Entrepreneurs: Don’t just define what you want to do, define who you want to be while you’re doing it.
Coming out of the fine dining world where we worked for others, to stake our claim as restaurant entrepreneurs was exciting. We had the management background, the culinary chops and the collective chutzpah to venture out on our own and make a courageous go of it . Ten years later, we had built a $100 million business and a beloved brand in an industry notorious for chewing up well-meaning chefs and spitting them out. Why did it work for us when it doesn’t for so many?
Like most restaurant founders, we thought through every detail of what a modern eatery should be and spelled them out in our business plan. We documented each consideration starting with our culinary perspective, our service model and our value proposition, then our site selection and design criteria, our training and development methodology, our growth strategy, our supply chain and our projections.
Just like that movie “Founder” that tells the story of Ray Croc and McDonalds, we meticulously and obsessively thought through what we were going to do and how we were going to do it. Instead of the basketball court in the movie, we used the ballroom of the hotel where we were working to lay out folding tables to simulate the flow of our kitchen. We wanted to make sure we could do the volume of business we needed to make it viable.
With each capital pitch, most of which ended in “yeah, nah”, we learned about what investors were looking for in a business. This made us think through the things we were less focused on like HR, finance and governance as well as our brand promotion strategy (although admittedly we had no idea what we were talking about there). We began to get some traction and eventually, we were off to the races. We built and opened our first restaurant with $800 in the bank, hope and determination, a commitment to putting the business first and a morbid fear of losing our friends’ and families’ money. Their investment had to pay off.
At the same time, we also had a vision of how we wanted to show up as an organization. Who we wanted to be as humans while we were plating 1,000 meals a day— how we wanted to treat each other and everyone who interacted with the brand; from our team members to the farmers and other suppliers, to our neighbors, our investors and, of course, our guests. We made agreements between us as founders about how we’d communicate and resolve conflict as well as a commitment to being the kind of company we would want to work at.
We each had bosses and mentors along the way we looked up to but we also had scars from spending collective decades working for chef tyrants who swore, threw pots and pans and who maintained a steady campaign of employment insecurity that kept cooks scared of imminent replacement and doubtful they’d ever amount to anything more than soon-to-be unemployed. We’d also worked for straightforward corporate leaders who applied the rules, who documented processes and who checked the boxes. Thankfully, these bosses taught us about systems and organization but they didn’t inspire us to connect, to go above and beyond or to bring the best of ourselves to the table. We were not just not going to be like any of them; we were going to be radically different.
In the very early days of our brand, Base Camp (the nickname later given to our philosophy and our guiding principles) was not a written out treatise, a page in a handbook or a poster on the wall. It was simply a way that my co-founders and I agreed (and declared) we would behave. It wasn’t a consciously considered part of the hiring or training process like it is now either. We simply acted a certain way and inadvertently inspired most of the people we hired to do the same. It wasn’t until we began expanding so much that, as founders, we were not able to be part of every new team member’s onboarding experience and were counting on restaurant level leaders to “indoctrinate” team members, that we engaged someone to come and help us distill our thoughts into a mission statement and a series of guiding principles. We did this to codify a language that could be passed along without (1) diluting the important parts of what we believed or (2) leaving the company’s values open to interpretation.
Declaring what we stood for and the essential nature of how we would conduct ourselves was foundational to our company’s trajectory because it expanded our contract of accountability from simply being between us as co-founders to now include all team members. Not in the traditional sense of a top down dictate but more like a two-way channel that, on the one hand expressed who we all needed to be and, on the other, gave permission for anyone in the organization to remind anyone else if they weren’t living up to that pledge. In doing it this way, we were ensuring that everybody in the organization not only had a measuring stick for the brand but also had a voice, the authority and the responsibility to question or call out a decision no matter who made it.
On a practical level and in keeping with the adage “if you want to design a better broom, ask the person who sweeps the floor”, this bi-directional feedback loop kept us on the lookout for silos forming in our organization (not that we didn’t end up with some from time to time) and, to our best effort, including the right people when we jumped in the sandbox to ideate, among other things, innovation, cost reduction and new programs for team development.
We’ve all heard and can appreciate that “culture eats strategy for lunch”. Our team lived that mantra to its fullest and often to a fault. While we grew to increasingly appreciate a well-thought out strategic plan, the overlay of our purpose and values-driven operating philosophy ensured that there would be alignment between what we say we’re going to do and how we’re going to be while we’re doing it. In other words, actively measuring our possible and real actions against our stated values keeps us, more often than not, away from the slippery slope of bad compromises and ineffective rollouts. It also drives team engagement and creativity in an empowering and empowered work environment and, on a much deeper level, supports a culture of heartfelt meaning and connection.
