Wow. It makes me think back to all the businesses I have started. Should have asked more questions.
I totally get the romantic side of it's a great idea...until it isn't. Yesterday as we were planting our first flowers for our new flower farm, and we were saying we get now why people say farming is so hard.
Thank God we invested in good courses to show us how to do it and not make costly mistakes.
I too want to think the toilet guy moved on to something that was a wild success.
That's no joke! People can lose SO much money from farming. I know someone who took money out of a retirement fund to seed a whole field of alfalfa... weeks later, it was apparent that they were planted either too deep or too shallow (can't remember), so the seeds never sprouted. The whole entire thing was a huge waste of time and money. It was really sad. I'm glad you learned more about farming *before* taking action!
Ha! Best piece of advice was to start very small. Our original plan was to plan one acre but in the flower world that’s thousands of flowers. So we scaled way back and are doing 5 rows at a time as a test. Sunflowers going I tomorrow!!
Wow, that is a crazy story! First of all BEST BLOG POST TITLE EVER!! Obviously I needed to find out right away how this odd circumstance came about! Haha. And yes, Kitchen Nightmares is so hard to watch, also Hotel Hell, same kind of thing. And watching Shark Tank is incredibly illuminating. It is so interesting how so many people are so convinced some very weird things are a good business idea, and hard to watch their faces when they are told it is definitely not. Now, sometimes those sharks eat their words and the business is a major success, but not usually. When I was at bible college, I worked at a restaurant that had such a weird vision and I could tell right away it would not succeed. It was so strange because I could tell the founder was very successful in her prior business field, but had no experience at all in the business she chose. She was completely convinced of her vision, like she had blinders on. It was all very tragic and sad and very dysfunctional. It was very educational for me to observe though. I think people think "how hard could running a restaurant be"?? Oh man. After that I went on to work at another restaurant that was started by a dentist and some friends of his. I felt like they were completely incompetent in the way they ran it, but the weird thing is it was very successful. Not because they were good at it, but because it was such a specific niche that did not exist and clearly there was a huge market for: kosher asian food. Everyone who came was so excited to find something like that there. And the food was actually good.
“How hard could running a restaurant be?” Indeed… it’s one of the hardest businesses I know of for so many different reasons (too many to list).
“Kosher Asian food” actually doesn’t surprise me: it sounds like those restaurant owners *really* know their target audience well and did their research first. Little ethnic or dietary pockets of large communities can be a surprisingly profitable niche. (Like being the only Ethiopian restaurant in large city, for example).
And yes, the food has to be good! More than half the time on Kitchen Nightmares, the food isn’t even good, and they don’t even follow basic food service/sanitation rules. Ugh!
Wow. It makes me think back to all the businesses I have started. Should have asked more questions.
I totally get the romantic side of it's a great idea...until it isn't. Yesterday as we were planting our first flowers for our new flower farm, and we were saying we get now why people say farming is so hard.
Thank God we invested in good courses to show us how to do it and not make costly mistakes.
I too want to think the toilet guy moved on to something that was a wild success.
That's no joke! People can lose SO much money from farming. I know someone who took money out of a retirement fund to seed a whole field of alfalfa... weeks later, it was apparent that they were planted either too deep or too shallow (can't remember), so the seeds never sprouted. The whole entire thing was a huge waste of time and money. It was really sad. I'm glad you learned more about farming *before* taking action!
Ha! Best piece of advice was to start very small. Our original plan was to plan one acre but in the flower world that’s thousands of flowers. So we scaled way back and are doing 5 rows at a time as a test. Sunflowers going I tomorrow!!
Brilliant. Take baby steps, prove the concept, learn lessons on a small scale, then grow. That's exactly the right way.
Wow, that is a crazy story! First of all BEST BLOG POST TITLE EVER!! Obviously I needed to find out right away how this odd circumstance came about! Haha. And yes, Kitchen Nightmares is so hard to watch, also Hotel Hell, same kind of thing. And watching Shark Tank is incredibly illuminating. It is so interesting how so many people are so convinced some very weird things are a good business idea, and hard to watch their faces when they are told it is definitely not. Now, sometimes those sharks eat their words and the business is a major success, but not usually. When I was at bible college, I worked at a restaurant that had such a weird vision and I could tell right away it would not succeed. It was so strange because I could tell the founder was very successful in her prior business field, but had no experience at all in the business she chose. She was completely convinced of her vision, like she had blinders on. It was all very tragic and sad and very dysfunctional. It was very educational for me to observe though. I think people think "how hard could running a restaurant be"?? Oh man. After that I went on to work at another restaurant that was started by a dentist and some friends of his. I felt like they were completely incompetent in the way they ran it, but the weird thing is it was very successful. Not because they were good at it, but because it was such a specific niche that did not exist and clearly there was a huge market for: kosher asian food. Everyone who came was so excited to find something like that there. And the food was actually good.
“How hard could running a restaurant be?” Indeed… it’s one of the hardest businesses I know of for so many different reasons (too many to list).
“Kosher Asian food” actually doesn’t surprise me: it sounds like those restaurant owners *really* know their target audience well and did their research first. Little ethnic or dietary pockets of large communities can be a surprisingly profitable niche. (Like being the only Ethiopian restaurant in large city, for example).
And yes, the food has to be good! More than half the time on Kitchen Nightmares, the food isn’t even good, and they don’t even follow basic food service/sanitation rules. Ugh!