What Are You Trying to Do?

It's amazing how easy it is to lose track of your real goal.

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At an Inc. 500 conference a few years ago, I heard a great speech with a message that every entrepreneur should take to heart. The speaker was Jamie Clarke, a mountaineer and former cross-country ski champion who writes books and gives inspirational talks when he's not out on one of his expeditions. He was telling the story of his first climb to the top of Mount Everest. Whenever you embark on a great undertaking like that, he said, it's important to keep your goal--your real goal--in mind. So what was his real goal? You might suppose that it was to reach the summit, but you'd be wrong. The real goal, he said, was to come back alive.

In business, as in life, identifying the real goal is often more of a challenge than you'd expect, even for experienced businesspeople. But first-time entrepreneurs, I've found, have a particularly hard time with this, mainly because they are torn between their dreams and their fears. They start with a grand vision of what they want to do, then make the mistake of thinking they can do it all at once. They set out to raise far more money than a first-time entrepreneur can hope to attract. Meanwhile, they miss the goal they should have had in the first place.

I've been working with two people who fell victim to this syndrome. One is Brian Konopka, a former chef de cuisine at the renowned New York City restaurant Le Cirque. With the blessing of his erstwhile boss, Sirio Maccioni, Brian had decided to strike out on his own. He contacted me, and I invited him to my office. He showed up with an elaborate business plan that he must have put together using a computer program. He gave me his pitch and threw in enough business lingo to suggest he wasn't a total novice. The bottom line was, he said, he needed $1.2 million.

I was skeptical. He might be a great chef, but he'd never run a business. I asked him, "Brian, how are you going to raise that much money?" He said that Sirio had promised to help in any way he could. "Do you have friends or relatives with a lot of money?" I asked.

"No, I'm going around and meeting people like you."

Then I knew for sure he wasn't going to raise $1.2 million. I said, "Brian, tell me something. What's your real goal here?"

He said, "Well, my goal is to open up a restaurant and…"

"Stop there," I said. "Your goal is to open a restaurant, right?"

"Yes," he said, "and I want it to be…" He proceeded to paint a picture for me of what he envisioned: a world-class restaurant in the heart of Brooklyn, with a beautiful kitchen, elegant furnishings, impeccable service, and tons of customers.

Brian painted a picture for me of what he envisioned: a world-class restaurant with elegant furnishings and impeccable service.

"That's fine," I said, "but you're going to have to start with something less ambitious because I don't think you'll be able to raise $1.2 million." Brian's head shot back. "Your goal right now should be to open up a restaurant. Period. That's an achievable goal." He listened, and he thanked me, but I could tell that he didn't believe me. I told him to come back if he wanted to talk further.

By the time Brian returned a few months later, he'd realized that he couldn't raise the $1.2 million. This time, we sat down and figured out how much money he'd really need to open a restaurant. The total turned out to be somewhere between $175,000 and $225,000, assuming he kept the restaurant relatively small, found a place he could move into without having to do a lot of rebuilding, and didn't insist on buying expensive furnishings and tableware. "People are going to come here for the food," I said. "If you have a successful restaurant with a reputation for great food, investors will flock to you with money. You can use this restaurant to put yourself in that position." I also told him that I'd be willing to provide the start-up capital, with my usual conditions--that is, I'd be the majority owner until I recouped my initial investment, at which point Brian would become the majority owner. (See "My Life As an Angel," July 1997.)

Since then, Brian has been looking for the right location. He thought he had a place at one point--an existing restaurant with a good kitchen in a trendy part of Brooklyn. The restaurant's owner was moving to Florida and wanted someone to take over his lease. It had four years remaining on it, and the owner said the landlord would extend it. After weeks of haggling over the price, Brian found out that the landlord would not, in fact, extend it but would instead wait for the lease to expire and then renegotiate. Given the way rents have been rising in that part of Brooklyn, that would have been a very bad deal. Brian walked away and is now searching for another location, perhaps on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

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