I’ve started watching (Chef Gordon) Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares on BBC on my cable package. Although I started watching because cooking is a hobby of mine and I’ve always been fascinated by the restaurant business (when I worked at McDonald’s as a kid, I loved it), it has struck me how wonderfully educational the program is for entrepreneurs in general.

(note – Chef Ramsey does a reality show on Fox called Hell’s Kitchen – not the same show at all)

The premise of the show is Ramsey, a celebrity chef and owner of multiple high profile restaurants around the world, visits small restaurants that are failing and provides 7 days of consulting to turn them around. I’ve noticed several themes that have clear parallels with entrepreneurial ventures in general. For example:

• Understanding what drives profit is important and often counter to conventional wisdom (serving high-end, elegant food is sexy but is much harder to do profitably – the profitable activity often isn’t the sexiest).
• There’s no substitute for roll-up-your-sleeves marketing. When Ramsey analyzes a restaurant, he goes into town and interviews people to see why they aren’t coming. Then he goes out with the owner go out into the general public when the restaurant re-opens for marketing. Lesson 1: lots of the most important marketing is not all that sophsticated. Lesson 2 – even millionaires should never think they are too good to sell to the public. Lesson 3 – Figure out who your customers are and talk to them.
• Lack of product focus is an insidious source of pain for a company. When restaurants have menus with dozens of choices, food production is a nightmare – you don’t get particularly good at preparing many dishes. Plus, your sales staff (wait staff) has a much more difficult learning curve.
• Denial of problems (Ramsey is excellent at facing the brutal truth, usually involving a great deal of profanity) is a killer – once you recognize problems, even deep problems can be surprisingly easy to fix if you take a cold, dispassionate look at them.
• Even one wrong person on the management team can be a company-killer. They need to be excluded from the company quickly once it’s determined that they are the wrong person.
• Managing employees who are friends is really difficult because it’s hard to ask your friends to do things that you expect your employees to do – and it’s even harder to provide firm guidance when required.
• Management is leadership – people have to want to do what you say not just because you pay them, but because they value your approval. You can’t leave your employees in the trenches and hide from crisis. You have to treat employees with respect (that’s very different from coddling), and you have to be willing to do whatever it takes to make the customer happy.
• Poor communication among the production (chef), management (restaurant owner) and sales (waitstaff) – often leads to lousy food and lousy service.
• Lack of passion on the part of owners and employees leads to sloppy execution (you can’t provide good service to customers without a passion for what you do). In one show, the head chef realized he really wanted to work with troubled teens (which is why he staffed his kitchen with them) and he left the restaurant to be a social worker.

If you’re interested in becoming a more skilled entrepreneur, I highly recommend watching this entertaining and edcuational show. My wife Cordelia, who also loves entrepreneurship, is also hooked and it’s become quality time for me and the Mrs.

I’ve found good lessons for me as a manager from the show. You may also.

– mike

Who’s Your Daddy?
Spotting The Unscrupulous Investors That Linger in the Shadows and What To Do When Dad’s A Deadbeat

By Stacy A. Williams

StartupLounge.com seeks to pair qualified investors with qualified companies. Our screening process is pretty rugged but it is not bullet proof. If you ever have a question about the integrity of an investor or entrepreneur that you have met at a StartupLounge event, we want to know about it. Please feel free to contact us if you ever have any questions or concerns about anyone that you have met at one of our events. We are here to be part of the solution – not another piece of the problem.

It is a sad comment on our times that we still have not eradicated the plague of the unscrupulous investor from the world of entrepreneurship. Amongst the many earnest and upright angel individuals, who are dedicated to fostering innovation and commerce in their communities, there often lurk the shady evil doers that are really looking to line their own pockets by directly funneling your money from your bank account into theirs. It’s not pretty but it is predictable.

Some of these “investors” are just self-serving and need the income. We call these small fish: job-seekers, consultants and fund-raisers. They are not really doing anything illegal, but they can waste your time and money because they don’t plan to invest their own money and may not work that hard to find someone else’s for you – no matter how much you pay them.

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Yesterday the world lost the greatest chess player of his generation, and perhaps the greatest of all time in terms of sheer genius. Robert J. Fischer died in Iceland (the only country that would have him) at age 64.

As an avid chess player, his passing isn’t so saddening as he had retreated from public life in 1974, and played only a handful of serious games in 1992 in an odd re-match against old foe (and current friend) Boris Spassky. Those games showed that, while still a strong player, Fischer’s skills had been overtaken by new, younger, better-prepared players. Indeed, commentators observed that Fischer’s games appeared frozen in time, not incorporating the years of advancement in theory since 1974. Fischer even demanded that the series be named the World Championship, even though almost nobody recognized the match in that context. Fischer won that match, most likely because Spassky’s age was more advanced and he was well past the physical prime required to play serious chess at a high level.

It is hard to understate the importance of Bobby Fischer in our culture in the early 1970’s and his star briefly lit up the sky with unprecedented luminescence from the chess world. Fischer’s apex was as the bulwark against the Soviet chess apparatus (and it was an apparatus with an entire system designed to dominate the world at the game), and then just stopped. His games had Cold War implications and the world watched his every move as he steadily ground down the USSR’s best players, such as Tal, Taimonov, and Keres, on the long march to the World Championship in Reykjavik in 1972. His style was reminiscent of today’s professional athletes. He set out not to win, but to humiliate his opponents. He was going to force victory down your throat because he was simply a lot better than his opponents, who happened to be the best in the world. It’s one thing to be arrogant; it’s entirely another to be arrogant and then back it up every day. Americans like arrogance. We (rhetorically; I was 2 in 1972) embraced his New York personality. To boot, he loved beating the Commies. He hated them. For a time, he was the perfect icon, smashing the Soviets at their game. ESPN would have loved him and he would have loved ESPN – at least for awhile.

