Requiem For A Fallen Business
December 15th, 2009If you have already returned once to find a place, a store or restaurant after a time, only that it has changed and not for the better? It could be the service that the product or maybe just the ambience of the place. Whatever it is, by the time you walk, you know that you will never go back.
I had this experience this weekend. I took the family in a suburban pizzeria that my wife and I have often in recent days. The restaurant had been a fixture in thisCommunity for decades, starting as a small town Mom and Pop and growing steadily to trade with local students and then the local and regional customers, long before my wife and I started to go there. At that time the place was great, awards and filling every night, the deep booths and tables, which dominates its cavernous dining room. More than that, it was added to a clean, affordable family place, and the laughter and chatter of children only to theAtmosphere.
But that was years ago. As the family grew, I went into other areas of the country late last year back. I was not long again to this place for almost a decade, until last weekend. On the trip, my wife and I were talking about the last time that we have been there when our oldest was four years old, and how big it was. It was, if anything, a nostalgic conversation, but that was expected to be. Time has a way of adding a layer of nostalgia, things, places, andPeople, this is true, but also the soft-focus nostalgia, you can depend on at least a grain of truth. In other words, you do not lose sight of what you remember the thing in the first place. It is the basis of expectations do you go into when you are back.
The six of us went into an empty restaurant. Given the hour, the agency would have packed, but we had it all to ourselves: a red flag. The dining room was also significantly lower: Another red flag. Thetop private dining rooms were still there, but a dining room, which once had half of the ground floor of this building was not even half as big anymore. The different rates were still on the wall, while my wife has the kids down at a table-booths anymore, I had a look at it. There was nothing new. I would remember a time, not enough in a year without a new badge will go to the wall. Well not for the year was recorded.
I want to save theDescription agony of the next forty minutes waiting for our food, the sad part overpriced garlic bread and the realization that we have gone somewhere else and take out gone. It was the hope that the pizza would still follow his original recipe, which we then held, despite the fact that the place was now anything but child-friendly. Our hopes were dashed on, when we discovered that, like everything else, the food and change. Maybe not the recipe itself, but surelythe ingredients were no longer the same. The experience was summarized nicely by my daughter who can produce this ringing, high-pitched sound that only called an eight-year-old girl, a tone that runs through all and over the back like ice, it will "never, ever one foot in that horrible place again! "At that moment I accepted the statement that neither would I.
I told you that I could tell you this: It was pretty obvious that this was unfortunate Pizzeriachanged hands. Everything from the art on the walls, what my daughter had to say that would be Simon Cowell to shame the food on the table shouting a new owner. More than that, it screamed clueless new owners, and it has me thinking of other companies that I had to since I arrived last year, places that was passed down in my absence from the area.
It is not something we often think, but what will happen to your business if you sell it, or you decidedisappear, and the business community subscribes to the sofa, and cuff links as part of your property? Think for a moment. Start a business, you have an idea of what should be customer service, you have the drive and the know-how to the best experience you create for your customers because you what kind of experience you want to have when you walk into a company to know. You make your company the best and always looking for ways to improve it. These are the things that attract the prices to fill tables or aisles.There is no magic formula here: Treat your customers better than you want to be treated, and they can have the best products and services at the best prices.
What a pity that you can not him forever. The next generation of owners may not share your customer-centric view. You can, in fact, rather more of a Wal-Mart model to follow. Well, more of a semi-Wal-Mart model since, while operating costs nothing to be reduced, evaporated real customer service, such as steam andOverall customer experience makes you long for the snack on the street, are not prices fall accordingly. Finally talked about and the customer base shrinks. Before you know it, you're selling the lamps.
It need not be so. If you buy for an existing business, you not only have a proven money machine, you have a platform that business to new heights, the ability on the shoulders of those who stand before you and comereally its own brand in the world. This is how small businesses last decade by decade, generation to generation. Is not that better than squeezed every last penny you can out of the city before breaking it out? If you sell yourself to think of all the work and money and love you invest in your company. Sure, you may be yours, but do you really believe everything, throw away what you want or you see it continue to grow and prosper?
Perhaps it is time that small business ownerskeep watch for the founder and empire-builders, while those who take their business to themselves as the heirs of the maintenance and expansion of the empire it.
Then maybe, just maybe, be able to survive large pizza from one generation to the next.