A couple years ago, a few coworkers and I were eating at a nice-ish restaurant in Florida while on a work trip (work trips, remember those?). The restaurant was a small, high-end southern establishment where the servers wore white cotton aprons and the water came in glass bottles. While ordering our dinner, my boss made a small special request for his meal.
He was ordering a meat served over chick peas and his lone request was for the chick peas to be removed or replaced with something else. He really doesn’t like chickpeas. Pretty mundane story so far, I get it.
The server told Mike he’d have to check to see if they could do that and then disappeared into a back room for more than a few minutes. Eventually he came back to our table and I kid you not, this is what he said…
“I’m sorry sir, we are unable to make that request. We can’t remove the chickpeas or change it to anything else. You see, chef views food as art,” the server told us.
Chef views food as art.
We of course made all sorts of jokes about how we view food as food, but that’s not the point of this story. The point of this story is that in that moment, the chef (also hilarious that he gets to just go by “chef” without a name) cared more about his expression of the work than his customers enjoyment and appreciation of it. He was more than willing to lose business because his expression of a meal that Mike was going to eat mattered more than Mike’s experience eating it.
Mike would have loved that meal (without the chickpeas of course). We would have spent good money, likely come back a time or two. The restaurant was in a fun part of town we hadn’t been to before, we probably would’ve brought more people the next time. But now, we won’t go back.
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Here’s my question to the rest of us: Are customers asking us for slightly different versions of what we do, but we’re unwilling to oblige because our perspective is far more important and pure than theirs?
Do you make widgets in all black but some of your customers really want hot pink? If you opened your doors 30 minutes earlier would it make it more convenient for people to visit your store? Is there a subset of your audience that would buy your product if it didn’t come with so many bells and whistles?
Not every decision about the business can be left up to customization or preference of a few. To be known for something memorable we must be specific. But if we’re going to go as far as telling our customers, “sorry, we’re not going to serve you the way you prefer to be served” we better be darn sure those decisions are worth the risk.