What Type of Owner Are You?

Taken from RestaurantOwner.com...

What Kind of Owner Are You?

As you know, there are two basic ways to improve profitability, 1)
lower costs and/or 2) boost sales. Nothing new about this but it's
surprising how many business owners focus much more of their
time and attention to #1 and virtually ignore #2.

Studies show that there are essentially 2 types of CEOs (and if
you own a restaurant then YOU are the CEO): accounting minded or
marketing minded.

An accounting minded CEO will focus primarily on reducing costs and
overhead. This may appear to make money in the short term but
actually loses customers over the long term which causes the CEO to
work even harder at reducing more costs.

Things like the cost of wasted napkins, employee wage rates,
vendor prices, food cost, etc. are the main concerns of this type
of CEO.

It may be easy to add up the number of customers last year and give
an exact number of dollars lost for wasted napkins but it is very
difficult if not impossible to quantify how many customers were
lost as a result of "cutting costs" and giving guests just 1
napkin.

Instead, marketing minded CEOs are laser-beam focused on taking
the best possible care of the customers they have as well as adding
more. Their primary concerns are things like company appearance,
brand recognition, CUSTOMER SERVICE and employee training, quality
of food, cleanliness of the restaurant, etc.

Marketing minded CEO will often have higher costs than accounting
minded CEOs but in the end will have more customers (& sales). When
times get tough restaurant, it's easier for marketing minded bosses
to find and trim the unnecessary fat vs. the company that is
already as lean as can be but has fewer customers and sales to work
with.

In short, you want to find the right balance of marketing versus
accounting but never forget the part of the equation that really
drives long term profitability and success.

Case in point: What would you rather have, 25 customers paying 25
cents more for extra sauce on their sandwich or 100 customers
getting the extra dressing "free"?"

What kind of owner are you? What affect is it having on the success
of YOUR business?