Street Smarts: Problems, Problems
Problems, problems. Every business owner has them. The key question is this: Are you just stopping the bleeding, or are you dealing with the root causes?
Published February 2004
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BUY A REPRINTIf you run a business, you don't need me to tell you that you have problems. They come with the territory. You deal with them every day. No matter how hard you try, you'll never get rid of them, and that isn't all bad. Problems can be great teachers--provided you're willing to learn.
A few months ago, my wife, Elaine, and I were in Dallas for a conference and we decided to go out to dinner at a fancy seafood restaurant near our hotel. The place was crowded, and we had no reservation, but the maitre d' said he thought he could seat us in 20 minutes or so. While we waited at the bar, Elaine ordered a shrimp cocktail. Before it was served, the maitre d' came over to tell us he had a table available in the balcony overlooking the main dining room.
"I just ordered a shrimp cocktail," Elaine said.
"No problem," said the maitre d'. "I'll have someone bring it to your table."
The shrimp cocktail arrived right after we did. Elaine tasted the sauce and found it too spicy. Intending to dilute it a bit, she reached for a bottle of ketchup on the table. As she turned the cap on the bottle, there was a loud pop, and ketchup came shooting out, covering her sweater, her blouse, her skirt, her whole arm.
Elaine sat there stunned, drowning in ketchup. Our waitress came running over. "Oh, I'm so sorry," she said, handing us napkins. "Let me help you." She worked feverishly to clean up the mess. "If you bring me your clothes tomorrow, I'll have them cleaned for you," she said.
The manager showed up a moment later and also offered his apologies. He wiped ketchup off a chair and sat down with us. "I'm terribly sorry about this," he said and gave me his card. "Just send the cleaning bill to me. I'll make sure it's taken care of."
Both Elaine and I were suitably impressed. Every business, including ours, has its share of accidental, unavoidable, nightmarish customer screwups. If we're the customers involved, we mainly want people to act as though they're sincerely sorry and to do what they can to repair the damage. We would have been quite satisfied if the manager had left it at that. But as he stood up to leave, he said, "In a way, you were lucky."
"What do you mean?" Elaine asked.
"The last time this happened, the person got ketchup all over her hair. We had to send her to the beauty parlor. At least you just have it on your clothes."
"You mean this has happened before?" I asked.
"Oh, yeah," the manager said. "It happens fairly often. This part of the restaurant can get extremely hot during the day. We ask the waitresses to loosen the caps of the ketchup bottles, so the pressure doesn't build up inside, but sometimes they forget, and the bottle explodes when the guest goes to open it." With that, he excused himself and walked away.
When you're deluged with problems, there's a tendency to focus on the crisis at hand--and then move on.
Elaine and I didn't know whether to be outraged or to burst out laughing. We were dumbfounded. I could think of all kinds of ways to make sure customers don't have to endure ketchup bombs: Take the ketchup downstairs every evening; buy a small refrigerator for the balcony and keep the bottles there during the day; put the ketchup in vented containers; serve ketchup only when the customer asks for it. Instead the restaurant had come up with a solution that solved nothing. The bottles kept exploding; the ketchup kept flying; the staff kept cleaning up and apologizing; and the victims kept telling everyone they met about their experience, thereby turning what should have been a one-time embarrassment into an ongoing public relations problem. That's what can happen when you don't learn from your mistakes.
The ketchup case is an extreme example, but the phenomenon is by no means uncommon. When you're deluged with problems, there's a natural tendency to focus on the crisis at hand, deal with it, and then move on to whatever else is demanding your attention. I know a couple, for example, who had a company that made women's clothing. In order to ensure that they always had enough stock on hand to meet the demand, they would habitually produce more clothing than they needed. Inevitably, they'd wind up with a ton of excess inventory, which they would then sell off at a loss. That was easier and quicker than dealing with the underlying problem, their inability to forecast accurately, and so they kept doing it, year after year--until they went out of business.
The fact is that if you don't eliminate the root cause of a problem, it only goes away temporarily. For that reason, I've tried to introduce a certain discipline in my company by constantly reminding people that there are two steps involved in fixing problems. First, you have to stop the bleeding--that is, deal with the consequences and minimize the damage. Then you have to figure out why it happened and make sure that it doesn't happen again.
