What Gordon Ramsay Taught Me About American Businessmen | Hacker News Reader

What Gordon Ramsay Taught Me About American Businessmen

ethercycle.com

32 pointsKurtElster29 comments

I'm a bit confused about the moral of this post. He says:

"Before you do anything with your business you need to ask, is this something that makes me more money? Or is it just to stroke my ego"

But in the paragraph right before that he says he adopted a no bullshit policy to call out problems to his customers in a direct way, and that it filters out the customers that can't take it. But if his conclusion is really just about making money, wouldn't he make more by taking in all customers, stroking their ego and making them happy, even if it means creating a bad product for them?

The goal of having a business is clearly more than just money. I think it's ultimately about pride, no matter how well placed that pride is. It's just that some people get enough pride just out of having a business, while others get pride out of providing the absolute best service they can possibly provide, and others do get pride by just extracting as much money as possible.

But we celebrate businesses that turn down lucrative deals when they're unethical, and admonish them when they adopt shady practices to force more money out of their customers. Lots of times, running an ethical and high quality business aligns with your business goals, and many business owners put that goal above money, and still make enough money to be successful.

I don't think being proud is a bad thing, it's just that it can be bad if you're proud of the wrong things.

Maybe his ethics override the concern for making money, but his pride does not? That is just one possible consistent explanation for this.

I consider ethics to be a matter of pride, but it's probably a pedantic difference.

You can be proud of your ethics, but ethics and pride are definitely not the same thing, at least not to most people.

> As part of our No More Bullshit stance for 2014, we've become totally honest with everyone who contacts Ethercycle. Brutally honest. We tell people: Your non-responsive website is giving your audience a subpar experience. Your website is huge and slow and it's driving people away. That font is unreadable. Why are there so many steps in the checkout process? Where's your call to action? How does that make any sense? Why do you think that's going to work? Did you think about this at all?

The first few comments were constructive criticisms. The last three are just beating someone up, and are generally dick things to say. There's no excuse for being mean to someone who's asking for help.

A lot of the conflict on those shows is contrived. That show is almost like a procedural drama where the owner's hopeless, resists change, finally sees the light, and then all is set aright by the end.

At least in the 5 episodes I've seen.

Also, not all advice from the expert is correct. Maybe there is a good reason not to change the name.

While I'm all for the HN anti-expert contrarian commentary, let's take a moment to think about this. You, the owner of a failing business, have one view. Gordon Ramsay, the owner of one of the most successful high end restaurant empires in the world, after hearing your justifications, has another. With only this evidence, which view is most likely to be correct?

None, because both have speeches written by the same writers.

Actually not everything is scripted. Actually, in the original show, nothing it's scripted, the sameness comes from following the same procedure and the director knowning how to edit it for drama.

You'll hear people saying BS things that you'd never expect a business owner to say, much less a scripted one.

And not all businesses he talks to are "saved" in the end. Some are just hopeless.

Reality shows are not scripted. They are simply carefully edited from many hours of footage to create the "story" that the producers are looking for. When necessary, the producers may intervene to create drama, but for the most part participants are selected for their ability to create drama out of thin air. (This is why reality show participants are so colorful and outlandish.)

Or to Don Draper put it on Mad Men: "You've already tried your plan, and you're number four."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y4b-DEkIps

In other words: when you run a failing business, the only thing you know for certain is that keeping on doing what you've been doing will fail. Will a particular new plan work? Who knows. But you need to be open to doing something.

I am with you on this one on most "reality" shows I've seen. In reality nobody asks me to go to a confession room to explain my supposed reasoning in front of a camera. I also find it ridiculous that they always keep the most abrasive yet sub-par contestants until the end to drive up conflict for the added drama.

Having said that I agree with the premise of the author's article since I've worked with too many small business owners in my early days of web development and most of them seemed to reject our tech/marketing strategy for theirs even though they usually waited until a crisis hit before calling us to begin with.

I have a hard time getting past this aspect of reality TV. I recently watched a few episodes of "The Profit" which is basically "Kitchen Nightmares" but for businesses, but it just really bothers me how staged it all seems and how resistant people are to take the advice of a guy on a show who they surely put in a ton of effort to get on and must have seen before. When watching this stuff with other people I find it annoying how no one else really see's through the clearly contrived story they're trying to tell.

No matter how much those conflicts are all made up, I've noticed attitudes like these are far too common.

I happen to live with someone who watches these shows a lot (Kitchen Nightmares, Restaurant Impossible, Save my bar or whatever it's called, etc) and I can totally see how this stuff is pretty fake as each episode always follows the same script and the owners always resist at first, but give in at the end and praise the 'expert'. So I'm not sure if parallels with a 'reality' TV show are entirely in place and representative of what's going on in the real world.

That said the type of 'businessman' the author talks about is everything but fictional. In my 7 years running a web consultancy agency I've come across a lot of these wantrepreneurs who value their status and opinion more than value provided to their customers. I also have been trying to avoid this type of customers as the 20/80 rule applies here very much: 20% of your customers give you 80% of your headaches. My experience with a lot of these 'family' businesses is also that these people often get into the business by heritage and not necessarily because they want to.

