In this solo talk, the speaker reflects on recent dining experiences to illustrate a core business principle: being ready to operate goes beyond simply launching a venture. He argues that any business—online, brick‑and‑mortar, or solo—must first ensure it can consistently deliver a level of service that exceeds mere acceptability. The talk highlights three common failure points: understaffed or poorly trained staff, insufficient product inventory, and inadequate capacity planning. By setting higher service standards, planning for sufficient staffing and inventory, and aligning capacity with demand, entrepreneurs can avoid disappointing customers and position themselves for sustainable success.
Chapters
Are you ready to be in business? That's what we'll talk about today. So I sit here on a nice evening in Atlanta, Georgia. We've had dinner and had a little dessert, and it brought to mind the question of whether or not you're ready to be in business. And the reason I said that is you might think I'm talking about are you ready to actually start a business, but I'm talking about are you ready to be in business. Regardless what business you decide you're going to be in, you need to be prepared prepared to serve the people you want to serve. And that means whether you're successful or whether you're not. And oftentimes we start a business and people— or people start a business and they find that things go quicker than they thought they might have. We had two experiences this evening where businesses have been established for a long time, were nowhere near ready to be in business tonight, whether it's short staff or whether it's not having product on the shelves. And for example, with us, for our dinner experience, there was plenty of people there. It's just nobody seemed to want to wait on us. And poor training, poor preparation of the staff to make sure that people had a great experience. And unfortunately, we won't be going back there. It was one of the restaurants that I really looked forward to going to. We had a great experience there about 6 years ago, but unfortunately tonight, really off the mark. And then when we went to have dessert, we went to one of those yogurt shops, and you've probably seen them with the, you know, 15, 20 machines that are in a wall and 3 different flavors. Well, A third of the machines didn't have any product in them, and because they hadn't been run because they didn't have a lot of business this evening, several of the flavors were frozen up and weren't able to be poured. So they weren't ready to be in business either, although they had 2 people on, on staff and they really didn't need them. The question you have to ask yourself is, is what is the level of service that I want to provide people when they come to the business? And that way, that's whether you're online or whether you're a brick-and-mortar facility or whether you're a one-person shop or whether whether you're somebody that goes out and meets people and does business virtually, you have to be prepared to serve at a level that is acceptable not only to you but to your clients and your target clients. And really, acceptable is not going to be good enough. It's going to have to be better than acceptable. So before you jump into business, make sure that you're ready to be in business by having enough product or enough service or enough capacity to serve the best possible outcome you might have in your business. If you do so, you'll be able to handle the business that You will get your way because you've done well in your planning.