And then one day, he just stopped. He got us hooked on him and the game and then took it away. Fischer was convinced the chess world was out to get him. The only thing worse than a paranoid is a paranoid who is right. The Soviets did manipulate matches. Sometimes the did so by changing room temperatures, sometimes by planting listening devices in Fischer’s hotel room to gain insight into his strategies (now called the Bill Belichek Attack). They made some of their people throw games so that their best players would accumulate less fatigue.

As a result of Fischer’s complaining (and, it should be acknowledged, of Spassky’s own opposition to the rigging, which put him in physical danger and nearly had him withdrawn from the Championship match by his own government), conditions were changed in the finals to make the playing field more level. Many of those changes persist in today’s tournament conditions, including much richer prize purses. Fischer once quipped about refusing to “play for peanuts”. Fischer handily won the match and the title of World Champion, the first U.S. born player to hold the title.

But, like catering to a 2-year old, giving in to Fischer only encouraged him, and he quickly and inexorably slid into mental decay, with perceived conspiracies by Communists and he became quite outspoken against Jews and Zionism. When asked once if he were an anti-Semite he replied “Arabs are Semites and I’m not anti-Arab”. When time came to defend his championship in 1975, Anatoly Karpov was the scheduled opponent (Spassky would later emigrate to France), but when FIDE and the Soviets refused to give in to Fischer’s tournament conditions demands, Fischer refused to play and Karpov won by default. Most commentators agree with Fischer that he “would have creamed him” had a match taken place, and Fischer could have been the one to face Garri Kasparov in 1985 in that seminal chess turning point.

Fischer was so arrogant, so convinced of conspiracies against him, that when he was ordered by the State Department not to play his 1992 match in Serbia (it was a violation of the U.S. embargo to try to outster Slobodan Milosevich), he literally publicly spit on the letter and renounced his U.S. citizenship.

After that match (it is rumored the sponsors never made good on their $1 MM prize), Fischer remained in foreign exile (it turns out he also hadn’t paid taxes since 1974), finally ending up in Iceland, the site of his greatest triumph. And he never played chess – or did anything from what anyone can tell.

But after 1974, Fischer never made any contributions to chess save for one book, “Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess” which remains a seminal work. Chess could have been elevated to a very high stature in the United States if he had stuck with the game. Fischer died in 2008, but we really lost him back then. Ultimately it is a sad tale of talent wasted and opportunity passed. And Fischer likely died rather unwealthy. He could have and should have been a multimillionaire.

The lesson here is that talent isn’t enough to be successful long term. Brashness and bullying works for awhile but after a time, the world decides you’re just not worth the effort. I’ve met many entrepreneurs with loads of talent but insufficient people skills and with such excessive paranoia and grudge-carrying tendencies, that their ideas simply never got far off the ground because nobody wanted to deal with them. I’m certain there’s a cure for cancer or a high temperature superconductor that hasn’t been developed because the inventors simply lacked the people skills required to make it a reality. People don’t have to love you, but they have to respect and understand you and your idea.

The best momento I have of Fischer’s brilliance is a two volume collection of the 744 tournament games of Bobby Fischer (before the 1992 series), in the “original” Russian. The greatest compliment you can get is the respect of a grave foe.

- Mike Blake

Thanks to Scott for allowing me to “guest blog”.

I’d like to note and comment on the passing of Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, the first President of the Russian Federation, and a key architect in the destruction of Communism and the ending of the Cold War.

Mr. Yeltsin was as responsible or more than Mikhail Gorbachev for the dismantling of the Soviet Union. In 1991, it was Yeltsin who, as the President of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, gathered the leadership of the Ukrainian S.S.R. and the Byelorussian S.S.R. and formally dissolved the Soviet Union from within. Gorbachev only resigned about three weeks later when he no longer had a country to preside over.

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Some time back, I had the privilege of meeting Krishna Avva, the self-styled “Business Storyteller.” At some point, Krishna realized that he had the unique ability to take reams of that drab marketing spiel and turn it into something that really reaches out and grabs you. He accomplishes this by telling your story. I asked Krishna to put together a little story for The Pothole, partially to illustrate what he does for a living, and partially because I get sick of writing all of these blog posts.

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Greetings Pothole readers and listeners! I have a fantastic treat for you today. No, I am not going to sing to you! Nor am I going to do my one man reenactment of Brokeback Mountain. Instead, we have a very special podcast today – how about $25,000 worth of free career coaching, courtesy of Ricky Steele, one of Atlanta’s premier business networkers?

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Search Professionals (i.e. Recruiters) should be a vital tool in a professional’s career strategy. Too frequently it is only when your job is in trouble that you even think about a recruiter; it is “Oh my God I am going to be out of a job; I need a recruiter!” You call a recruiter and say “find me job; I need a job!” People spend a lot of time on resumes, on networking or Web sites, but when it comes to recruiters they have a very rudimentary approach. Few people are really leveraging recruiters, except for immediate need.

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