Strategic Thinking and Execution Heading Into Q4

Speaker A: Uh, I want to be able to have that strategy laid out in a way that I can track it on a weekly basis, at least. What's working, what's not working? How can we measure our success in alignment with the strategic initiative that we've identified and the actions that we're taking?

Speaker B: Welcome to the Profitable Table Fed by Wilco Foods, a podcast at the nexus of hospitality, business, culture and the mind. Now here's your host, Wilco Food CEO, uh, Stephen Toboroff.

Speaker A: Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Profitable Table Fed by Woolco Foods. I am your host, Stephen Toboroff. And as we're heading rapidly through the month of August, I thought today would be a good time to do a subject that combines something very real world and practical, which is preparations for the fall and the sort of reemergence of New York City hospitality out of what are traditionally some slower months in the summer. And to combine that subject with sort of a deep dive into what it means to be a strategic thinker. And then I want to actually use what we're going to discuss and reflect on M today with respect to strategic thinking, to really apply it to how we can make the months of September through December as exceptional as possible by identifying and implementing and executing upon a strategy. So the reason I've been thinking a lot about strategy is I read a book about a month's, maybe a month and a half ago called Good Strategy, Bad Strategy and why It Matters by an author and scholar named Richard P. Rumelt. And that book had an enormous impact on my thinking because I was somebody who was very much consistent in setting goals, very much a goal oriented person. I would set quarterly goals, I would set annual goals. I would set goals for myself personally and I would set goals for, for myself professionally. I would write them down, I would stick them to the wall in my office and would look at them. And I encouraged other people to do it. And I think that there is a value in that and there is something very magical. I can't explain it, that does happen when you write things down. But goal setting is very different than strategic thinking and execution. And that's what I so appreciated about this book. Rummelt really gets to the core of visioning and vision boards and expansive goal setting. While potentially important and certainly not an ipso facto negative thing, the real lack that most businesses have is a lack of strategic thinking and a lack of strategy. And this really hit home for me. And I had not read the book yet, but I recognized, um, very early on in Q1 of this year that there were some tremendous opportunities available to us that I'd been struggling with finding a solution for for a period of time and had tried different things and had set goals. But this book really helped refine my thinking strategically. And in so doing, uh, we've made immense progress on our goal, which is essentially to not just grow revenue, but to dramatically expand line item penetration within our existing customer base and expand the number of cases that we ship on each order. So that's sort of the main thrust of the book that Rommel talks about. What is good strategy? What is bad strategy? Why does it matter? Needless to say, I very much recommend this book, but to just give us some, I think, important context, I'm going to read one quote from the book where he essentially describes what the kernel of a good strategy is. So to give this quote, you need three parts for a good strategy. One, a diagnosis that defines or explains the nature of the challenge. A good diagnosis simplifies the often overwhelming complexity of reality by identifying certain aspects of the situation as critical. Two, a guiding policy for dealing with the challenge. This is an overall approach chosen to cope with or overcome the obstacles identified in the diagnosis. And three, a set of coherent actions that are designed to carry out the guiding policy. These are steps that are coordinated with one another to work together in accomplishing the guiding policy. So for purposes of our discussion, those three points that Ramalt lays out, I think can be a very valuable starting point. Because I know that for myself, the biggest impact this book had on my thinking is when I decided to really take on this challenge that I just described to you. I realized a few things. One, I had to clearly articulate what the challenge is. In my case, the challenge is why are we not selling as many items as we could be and should be to all of our customers? And then two, what specific steps or actions need to be taken, or at least that we think need to be taken in order to achieve that objective. And then three, my little twist on Ramelt is I'm a big believer in accountability, repetition, and data. So when I implement a strategy, and when we implement one here at Wilco as a team, I want to be able to have that strategy laid out, so to speak, in a way that I can track it on a weekly basis. At least, what's working, what's not working? How can we measure our success in alignment with the strategic initiative that we've identified and the actions that we're taking? Because obviously, anytime, you know, there's a famous quote by Mike Tyson. Everyone's got a plan and a fight until they get punched in the face. And I think with strategic thinking, it's really important. And there are things that you can do from the beginning that will absolutely get it right, honestly identifying the challenge or the opportunity. But once you start engaging with the opportunity or the challenge, you start making decisions, you need to be accountable because obviously you have to execute on the steps that you've identified consistently. And then in so doing, you want to be able