Jay Sachetti joined Jeff O’Brien, partner at Husch Blackwell and Dyanne Ross-Hanson, president of Exit Planning Strategies talked about the market for mergers and acquisitions, exit planning opportunities for companies that don’t end up for sale and how companies can maximize their eventual sale price during an early October panel at the first Upsize on Tap event at Summit Brewing Co. in St. Paul.
When the state Legislature passed a law requiring employers to provide paid leave and safe time for employees, Justin Bieganek started hearing differing details from friends, colleagues and peers.
Suppose you had a party to celebrate your company’s failures, and 400 people came. That’s what David Kristal did several months after he exhorted employees at the Embers restaurant chain to try new ideas.
“We did that to shake things up. We couldn’t afford to do things incrementally,” says Kristal, CEO of Embers in St. Paul, and of two related companies. He’s our Back Page subject this month.
Eighteen months after he joined Embers in 1997, Kristal had slowed but not stopped the hundreds of thousands of dollars of losses every month. He formed companywide focus groups of employees, from bus people to managers, to come up with new ideas to boost revenue.
But then he needed them to actually try those ideas, to really believe that they could throw stuff out there and dare to fail, to trust that they wouldn’t be out of a job if ideas didn’t work.
“I said, ‘Keep track of the really good ideas that fail, because we’ll have a party to celebrate,’ ” Kristal says. Two years later, 400 employees showed up for a bowling party in honor of their flops. “It was really fun.”
Celebrating all our really good ideas that failed? What a concept. Too often the definition of a good idea includes a successful outcome. Too often we take a good idea — a rare jewel that somebody dreams up — and put it in committee, run risk assessments on it, draw up budgets supporting it, and otherwise encumber it. And if it doesn’t work, we take the failure as proof that it was a bad idea.
What if a good idea was one that energized at least one person to try something new? What if a good idea was one that motivated a group that before had been demoralized? What if a good idea was something that made a dozen customers happy, no matter that nobody else cared? What if a good idea was one that made a few people shake their heads because of its audacity, and think bigger after they heard it?
In Kristal’s world, that may be the case. He has an unusual way of looking at many commonly held conventions in business. Take passion, for example, something that is often cited as a key ingredient for entrepreneurial success.
“There’s a lot of talk about passion, but if you ask people in a room, especially entrepreneurs, most will say yes, they have passion,” Kristal says. “Passion only means something if it translates to obsessive behavior in your firm, and I don’t mean obsessive in the negative sense. Passion needs to translate into a behavior that affects your success.”
Kristal’s comments inspire me to try some unconventional thinking, and I hope you, too. Celebrate your failures? Forget passion, try for obsession? I don’t know if those in particular are right for me, but they definitely have me thinking.
— Beth Ewen
Editor and co-founder
Upsize Minnesota
be***@*******ag.com
