Find. Build. Sell.

CHAPTER 2Find your feet

Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.

Marcus Aurelius

I saw Steven Spielberg interviewed once. He was launching a new blockbuster film and the interviewer asked him, ‘How do you deal with the pressure of managing such big budgets, and how can you bolster your chances of having a best-selling movie?'

He said, ‘Ninety-nine per cent of a film's success is in the casting. If I get that right, the rest will take care of itself'.

Don't let them in

It's the same with pubs, or any business for that matter. ‘Casting' is critical to success. In other words, who we ‘let in', be they a patron, an employee, an investor or a supplier, dramatically impacts our ability to be successful, because everyone we ‘let in' brings with them a whole bunch of baggage that can very quickly become ours.

Running a hospitality business like a pub is quite different from running a law firm, a factory or a furniture store, in that most of those businesses don't have 10 000 strangers streaming through their doors each week to eat, meet and greet who treat the place as an extension of their loungeroom. That kind of ‘random fun factor' of never knowing who or how many people will come in creates a level of unpredictability that means we have to employ robust procedures to ensure that we don't let the wrong people in.

This is tricky and somewhat counterintuitive because as a publican, I'm in the business of letting everybody in. In fact, the more we let ...