Carmen Rossi is the Owner of 8 Hospitality, a restaurant, hospitality development, and management company specializing in food and beverage marketing, branding, promotions, public relations, and operations. Carmen serves on the IRA Board of Directors, and the Finance and Government Relations Committees.

Five Tips for Managing Your Growing Company

by Carmen Rossi 

Having been involved in over a dozen hospitality ventures in five years in highly competitive markets, managing growth can be, in and of itself, a serious challenge if your strategy doesn’t align with your goals. For me, it has never been about becoming a large hospitality company. It is not about getting bigger; it’s about getting better. How can we better manage our growing company and improve our corporate culture and our customers overall experience.
 
Identify Trends in the Community

Whether concentrated in major metropolitan spaces or located in a neighborhood servicing the immediate community, our first conversation is focused on identifying regional needs and trends. When we decide to acquire a property and develop a hospitality concept, we first want to assess what the community wants, and we do this by reaching out directly.

It is important to meet with local government leaders and neighborhood organizations to establish rapport. We do this to gain an understanding of community infrastructure and future development that may be coming online and impact our decision and direction. Investing considerable time and financial resources requires that your strategy contemplate not only those details inside your brick and mortar four walls, but on the community as a whole.
 
Get Educated in Local Governance

Over the last few years, I have invested significant attention and focus on government relations. Admittedly, I had not originally contemplated this when first starting the company. Across the country local governments and municipalities are enacting laws that have considerable impact on daily business practices. As a business owner, your staff and team has to be aware and educated on these laws.

In the business of operating a restaurant, inflation and consumer pricing does not parallel multiple new line item costs like minimum wage, taxes on sugar, paid sick leave, property tax increases, prevailing wage, and employee scheduling policies. It then becomes important to have a channel of dialogue with those legislators to discuss the impact of their laws on the hospitality industry, specifically.
 
Innovate

When I say “innovate,” I am not referring to the desire to change the way we dine and cook food through new and innovative means. Innovation, to me, is about looking at what we do and developing strategies to improve it. We want to translate the ideas we have into an impactful campaign by identifying an emerging theme we wish to present to the market.

If the theme is to reinvigorate the brand, we discuss marketing and how best to grab attention. If we wish to attract new employees or retain current ones, we innovate on plans for incentives and building staff morale. And when it comes to innovation as to our data collection and mining, we develop strategies surrounding social media platforms, share contests, email collection, rewards programs, and bar promotions. We use innovation to translate our brand and our ideas into impactful market campaigns.
 
“Sweat the Small Stuff”

In hospitality, food and beverage services means you have to pay attention to each and every detail. It seems like in today’s world it is not enough to just serve a warm meal and a cold pint. There needs to be more. Our customers have chosen to experience their moment in life with us. So every detail has to be considered and executed, with consistency.

This is not simply a mantra for the business owner; but should be a common theme communicated to the whole team, such that the expectation then becomes singular: providing the best. In focusing on each signal/detail, the entire team will be contributing to exponential growth. This growth hacking will be attained not from directly paying for advertising necessarily, but from evangelizing the most important audience any brand has: its immediate, participating community.
 
Network Intensely

One key theme that has helped in the early stages of venturing into a new market or industry and remains valuable today is to network intensely. Timing and luck both play such large roles in the potential success of a new business. While both timing and luck can be unpredictable (if even accessible), I believe there is no better a way to increase your luck than by knowing and networking with as many people as possible. Short and sweet.