Your Neighborhood Restaurant Reality Show
Janet and I have pretty low privacy needs. This is put into evidence by the inappropriate stories I tell to customers as I wander the dining room, and by Janet’s lack of shock and horror when I drag her to a table to show off her tramp stamp. It also becomes apparent when we tell the tales and trials of restaurant ownership. I, like many of you, are fascinated by just how insane one must be to own a restaurant. Why so many dream of such a fate is a riddle. I don’t think it is because they want to have my life; it’s more likely they romanticize Janet’s job, though I have in fact struck the better bargain. Nonetheless, from time to time we like to share our stories about the travails and triumphs of owning Bethany’s Table.
Striving
Five or six years ago we decided to open a second restaurant at Timberland Town Center. That failed effort cost us six-figure cash. Spending that money to not open a restaurant turned out to be a much better investment than had we succeeded. One of the outcomes of that effort was our Vision Statement. That statement contained three bodies of work: a Purpose Statement - the star we follow; a Mission Statement – the mountain we intend to climb; a Values Statement – the guideposts we use to find our way. Here we dove into the work on values not to develop florid statements on world peace and long walks on the beach, but rather to drill down into the core beliefs that drive our behaviors. (This isn’t always pretty.) As the process burbled along there arose a finding. Our Number 1 Core Value was Striving. Constantly striving to improve every aspect of our business in both the front and back of the house, the phrase “that’s good enough” was seldom heard. It was either great or it was a work in progress.Learning this about ourselves explained some of our hiring failures, where otherwise qualified individuals did not pan out. Folks who did not share this value for striving lacked a vital foundation stone for communicating in our environment. And when s**t happens, which it always does, this inability to communicate would fling it straight into the fan. Folks don’t necessarily need to channel their impulses for striving into their job. Self-betterment, education, art, family are all worthwhile expressions. It is simply their relationship with this way of being that creates the common ground necessary to communicate when the work of doing so collides with difficult circumstances.
Wellbeing
My lovely (and I mean that) ex-wife, Carol, periodically sent me to one mental health expert or another to diagnose what made me so hard for her to live with. One of these episodes led me to be seated in a room with Hal Boverman, and old-dog psychiatrist that no longer accepted patients on his own account because he did not expect to live long enough to complete their treatment. Thus, he worked a diagnostician for other doctors. Much to Carol’s chagrin, Hal gave me a relatively clean bill of health. He explained to me how the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) had evolved over the years from a few, simple classifications into ever more complicated iterations that, in later years appear to be driven by the need for diagnoses that define a need for pharmacological solutions. Hal said I had some neurosis, but explained his early-sixties version of this to indicate simply “behaviors adopted for circumstances that are no longer relevant.”Pondering the last year and something of a seismic shift in our attitudes and interactions, I determined that the story I was telling about our Number One Value for Striving had become an example of just such neurosis. It simply wasn’t true anymore. Striving certainly still nests prominently in our basket of values, but it was no longer the prominent driving force of how we address our world. Wellbeing has usurped Striving as our Number 1 Core Value. Wellbeing tints the lens with which we now view the world. We see it in our staff, our vendors and our customers. We simply want things to be okay. We want good health, freedom of movement, civility. We want joy. We want a good night’s sleep, a hand to hold and a hearty laugh.This epiphany of mine has softened our targets but steeled our resolve. Our focus has shifted. When we meet with members of the kitchen leadership team we might still mention the cost accounting project that seems to have stalled, but we are more focused their needs, not ours. Are you happy? How’s the family? What do you need?
“Years ago my mother used to say to me, she’d say, “In this world, Elwood, you must be” – she always called me Elwood - “In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.” Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me. Jimmy Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd
Perhaps this preoccupation wellbeing will cost us some of our edge. Oh well. Let’s all just get happy, and devil take the hindmost.