Care Like An Owner
The bulk of the mediocrity, corner cutting and incompetency we experience in this world I feel is mostly down to people not caring. My first real job on a real wage was when I was 16 working in a hotel that had both a restaurant & bar (the Travellers Rest in Kenton, seeing as you asked). The legal age to work in the bar was 18 but there was a loophole that meant you could work in the restaurant bar area at age 16 if you didn’t serve customers directly and just took orders via the restaurant waiting staff only. A quirky loophole but one that I exploited. I’m not sure if the rules have changed in the subsequent 20 plus years.
I wore a freshly ironed shirt and tie, polished my shoes, arrived early and prepared my area. The previous person always left it in a state, because they didn’t care. I learnt all the systems in the place, got to know all the staff and who did what, left late after cleaning my section and helping the others out. I wanted things to run smoothly and I wanted to anticipate what the next issue or challenge would be.
Even though this wasn’t my place, I didn’t own it, I still treated it like it was, for good reasons, owners care. Why is it that some peoples default is to act like an owner and care and other people’s default is to act like a renter and not care? The renter’s mentality is to be avoided at all costs.
Whatever it is that you do, be intentional about caring about what you do. When I started working at the restaurant I had absolutely no idea how to make an Irish Coffee, why would I? But within a few weeks my Irish Coffees were legendary, why, because I cared, I agonised over every step, the perfect milk, temperature of the coffee, the right amount of whiskey, always over generous and presented in the best glass and plate I could find with a clean spoon and sugars on the side.
It hits you when you encounter people who care, because it’s unusual to care these days. Most people do the bare minimum, they tell themselves that they can turn the caring mode on and off when it suits them, I disagree. Caring is a mature skill, the older you get the more you should care. We have to flex our caring muscle all the time and continue to focus on acting like an owner in everything we do.
I do believe that how you do anything is how you do everything.
When you encounter excellence, competence and kindness it’ll usually be from someone who cares. Most companies these days are impossible to get hold of, even when you do get hold of them you’re speaking to the wrong department because their ‘helpful’ automated telephone system is excruciating. When you do speak to a human they often do all they can to add to the problem and do not provide any solutions.
In this business most of us treat clients how we wish to be treated. We want one point of contact, I know there is a movement towards the team approach, however I’m personally not a fan of this. We want one contact, one phone call, one email, there may be a team behind this one contact but we want our contact to take ownership of the issue or concern and then pass this across to other team members and then update us when a solution has been found.
To care like an owner you have to know the tools of the trade and want to be the best at what you do. Continually look at what you do from all angles. Tweaking all the time. Have a solution orientated attitude and not a problem orientated attitude. Learning more and more each day. Incremental gains, which compound greatly over time.
It's wonderful that so many of us are actual owners of the businesses we work in, but even those who aren't shareholders can choose to act like "owners". Owners of the relationships they are managing, the tasks they're being trusted with, and the confidential information we are exposed to. The compounding effect of not caring is misery long term. Here’s to the ones who care like owners.
