Part 2 – The Building Block Approach™

Why do you wish to accomplish this goal- Reality sets in

Part 2:

During my career I have discovered that most adults want to know the why of what we are planning or asking to be done. After all, how many times have your children asked you the why question when you asked them to “clean their bedroom?” So being the highly effective facilitator that I am, I always make it a point to explain the why we are doing something as we stack up Building Blocks™.

As we left off in the first segment to this series of articles discussing the foundation to the Building Blocks™ approach to success, I spent a week observing and researching Bill and Stacey’s The Town Tavern business. During this period I spoke to the employees, many of the vendors, and their customers. I also was able to speak with Bill and Stacy independently of each other to really understand their strengths, weaknesses, desires and dreams for their business. In short, I figured out pretty quickly that nobody knew what they were doing other than the vendors and employees.

The vendors were taking advantage to Bill and Stacy lack of experience. Selling things they didn’t need. Selling those things in quantities they didn’t need and at inflated prices. As this was going on the customers were enjoying food and beverages at 2010 prices. Whenever Bill started to raise prices they all complained and threatened to take their business elsewhere. Of course they would be going to other eateries in town that had already adjusted their prices, which were higher.

Along with being taken advantage of by the vendors and customers the employees were not helping the situation either. They worked when they wanted too. They were constantly on their cell phones. They even stole from the tavern (paper shrink as well as actually taking goods or giving away food and drink to friends).

Like I wrote earlier, Bill and Stacy didn’t have a clue. So my recommendation to them was to first make the tavern profitable again. Once this was accomplished, put it on the market to sell or lease to someone who did understand the restaurant business. The why in this scenario was simple. Because of their lack of business and management skills they needed to recoup what they could through the sale of the business.

As you can understand, this was a harsh reality that Bill and Stacy had to embrace to survive. Needless to say, I didn’t hear from them for a month as they came to grips of their situation – Another month of negative net income. A month where they had to withdraw more money from their line of credit. Does this sound familiar to any of our readers?

I was in the area one evening with my wife and decided to stop in to The Town Tavern for dinner. We had no sooner sat down when Bill came over to our table and asked me if he could join us for a minute. Much to my wife’s chagrin the minute turned into an hour of nonstop horror stories. Stacy joined us over coffee and desert to reiterate what her husband told us and then said, “You are right. We need to sell this place before we end up in a divorce.”
At this point I asked them “what is the timeline for this to happen?” The response as may have guessed was, “YESTERDAY!”

In part 3 I will discuss the “when” factor or timeline and what had to be done in order to accomplish that plan.