If you choose your focus areas wisely and ensure you are effective in those pursuits, then success will follow. The trick is to correctly identify what areas to focus on.
For example, at Nando’s we identified that we hadn’t really maximized our full sales potential halfway through our financial year. What did we do? We moved our focus away from direct demand generating initiatives and looked into areas that indirectly affect sales such as customer service, restaurant standards and our staff. It wasn’t long after putting our heads together that we grew those areas as close to perfection as we could, and as part of a chain-reaction, the sales started to follow. This in hindsight is fairly self-evident – happy customers and well-taken care of staff make for a place where people want to work and people want to visit.
The lesson here is that you need to know what to focus on and it may not be the obvious answer. It is critical to learn what’s important in your business and how one area affects the other. That way you can determine what your focus areas should be, and then proceed to drive the right behaviour at all levels of the business.
As a leader, while you need to know what’s happening in your business, you also need to know how to focus your energy and time wisely. For me, as a COO, it doesn’t help to get stuck into the nitty gritty of a single restaurant when we run nearly 300 restaurants. That’s why I hire the right managers to filter the need-to-know information to me where I can make the biggest impact. You need to trust in your teams, and the processes and procedures that allow information to be channeled.
Focusing your effort also means tapping into your creative side. Sometimes you need to kill 10 birds with one stone and that requires a solution that comes from outside the box. Don’t be afraid to tap into the expertise that surround you in order to collate a solution that applies to all your focus areas. Nando’s is famously creative, not just in our advertising but our employee benefit programmes, our approach to food innovation, even the sub-copy in our award-winning app is creative. All of these little creative decisions build competitive advantage.
Remember, as a leader, you’re also an adventurer. You can’t be scared of making bold decisions and trying new things. You need to be brave. No matter how hard you worked on a particular solution, there is always a better way to meet your objectives. You just need to put the right heads in the right room to uncover it. Sometimes that means making the difficult choices and sticking by your decision as you boldly venture into new territory.
As part of the human experience, we all have different skills and talents. It’s not wise to pretend you are good at everything because your pride will be your downfall. The same is true with business.
At Nando’s we focus on what we are good at. Our core competency is making chicken and serving this from beautiful restaurants. That’s it. Everything we do is in service to this one mission; to run restaurants brilliantly and change the lives of those we can in doing so.
Know your capabilities and those of your teams so you can collectively harness the best of everybody to get the best out of your business.
