Marketing and innovation- the two words that are ingrained in my brain as the keys to continued business growth. We are always innovating, looking for the magic combination of services that will give our brand the perfect storm of success in our business. There are many more failed experiments than successful ones, but thank God we tried them otherwise I don’t believe we would find the ones that work. The ice cream machine was a definite fail. We thought it would be a hit when we added the soft serve machine to the Dublin location back in 2005. We had extended our hours and were open for dinner, but only until 8. We could not even give the ice cream away for free, let alone sell it, and the process of maintaining and cleaning the machine took over 90 minutes a day, something the salesman neglected telling us when we bought it. Not counting the fact that James and I both gained a considerable number of pounds after indulging in the all you can eat free ice cream that was suddenly at our disposal!
Those early days of being open for dinner in Dublin were also a fail, since we had not been ready to go all in and open late. We closed at 8 pm and didn’t have enought foresight to hire a manager despite the advice from our mentors. James was spread super thin, both opening the restaurant at 2:30 am as the baker and running the dinner shift until 9 pm at night. I was home with our young family and this was a super challenging time for us. It took us over 2 years to make the difficult decision to close the dinner service and go back to our model of breakfast-lunch.
Why was it so hard to make the business decisions of knowing when to change? For us it was tied up with our ego and not wanting to quit. I think any successful business leader would agree that you have to be willing to do whatever it takes to succeed. That can get twisted up when you have to make a decision to kill a project, it definitely did with us. Our financials didn’t lie, the extended hours were costing us more money than they were bringing in. Add to that the additional stress on our family since Dad was always coming and going to work and was tired as all heck. We wrangled for over a year whether to close for dinner, and when we finally made the call it was a sad day for both of us. It took just a short time for us to feel the relief of the added costs and stress that the dinner hours had caused on our family and to acknowledge that it was the right decision.
Why did it take us so long to make the call? Why did a giant like Kodak fail to make the innovations that could have ensured their continued success? Why did Blockbuster fall from the top? Ego and complacency. You have got to get your ego out of the way and look at not only the hard facts, but your intuition. Listen to new voices and be willing to try something new as well as to pull the plug on something that isn’t working. Never rest on your laurels, past performance does not automatically guarantee your future success. No one will argue that we live in a fast paced, rapidly changing world. You have to keep innovating and evolving your business and your leadership, or you will be left in the dust with the fallen giants. Being a leader means making the hard decisions, and also always looking for new voices and opportunities to add more value to your clients and the people you lead. Embrace change, and celebrate new ideas, even if they sound crazy. Change is made by the crazy ones, not the sheep. Crazy is good!