Johnnie – true story
We used to run a hugely successful café
within a retail chain. It was a stunning
success on many levels and we really felt
there was little we needed to do to improve it.However, as part of the retail business, we used to be assessed
regularly for a variety of industry awards. We had won a number
of these awards for the retail operation but the cafés were always
ignored and treated as an afterthought. The governing body was
essentially controlled by retailers and they weren’t quite sure
how to deal with food operations. They suddenly realised that
they should be putting together some scoring criteria for cafés
too and hastily threw together some ideas based on how they
scored the retail business, i.e. they applied retail rules.With a suitable level of conceit we ignored these rules since we
were doing so well and arrogantly assumed they didn’t know
what they were talking about in relation to the cafés.
Subsequently we were marked down for not having clearly
labelled traybakes and scones. Once more we laughed and
scoffed at them until the next year when we realised that we
were perhaps being a little silly and petulant and should put
some cards on each product before the next assessment. After all,
we could always take them down after they left. But complacency
and laziness meant that we didn’t bother and we left them up.66 .Wake up and smell the profit