I would generally agree with this, but the one exception I would make would be for the original British version of Ramsay's show. (It was called "Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares"; they cut the title to just "Kitchen Nightmares" for the US version.)

That show, especially in the first couple of seasons, skipped the usual reality-show tropes and really dug in to the nitty-gritty elements of running a successful restaurant -- which it showed pretty clearly are the same as the elements of running any successful business: know your customers, watch your money, care about your work. There was real human drama in that show that you just don't see very often on TV.

Of course, then they brought it to America and threw all that insightful stuff out to make room for trumped-up shouting matches and canned sound effects of rattlesnakes. What a disappointment.

Both versions are up for streaming on Netflix, if you want to see what I mean; make sure to look for "Ramsay's" in the title to get the UK version. Watch the first episode of the first season and you'll understand the difference.

Actually, I think that's what differentiates the Profit from other similar shows. About 50% of the time (so far) Marcus determines that the ownership is unethical, too incompetent, or just too difficult to work with that he decides not to help them. Still makes for great TV.

I think the author may be taking a misleading lesson away from these shows, because the businesses they focus on -- restaurants and bars, for instance -- are the sort of businesses people (mistakenly) think are glamorous and exciting, so they attract lots of clueless people. Many people daydream about quitting their job and owning a restaurant, mostly because they don't understand what owning a restaurant entails. They think instead that they have fun in restaurants, so running one would be even more fun; or that they like to cook for their family, so they'd like cooking on demand under time pressure for large numbers of strangers even more; and so on. They don't know what they're getting into until they've sunk their life savings into it.

It's a mistake, though, to assume that because these types of businesses attract dilettantes, that all types of businesses attract dilettantes. Once you get away from the "glamor" businesses, that happens much less. Nobody dreams of quitting their job and starting a waste management company; not unless they really care about waste management, at least. So it's not really a safe assumption that the ranks of small businesspeople are uniformly populated with flighty dilettantes.

I think I can state with a high degree of confidence that the blog author was neither assuming nor suggesting that "the ranks of small businesspeople are uniformly populated with flighty dilettantes." Seems like a strawman critique of the article, although your larger points are very true (viz. "glamorous" businesses, motivations, etc).

Bourdain had it right in Kitchen Confidential:

"Why would anyone who has worked hard, saved money, often been successful in other fields, want to pump their hard-earned cash down a hole that statistically, at least, will almost surely prove dry? ... The easy answer, of course, is ego. The classic example is the retired dentist who was always told he threw a great dinner party. 'You should open a restaurant,' his friends tell him. And our dentist believes them. He wants to get in the business-not to make money, not really, but to swan about the dining room signing dinner checks like Rick in Casablanca. And he'll have plenty of chance to sign dinner checks-when the deadbeat friends who told him what a success he'd be in the restaurant business keep coming by looking for freebies. All these original geniuses will be more than happy to clog up the bar, sucking down free drinks, taking credit for this bold venture-until the place starts running into trouble, at which point they dematerialize, shaking their heads at their foolish dentist who just didn't seem up to the job."

Although I also think the producers of these shows screen for volatile applicants and then stoke the egos of those same people so there's a fight ready to happen when Ramsey walks in the door.

> To start your own business you just need to send $500 to the Secretary of State's office and congratulations! You're what makes America great!

This reminds me of a scene from 'Searching for Bobby Fischer', http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v38lu0Bi0Kk, only two minutes but it has stuck with me ever since I watched it as a kid.

This is what I think of whenever someone talks to me about certifications...

I'd disagree on one point. Being a business owner is not easier. We all intuitively know that. He knows that. Getting capital, having an idea, executing (even if you're failing) is difficult.

To get a job, I need to impress the hiring manager, and maybe a few of the engineers who interview me. To open a business, I need to impress a banker, or a VC, or an angel, then I need to impress each and every potential customer. And impressing them is beyond, hey this guy has roughly the right skillset. No I need a feasible idea, a plan. I need to be good with money, I need to know an industry enough to contribute to it, I need the inter personal skills to demonstrate to people I can actually do those things... and then to be successful, i have to be telling the truth.

I'm impressed by a "business owner" because its truly an impressive thing.

No no no. First off, you're completely ignoring businesses that bootstrap or don't need capital to start. Secondly, yes, being a good business owner is hard, but that not the focus of this. This is about the wantrepreneurs who only care about thinking that they're hot shit.

Your ego can be a distraction from sound business decisions.

It's quite instructive to watch the American and British versions of the same show.

The American version is like the British but with the volume turned up to 11 - more drama, more shouting, and more tears.

Also, everyone calls Gordon Ramsey "Chef Ramsey" which sounds wierd.

I think that this problem persists beyond individual business owners. There are all kinds of management types out there that love the idea of being in charge, but not any of the hard work involved in actually managing and leading.

> Or is it just to stroke my ego*

> *And I realize that's ironic coming from a guy who just wrote an 800-word blog post telling you how to think.

It's not ironic.

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