Measure for Measure

By Patricia Dailey, Editor-in-Chief -- Restaurants & Institutions, 8/15/2004

Accountants and bookkeepers may think foodservice is mostly number crunching, with the P&L statements it spins out the sole measure of a company’s success, the last and loudest voice in a high-stakes game.

Operators, though, intuitively inhabit a different reality, one in which customers knowingly and gleefully occupy the real seats of power. By their whims, tastes and preferences—all of which change with dizzying speed and vexing unpredictability—they set the rules, ultimately determining the fortunes, failures and also-rans in the nation’s great and endless eat-a-thon.

Within that framework, taking guests for granted or assuming you know them and how they’ll behave isn’t a good idea; neither is discounting the full sway that their opinions and actions hold over business. To the day’s total take, patrons often may be counted as nothing more than their orders—a value meal, Caesar salad or doughnut and coffee—but to a company’s financial well-being, they’re revenue streams, and cranky, dissatisfied customers aren’t apt to hang around long.

Stephen C. Goodall, president and CEO of J.D. Power and Associates, and the keynote speaker at R&I’s annual Summit conference, held last month in Los Angeles, reminded an executive-level audience that regularly polling the sources of cash is highly useful as a business strategy. “What gets measured gets managed,” he said, quoting a well-known business axiom and a good one by which to operate.

Especially in matters of customer satisfaction—that sometimes elusive but always enlightening view of guest reactions and responses—obtaining specific metrics on customers can be of great value, creating a vast universe of input, with a lode of guidance and direction on strengths and weaknesses. In the spirit of the best business-school practices, Goodall said, “The goal of measuring is not to achieve higher scores. Measuring is about improving.”

True enough, of course. A consultant’s chart filled with numbers and percentages can be a very compelling read and doubtless filled with insights, opportunities and action items. But as telling as these perspectives appear to be, there’s danger in allowing the precise mathematical order of quadrants, graphs and pie charts alone to dictate an operation’s strategy or change its course.

Missing from all the scientifically gathered data are basic gut instincts, the finely tuned senses of someone who works in and knows the industry. Dreams, vision and drive play big parts in building and shaping most businesses, and in even the most challenged settings, it makes sense to heed and take a bow to them every now and then.

As alluring as it may be to analyze restaurant patrons as sets of numbers, they are far more complicated than weighted averages and percentage points. Gathering stats on them is absolutely vital, to be sure, but it’s only one tool out of a whole boxful, supplemental data to support that which business instincts know is the right course.