to really see with great clarity what's working and what's not working. And that's the biggest shift that it's had on my thinking. Simply setting a goal or visioning something is not going to get it done without massive action behind it. And that's kind of my big takeaway coupled with the steps. Now let's sort of bring this back a little bit to the hospitality industry in New York City. As is traditionally the case, once we get past Labor Day and the kids are back in school and the universities start reopening, which is shortly, people start coming back into New York and there's a massive infusion of energy in New York City. The fall in New York is beautiful. Hudson county, this part of the country where we are. But this is probably the case in many other urban environments and very similar for the hospitality industry. So the city starts to come back to life in the fall and there are gonna be a number of catalysts, I believe, that are gonna occur in this particular fall through winter season, if you will, that are gonna be unique. I think that the hangover, if you will, of the Knicks championship run is gonna continue in a very positive way. I think that championship run was transformative for the New York City hospitality industry, or at least I suspect it will be for the relatively consistent future. Meaning I think once football season begins, you're gonna see people congregating that normally didn' to go out and enjoy that in a group environment. I think most certainly when the Knicks start playing again, people who went through that amazing championship run are going to want to reengage with that experience, go out, watch opening nights game, watch the game where they get their rings and hang up the banner. So in addition to the traditional uplift that occurs in the fall, just based on population returning, I think that the two aforementioned dynamics are gonna be relevant. And I think, in fact, I know from speaking to my children and even other people, the social media representation of New York City during that Knicks championship run was incredibly positive. And there's an enormous amount of demand to come to New York City, domestically and abroad. And in the winter, New York is traditionally visited by a lot of domestic tourism. Um, people want to enjoy the Thanksgiving Day Parade, Rockefeller center, and the Christmas season and all of that. But I think that dynamic is going to be amplified by the FOMO that occurred from a lot of people who just saw what was going on here in the month of June and want to participate in it. And so, as a result of that, I think we're going to see an even bigger and more explosive resurgence beginning in September. And in addition to that, something that I think is important to be mindful of, and I've mentioned this in other podcasts, once things start getting busy again, yes, we're gonna see the return in a more meaningful way of business travel. But New York City is now the host of some amazing massive conventions that bring a lot of attention to the city and can be of great derivative benefit to the hospitality industry. The Fanatics Fest for people who are into collecting sports car occurred. This, I, uh, think it was about, uh, maybe a month ago, got immense attention. I know in October, New York City Comic Con is occurring. I know, because I'm gonna go for two days. I enjoy collecting comic books. And you have an opportunity there to meet some writers and artists. So in addition to everything else, Javits center conventions and other events serve as another catalyst that really start to ramp up in a big way, uh, in the fall. So this is what we're looking forward to. So the question is, as we began the podcast, what can we do to really maximize the opportunity that's going to be available to us in the fall? And now let's apply some strategic thinking to that question. So in other words, instead of saying, well, what I want is, I want to have 10% revenue growth in the. Let's just call it Q4 to be very simple, even though Q4 begins in October, we'll say in September, but we'll call the whole thing Q4A, uh, very ineffective thing might be to set a goal. Well, I want to see revenue up 10%. Okay. I want to see our takeout business grow by 8%. I want to see cocktail sales grow by 14%. Those are goals. Those are not strategies. So what would a strategy look like for the hospitality industry? Well, I can give one idea. I'll give a few ideas. I want to see consumption of takeout food by our regulars grow by 15% as a result of us implementing and executing on an incentive package that we're going to make available to all of our known regulars. As well as to all boats businesses that are within a three block radius of our restaurant. And we're going to do that by having marketing material, email access to the desired customer base so that we can send emails. Uh, we may promote this on social media. Come in for your first time with us and introduce yourself. Give us an email and, uh, you'll get a special in the next drink. So that's a strategic difference. Identify an opportunity. Let's just break it down into chunks. One obvious opportunity is to grow sales. But to grow sales, in my opinion, is too big. Who do you want to grow sales with? Do you want it to be with the regulars? Do you want to capture more tourist business? Do you want to attract the sports fan that you now see as perhaps being more relevant for your hospitality establishment and have them watch the football games at your restaurant? Get as granular as you can be as to what the opportunity is for you. If your question to yourself is, again, we've discussed this in the past. One of the most amazing things about the human brain when you've taken the work to think for yourself and understand your mind a little bit, is, uh, you understand that the brain will answer