Posted October 27, 2010
A barbeque restaurant opened last year in the city where I live, and in a very short period of time has become the top-selling BBQ joint in town. The owner doesn't even advertise--he doesn't have to. Word of mouth promoting the place is so strong that advertising would be a waste of money. I read an interview with the founder and owner in which he discusses the source of his phenomenal success. He gave a handful of reasons why he thinks people will wait an hour in a line trailing outside into the parking lot to eat his BBQ, but his main reason was simple: he broke the rules.
Being a great cook with no background in the restaurant industry, he consulted several experienced experts for pointers on how to maximize his sizable investment. They told him that most restaurants fail in the first year, and that if he veered away from a strict set of rules, he'd find himself among the failures. So he listened to them--but what he soon realized was that if he followed all of their rules, he'd be the owner of a restaurant not at all resembling his vision for a fresh and distinct approach to serving quality BBQ.
He decided that staying true to his creative vision outweighed adhering to franchise-esque rules for surviving year one. He wasn't going to throw prudence overboard, but he also wasn't going to sell his ideas short by taking an expert-approved safe road. So when the experts told him to forget about selling Texas style BBQ brisket in a city where pork BBQ is king, he ignored them. When they told him to buy cheap ice machines instead of the more expensive shaved ice machines, he ignored them. When they told him to take all of the desserts off the menu and replace them with the tried-and-true cobbler and ice cream combo (a BBQ joint mainstay), he ignored them.
In each case, his decisions were not arbitrary. He didn't ignore the experts because he wanted to defy established authority. He had a well-developed sense of what he, as a customer, wanted to see in a restaurant and he trusted that sense. That meant not cheaping out on little things, like ice, and not just serving the same things people could get anywhere, like pork BBQ and cobbler. What would be distinct and fresh about that? Why would anyone talk to family, friends and coworkers about a place that serves all the same things as every other BBQ joint in town?
Turns out, passing up the safe road and taking a few well-considered risks wasn't just a good move, it was a fantastic one, and the market has rewarded him for it. From one little restaurant, he's now opening more places around town, and people are talking up "that unbelievable BBQ joint that'll be opening here soon." The vision is now a reality, and then some.
What this story tells us is not that experts are always wrong, because that's obviously not true. The experts in this case were communicating what they had experienced and observed as the rules for not failing in a very tough industry. And if the owner had followed their rules, he probably would have survived his first year and taken his place among the slew of other BBQ places in the city.
What he realized, though, is that "surviving" wasn't his overarching goal. Seeing his creative vision enacted and standing out from the rest--that was his goal, and merely following established rules wasn't going to get him there. He had to believe in his vision, take some risks, and always keep top of mind why he was getting into this project at all. He said in the interview, "Every day I had to renew my self-confidence."
Given a few stumbles, he could have failed. If he had, for example, ignored the time-tested financial principles of structuring a restaurant business, enacting a great creative vision may not have been enough. If he'd spent the bulk of his investment on furniture and décor and left too little for purchasing quality food, no amount of passion would have rescued the project. Relying on expertise to guide those decisions was wise. He didn't rashly decide that the experts had nothing to offer him; rather, he decided to carefully choose which pieces of knowledge best fit his project. He didn't relinquish control to expertise--he made expertise his tool.
And that, in short, is the moral of this story. Expertise is important, but so is vision and passion. Knowing when to break the experts' rules in favor of one's vision entails definite risks, but it's the willingness to take those risks that can make all the difference. It makes a lot of sense to ask the question the restaurant owner was faced with when making his decision: why am I getting into this project at all? If the answer is, "to survive," then perhaps the full docket of rules will work just fine. But if it's to do more than survive, to realize a creative vision that surpasses survival--then you have to know when to break the rules and be ready to own the success or failure that results from full investment in your vision.
