Making It Work

A few posts back (before the Thanksgiving holiday) I mentioned that, in my none-too-humble opinion, food service is the single hardest business to make a go of in the long term. Since then I’ve had a number of people point out examples of single-unit restaurants that have been in place for multiple generations, and multi-unit chains that have expanded from humble beginnings in a burnt-out gas station to become multinational powerhouses with a reach far beyond the restaurant industry itself. It seems clear that however difficult this industry may be, some people do succeed in it, and some in fact succeed in making very large fortunes selling food and beverages. The question here would seem to be, if this industry is so difficult, how do so many people strike it rich? And if the industry is so easy, why do so many new food service businesses fail?

Part of the problem lies in the fact that the heart of the food service industry, cooking itself, is more an art than a science. Just as a technically competent musician does not produce the same results that a virtuoso performer will playing the same piece, a great chef will get far greater results from the same ingredients, equipment and location than a merely competent cook will – even when both of them are preparing the same dish! Almost as much of a problem is the fact that most people go into the industry for the wrong reasons – as noted in my post called The Hardest Business. People who love to hang around in coffee houses open coffee houses, never considering the crushing physical labor involved. People who love to hang around in bars open bars, without even considering the paperwork, liability, safety, crime or crushing physical labor involved. And too many people fail to consider the three critical factors involved in opening ANY food service operation: location, location, and especially location.

But suppose we take a case were you are opening a franchised restaurant, with the menu, the décor, the marketing and advertising, the medical and dental plan, even the location chosen for you by the franchising company’s pathfinders. Could you make such a business a success? Without the ability to bring your particular culinary art to bear on the subject? For answer, I commend to your attention the International House of Pancakes location on PCH in Hermosa Beach, California. We were there for breakfast last week, and it did my heart good to see the new franchisee working the tables. He made a point of greeting each guest personally, welcoming them to his IHOP, making sure that they each had a menu and a copy of the week’s specials, and getting them their drink order.

After that he would move on and let the waiters take over while you place your order, eat your food and pay your check, but he was always there in the background – making sure everyone’s food was cooked properly, everyone was being looked after correctly, and that none of the easily preventable mistakes that you see in food service (particularly in the lower echelons of the industry) take place. I can’t tell you how he would handle a problem or customer complaint, because I’ve never seen one come up in his IHOP; I can only speculate that they don’t come up very often and the new franchise owner probably takes care of most of them before the customer even realizes there’s a problem. In any event, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this particular IHOP has become insanely busy every morning in recent months, or that you have to come early to avoid waiting until after noon for a table.

Of course, some of you will argue that it’s only an IHOP, with a limited menu and a clientele that is not expecting fine dining. Anything better than the “barely passable” level most people associate with the IHOP chain would look amazingly good here. Which might be true, except that later that day we saw the same principle applied to a far more complex restaurant operation…

But that’s the topic of my next post.