whatever questions we ask of it. So if you go around and ask negative questions such as why am I such a loser? Or why is my business always falling behind? Why does our service suck? Your brain will answer that question. If you ask a different question, such as what is the best opportunity for me to have a meaningful impact on revenue growth? Your brain will answer it. Oh, easy. That would be with your regulars, that would be with tourists, that would be with an office crowd. That would be by creating a catering line to your business, whatever it is. So back to the strategic thinking dynamic. First, identify for yourself what it is that you want to accomplish and what the best avenue available to you is to achieve that objective. Now, to answer that question as to what the best avenue available for you is. First you want to identify what are your clear, discernible advantages as a restaurant? And be honest with yourself. Where are you really strong? Are you strong in your cocktails? Are you strong in your appetizers? Are you strong in your ambiance? Are you strong in your ability to create community? Are you strong in your desserts? Whatever it is, identify where you think you're really strong and have a massive value added benefit to your customers that other people, other restaurants do not. Second, think about your competition, people who might be competing for the same customer base as you, and ask yourself, where are they strong and where are they Vulnerable. So, for example, if you saw a massive uptick in business during the Nick championship run, even though you're a bistro, even though you're a tavern, that really wasn't sports bar ish. And there's a sports bar two blocks away that did really well. But you did well. And now you want to keep some of that business. Where do you have an advantage over them? Is it your menu? Is it the ambiance? Is it your wine list? So think step one, what is it you want to accomplish? What is the challenge? Step two, what are your greatest assets? Where is your competition potentially weak? And how can you leverage those attributes? Once you've identified that you now have what I would call your strategic objective, you know what it is you want to achieve? I'm clear. I want to grow our business amongst domestic tourism by 20%. I'm going to do this. How? So that gets to our next part of the strategy. You've identified the challenge. You have your leverage. You know what your value proposition is. What specific actions are you and the rest of your team going to take on a daily basis, a, uh, weekly basis in furtherance of this objective? So let's just take the hypothetical example. I just said I want to increase my traffic from domestic tourists by 20%. I'm going to do this by. Well, I know that most of our domestic tourists in my restaurant, I'm giving hypothetical here, come from the Midwest. So I'm going to do some type of social media outreach to the Midwest. I know who some of our regulars are who come to the city every time for the holiday season. And I have their email addresses. I'm going to email them saying, hey, refer a friend or bring a friend and would love to buy you a drink. I'm going to leverage them and make them raving fans, uh, of my business. I'm going to directly introduce myself to everyone M who we know is a tourist from any part of America. Really make it a phenomenal experience and encourage them to come back and tell their friends, I don't own a restaurant. These are just some ideas off the top of my head. But what you need to do is in furtherance of your strategic objective, you need to identify what steps and actions you can take that you think are going to enable you to achieve that objective. Then you need to find, how am I going to measure this? Am I going to have a weekly meeting with my bartender and my servers and find out how many people they spoke to? Am I going to keep some type of a spreadsheet that Keeps track of how many people came into the restaurant that were tourists that I was able to identify. Am I going to keep track of how many people I knew from last year I reached out to and came in? I don't know what it is for you, but whatever actions you've decided to take on a consistent basis in furtherance of your strategic objective, have that information displayed and accessible to you on a consistent basis. I like to do these things weekly, at least where you can review it and identify what's working and what's not working. To the extent that your strategy involves multiple components, as it might, you might want the servers doing what they're doing on the front lines. You to might want. You might start offering certain dishes or specials or cocktails designed to appeal to whatever segment of the market you're trying to capture more revenue from. You want to make sure that those two dynamics are working together. To the extent that the special menu items contain products that are shelf stable and you can keep for a while. You'd want to work with your vendor to see if you can get great pricing. If you buy a little heavier, even if you can't store it, maybe the vendor will hold it for you. That's having all aspects of your organization work together in pursuit of the strategy. And then the final part of it is to really not just evaluate the steps, but evaluate where you are after a certain period of time. You know, if you feel you should have some real traction after a month, then take a look at it in a month. Is this strategy working? Sometimes we will select the wrong strategic objective. Sometimes we will select the correct strategic objective, and we will have dramatically underestimated the amount of opportunity that is there and we want to add to it. So you sort of have to define what success looks like for you and how you're going to measure that up over what type of a