I love watching the UK version of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, a TV show featuring one of the world’s most successful chefs delivering weeklong, intense and foul-mouthed crash courses on how to run a restaurant for those who desperately need it.
Here’s the first ten minutes of one episode:
Gordon follows more or less the same consulting method each episode:
1. Visit as a customer
Gordon visits, tries the food & samples the service. He provides critical feedback, pulling no punches, to the assembled owner and staff.
2. Obtain commitment to change
Gordon shows how bad things really are and obtains commitment from everyone to change.
3. Observe staff
Gordon steps into the kitchen and watches the chefs and service staff at work. Typically owners haven’t put systems in place either in service or the kitchen, don’t have properly trained staff and don’t have enough experience to improve the situation.
4. Demonstrate viability
Most owners cannot go much further financially and have reached desperation point. Gordon demonstrates how the business can be turned around, sometimes running trials to show how much money can be made.
5. Inject business sense
Gordon puts systems in place across the restaurant, leverages relationships to get better deals on business inputs and finds contra deal opportunities such as cross-promotion.
6. Rebuild passion
Usually the staff have wallowed in mediocrity for so long that they’ve lost all interest in their job. Gordon works with them to restore “passion, care, attention & love for food”.
7. Provide focus
Typically the restaurant has an inconsistent theme and a menu without focus. Gordon says "a good restaurant does one thing brilliantly, a bad one does fifty badly" and typically cuts the menu down to 5 excellent (& simple to prepare) dishes per course.
8. Restore confidence
Gordon often provides the staff with a surprise challenge that irons out problems in the kitchen and restores confidence of the staff and owner.
9. Consolidate the learning
Gordon observes staff on a busy night, irons out remaining bugs in the system.
10. Find replacement staff
Some staff cannot change or do not have the owner’s interests at heart. Gordon provides the owners with the courage to get rid of them and finds qualified replacements.
11. Leave
Gordon Ramsay know how to make a number of small changes to achieve significant outcomes. Then he hands control back to the thankful owner and leaves.
So that’s Gordon Ramsay’s method. It’s good advice for any type of business and entertaining to boot.
