Comment on Entrepreneurial autopsies

Tue, 14 Jul 2015 07:07:54 GMT

If you can make a profit opening a small restaurant, then a large startup (this is the word for a scalable business) will try to do that in a way that scales (franchising).

I don't see that here. Franchising is largely an American habit, probably due to many restaurants, even real ones (steakhouses) having semi-fast-food type approaches that lend themselves easily to being broken down to procedures and rules that can be trained to anyone. Most restaurants I see here don't have these semi-industrial procedures, they are typically based on the personal touch, the owner cooking or training a cook in person, by mentoring, without being able to break that down into written rules that can be trained by someone else in a different city. The interior design and even the building itself plays a non-scalable role as well i.e. if you open a fish restaurant with a fisherman's theme and put 100 years old fishing instruments on the wall, you cannot really blow up into a chain of 50 restaurants, in that case the decoration will be made in some kind of a factory and the whole thing having a fake vibe. In short, their appeal is largely in their uniqueness, being in a specific historical building, having a specific semi-historical or not but generally unique interior, with the personal touch of the owner's cooking or personally trained cook and all that.

I figure the kind of restaurant that could be potentially turned into a franchise could easily fail because it would not have this appeal of uniqueness. It would be just a place to eat at... not the whole experience of time-travel or travel to a distant place in the case of authentic ethnic ones.

Discuss