The ketchup was Hunts.
I had a genuinely great meal somewhere last year. Everything about it was right. Then I asked for ketchup and they brought me Hunts instead of Heinz. Small thing. Completely fixable. And nobody in that building was thinking about it, because everybody in that building was busy being excellent at the actual food.
That's the whole thing, really, and I've never been able to turn it off. I sit down to eat and I'm counting the tables, guessing the average ticket, working out how many times each one turns tonight. I did it as a kid with a lemonade stand on the corner, thinking about where the foot traffic actually was. The gap between a good business and what it earns is almost never the craft. It's everything around the craft - and the owner is the last person with time to see it.
What I've added since the lemonade stand is 25 years learning which of those levers actually moves revenue. I buy media on Google and Meta, I've been CMO of a multimillion-dollar brand, I own and run my own Shopify store with my own money on the line every day, and I have a full team behind me: developers, designers, video, automation, sourcing and quality control. So you keep doing the thing you're great at. I'll take everything around it. Read the longer version →