timeframe. Okay, this is the difference between strategy and goal setting. And I will tell you that if it's a great strategic initiative, when you choose a strategic objective, you have to choose it and sometimes choose it in place of other things. For us, I believe that this opportunity was immense, and it's proving to be immense. So I didn't want my management team or myself distracted with three or four or five other things. Although they may be important, there may be a number of opportunities that are available to you in your restaurant or your bakery or your bar that wouldn't be surprising to me. The challenge is strategic thinking always requires making a decision, making a choice. And once you've determined for yourself what that strategic objective is, you're going to have to lean into that to the exclusion of other objectives. If you want maximum impact, you don't want to dilute the opportunity by only devoting 60% of your energy to it and 20% to something else. And 20% to something, something else. If you have a strategic initiative that you've decided upon, you've clearly defined for yourself and it's working and it's important and it can have a material impact on your business, you've got to go all in on that and not dilute that by confusing your staff, by diluting your resources, your attention, your focus. That's just the nature of it. And that's why I say it's important to define what success looks like. And in addition to having weekly meetings or weekly reviews to make sure that your steps are being done, really assess is it working? Is it not working? And that's how I would suggest you can apply strategic thinking to the massive opportunity that's coming our way in the fourth quarter. God willing, not just to vision about it and talk about it and hype yourself up, but develop a concrete, clear set of objectives, or one objectives, a, uh, set of steps that you're gonna do in furtherance of it and then just attack it with everything you and your staff has. Now, one thing I will say which sort of dovetails on what I discussed in my last podcast and other podcasts, is I think in order to be an effective, or maybe the word is even a, uh, truly effective or elite or the best strategic thinker we can be, there's one type of thinking that according to a report that I just read, only 1 to at most 3 or 4% of the population engages in, which is called metacognition. And I've discussed that a little bit in earlier podcasts. But metacognition means thinking about our thinking. Metacognition means understanding that we are in control of our minds and that we can interrupt a thought pattern or a reactive pattern and choose a different path. So what I mean by that is the following. The vast majority of people think that as soon as they have a feeling or an idea, that that idea, that feeling is reality, and it's not reality. It's simply an idea or a feeling that they have in a moment that they could change by changing their focus, by evaluating what it is that they're getting upset about, by questioning why it is that they're having such a strong reaction, by being aware of the fact that they're getting Emotionally overwhelmed and therefore it's impossible for them to activate their intellect. And so they will take a step back, calm down and then think. The vast majority of people do not do this. They believe that their reactions, their perspective, their emotion, their personality is reality. And unfortunately they go through their whole lives with a very narrow aperture, almost as if they're quasi marionettes. And so strategic thinking is really unavailable to them except in the extreme. Because at any given moment they're just gonna be puppeteered by whatever emotion or thought or belief about themselves or belief about others that they have. And that's just gonn carry them away in whatever direction it does. But it won't be a self directed destination. People who engage in metacognition and who think if somebody comes in, they will have the capacity, even if their first reaction is to get angry or upset or offended, to take a step back. Hold on, is this the appropriate reaction? And even if it is an appropriate reaction, is it an appropriate reaction within the context of what I'm trying to achieve here with this other person, with this group of people, with my family thinking about your thinking? Right. So if you can sort of get in the habit of doing that, then not only does one have the ability to be a strategic thinker on large initiatives that you get to design and spend a week or two really designing and executing on and doing all the things we said, but day to day life, you get to be a strategist. I've had circumstances where I'll use my home life. Let's say I come home and I've told one of my kids not to use my running sneakers. I told him I'll get him his own. I have a used Perry can use, but the new ones I don't want him using. And I come home and he's used them and they're muddy. My initial reaction is one of frustration, anger, whatever it is, and if I wanted to, and I wasn't thinking, I could come home, yell, act out of anger, express my disappointment, do a whole thing. Right, that's one option. But that's an unconscious option. When I take a step back, as I did and I thought about it, I said, well, hold on a second, hold on. Yes, you asked him not to. And yes, he didn't listen and yes, that's disappointing. But he's only home for two more weeks before he goes back to his second year of college and, and he's a really good kid and he's gotten into the habit of running, which is a great positive. In addition to his weightlifting. And he's always really nice and respectful. And maybe he made a mistake, and maybe he did this not to deliberately offend you or defy you, but he legitimately forgot. So rather than just giving in to this initial reaction of