I read an article in the Orlando Sentinel written by Scott Joseph, the Sentinel’s restaurant critic. It was critiquing Gio’s, apparently a new restaurant that had recently opened. I always read Scott’s critiques and something struck me in this particular article which, although he was referring to restaurants, is very relevant to business in general.
It goes like this. He said: a restaurant should have a purpose, something that goes beyond the basic business plan that any startup would mete out. It doesn’t have to be grandiose…and it isn’t even necessary for food to be the main reason for the restaurant’s existence. But the bottom line, according to Scott, is that a restaurant has to have a reason to be.
That was good enough for me. It reminds me of the conversation I had years ago where the conversation centered around the age old question as to the reason for a business to be in business. My position was that the purpose for having a business is to create something, or to stand for something, or to produce something. The position of my counterpart in the debate was that the reason for being in business was to make money.
While it’s obvious that a business has to make money in order to stay in business, it’s not obvious that is the reason why the business is in business. In order to stay in business, a business has to have a reason to exist at all. What does it stand for? What’s its purpose? What’s its persona? How does it show up in the landscape of economic units producing products and services?
The question is not the Shakespearian one: to be or not to be? The question is the more probative one: what to be and why?
In building a business plan and the foundation for a successful business model, there has to be an intersection point between two components: the intrinsic value associated with a product or a service being delivered and the strategic differentiator which identifies that product or service as being unique to the intended customer base. If there is no intrinsic value and there is no uniqueness or differentiator in the strategic positioning, then there is fundamentally no reason for the business to be in business. At best, it’s a copycat or an impostor; at worst, it’s a waste of energy and effort.
Most businesses do not have individual critics like Scott Joseph wondering out loud what the purpose of the business is. It’s actually worse. They don’t hear anything at all. The business simply hears silence—the silence of customers not coming back for more!
Original writing date: June 11, 2007