I was recently listening to an interview with Ron Ashkenas who was at the time speaking in relation to Covid recovery but had written for the Harvard Business Review about innovation and the elements required for effective change.
He suggests that organisations should innovate with ‘urgency’ for which there are three elements:
Engage in small experiments
Set ‘zesty’ goals (challenging, short-term, and high priority)
Get personally involved
And it occurred to me that the independent pub owner-operators’ owners were already aligned to this and dong it well.
The thing is if you own a small independent hospitality business you are sitting in a very saturated market. You have competition from all sides, not just the other coffee shops, bars, restaurants, and pubs in the same area as you but in the modern world, we compete with Netflix, Xbox, supermarkets, and takeaways to mention only a few modern-day distractions.
We operate in a shrinking market: 1 in 4 16-24-year olds apparently don’t drink at all.
The world has changed, and continues to change at an increasing pace, and this was before Covid. Now, seemingly overnight, the operating landscape has altered and will never return to what was deemed ‘normal’.
Our businesses cannot take anything for granted and innovation, responding to changing trends, changing demographics and cultural change is what we have always done and there are a great number of operators who are exceptionally good at this.
The high levels of competition and rapidly changing culture and trends mean that Covid or not there is always ‘urgency’ to the hospitality environment.
There are always ‘zesty’ goals: short term, high priority, and challenging - they must be achieved. Goal setting in hospitality is nearly always about keeping up and survival, failure to find a solution is not an option.
Owner-operators are personally involved in their businesses, they are involved in the day to day, they are part of their communities and they know and understand their customers. The ‘personal involvement’ is a given, but this also means that the opportunity for ‘small experiments’ is also prevalent.
Innovating the product is a great example.
In a pub, the product is not just the food and drink you serve, though this, of course, is important, but the ‘product’ includes the ambiance, the décor, the music policy, the lighting, the events, the other customers, the staff, the service, the long list of moments and interactions your customers have with through their visit which makes up the full experience.
As an owner-operator every day there were tweaks to the business, balancing the needs of the staff, the customers, and the business to be constantly moving forward.
Very rarely did I engage in any major overhaul though a business that operated for 10 years would have very much changed and evolved over that time, adapting to its surroundings playing with new ideas, new products, different priorities, changing customers.
There were always new ideas to try, management, menu changes, staffing structures, events, décor all ‘small experiments’ some worked and were pursued others not so good and improved.
Marketing is another obvious example.
A long time ago, when I first started, the only way to communicate with your customers was posters or flyers. My first business did not even have a website for the first 7 years!
The advent of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok has changed the way venues now communicate, what they say how they say it, and how they get attention.
Moreover, the way customers, potential customers, and the wider community respond to the business has changed and the business however has over that time with the urgency of the short-term goals of keeping up and surviving in the rapidly changing world, used small experiments with the new technologies and those that have done that well and really understood it have been personally involved.
Linda Hill who Co-authored ‘The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation’ talks about the innovation from companies such as Pixar, Google & IBM and she states that innovation in organisations should be a ‘team sport’ whilst she agrees there needs to be both a sense of reality and urgency there also needs to be a shared sense of purpose.
The best hospitality operators know this, their teams are involved in the success of the business. The collective passion for the delivery of exceptional service to customers generates a great understanding throughout an organisation of the community and the desires and needs of the customers.
The best teams are driven by this and ambitious to exceed expectations generating once again the ‘zesty goals’. If you are ambitious to always provide the best for your customers then this is challenging, high priority and so short term it can be literally now!
In my previous businesses, we have operated a ‘positively outrageous service’ ambition. Our staff motivated to find above and beyond opportunities for every customer.
This requires all our staff to be alert to possibilities to be always engaging in small experiments and to be personally involved. Targets like this become a team sport and allow everyone in the organisation to be engaging in innovation.
Whilst all venues are currently closed and most, exhausted from the constant innovation required to keep up with changing rules and changing world, many still can’t wait to get back to work, to be part of their communities, and to demonstrate the exceptional entrepreneurial skill that they have for continual innovation.