anger and frustration and going with it. Cause I can, why not take a different approach. Calmly go in, remind him of what you'd requested, find out what happened and assess it from there. At the very least, that's a choice. Now that's in my personal life. You can imagine how much more I don't know that it's more consequential, because the relationships that we have with the people in our life are important. I'll tell you what I did was I came in, I said to my son, look, I see that you use my sneakers. Why did you do that? I had told you yesterday not to. I'm happy to get you a pair. In fact, I think you should go to this store in Paramus and get properly fitted and get your own running shoes. And he said, you know, dad, I totally forgot. And my friends came, we were gonna go for a five mile run and I apologize, I really didn't think and I did it and whatever. And then I said, you know what? I just got another pair that was shipped to me. If you like those and they fit, keep them, but please don't wear the next ones I'm bringing home. And again, I encourage you, go to the running store, get properly fitted. Because I think it's great that you're into running, it's great that you're into fitness. I'm glad you like it. I want to support you in this. But in the future, if I ask you to, just please not do my things, I'm not doing it capriciously. But in this case, I get where you're coming from. Just so happens we can move past it. Well, how about the same thing in business? You have great people who work for you that may have a slip up, or you have horrible people and they want to engage in a yelling match and a emotional, uh, outburst. How does that help anything? So what's my point? If you can engage in metacognition, you can make microstrategic decisions all throughout your day. You can say to yourself in the instant, what is my objective here? What is my real objective here? Does the behavior that I'm about to engage in? Because I'm just on automatic here, and I haven't questioned my thinking further, my objective, or diminish it. What may or may not be a better choice here. And in so doing, of course, you get to make a host of strategic decisions throughout your entire day. And I'm going to argue that when you engage in that type of intervention with your first reaction, especially if it's heavily based on emotion or lack of information, or if you're honest with yourself and you just are repeating the same pattern of behavior that you've done for 10, 20, 30 years, not gathering enough information before you act, allowing other people to trigger you, that's an important thing to underscore. People don't trigger us. We allow that to happen because we allow it to happen. We don't break that pattern. So whatever your patterns are, if you can be aware of them, then you can choose, hey, it hasn't worked so great for the last 20, 30, 40, 50 years. Should I try something new? But at least you'll give yourself that choice. And in so doing, you can be a strategic thinker. So that was a bit of a diversion, but not really, because in business, we're constantly confronted with stimuli. And if we're not thinking before we speak and not thinking before we act, and we're not gathering information and trying to make the best decision, not based on our ego and our personality, but based on some inner narrative we're telling ourselves or based on some fragility that we have in our identified, and we just act out of, we're not going to get favorable outcomes. And when it comes to larger, excuse me, macro decision making, well, it's great to have a vision board. It's great to get a room of people together and say, we're going to do this. Yeah, let's do it. I mean, I'm all for enthusiasm and I'm all for that, but without a clear strategic objective, a plan that you can measure, and a clear definition of success, I would say the odds of getting the outcome you want are much, much lower. So that was really what I wanted to discuss today. I would love, as always, to hear your feedback, if you agree, if you disagree, if you've read the book Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, what your reaction is. As always, you can reach me through email. You can email me at stephenolcofoods.com you can DM me on Instagram. And. And again, I'm going to ask. You know, I found out that a lot of people listen to this podcast but are not subscribing to it or not commenting. And that's totally fine. You're under no obligation to do so. But what I would ask of you is if you found this content valuable and you enjoyed it. If you would recommend it to uh, someone else who might derive value from it, that would be great. Anytime you can comment or like or subscribe, it helps us and the algorithm get boosted. I'm very happy to say that the podcast is getting more and more traction. And um, I like that because when I do speak to people or get emails, people find it constructive. And I know that in the same way that I derived benefit from Rummelt's book and a lot of other information that I seek, uh, out and obtain through books and podcasts and uh, YouTube videos and other sources, I'm always appreciative and hopefully this particular podcast is providing value as well. And if it is, would certainly love a comment or a like a subscribe what have you. But even if you disagree, I love to hear contrary opinions. I love to hear from people have different perspectives and I always appreciate the emails I receive. So I thank you for those and I look forward to emails on this episode and beyond that, I just want to wish everybody an awesome, awesome day.

Speaker B: Thank you for listening to the profitable table fed by Woolco Foods. Please be sure to, to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. And to learn more about Woolco Foods or Stephen Tobaroff, please visit us at woolcofoods. Net.