MONEYBALL

The movie "Moneyball" made on me a great impression. I have been thinking about how the movie (about a small market baseball team trying to compete with the likes of the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox) contains lessons for the restaurant industry in my home town.
I have worked for small, independently owned restaurants and I have worked for one of the biggest chains in the world. I have even owned a small, independently owned establishment in Kingston. (Let's call it: "Bananaskins". Not for legal reasons... I just like the name.) Small businesses the world over often make the point that they cannot compete with large corporations because they (the corporations) have all the money. That's kind of like the situation in baseball, and that brings me back to Moneyball.
Brad Pitt plays a real life character called Billy Beane and he was (and still is) the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, a small market team if ever their was one. The owner of the team is just an ordinary millionaire and his pockets are no where near as deep as the pockets in New York and Boston. So Brad Pitt (Billy Beane) must find a way to sign players he can afford and still be in the hunt to win the World Series. Otherwise... what's the point? And he knows the old methods of finding players have not been working. He turns to, and hires as his assistant, a computer geek who has never played a game of baseball in his life, but he knows stats and he loves numbers and he has his own theories about how to get value when you sign a player to your team. It's called "sabre metrics". And the result is a very entertaining movie, and a very good lesson for restaurant owners in Kingston.
Restaurants are labour-intensive. You need staff. You (the owner) cannot do it all yourself. So you need to find good people. And you need to hire them. And you need to retain the really good ones. And how can you do that when you are competing with the likes of The Keg and Red Lobster and Milestones? And how do you MEASURE the performance of your staff and therefore recognize the good ones?
Restaurants, like all businesses, need customers. How does the independent operator attract customers to his or her place when the big chains can spend so much on advertising? How do you (the little guy/gal) compete on a fair and equal footing against the Wal-Marts of the world? To quote Michael Lewis, who wrote the book "Moneyball": "It's an unfair game." What can you do?
You want to be in the hunt for the World Series, don't you? Otherwise... What's the point?