Have you ever watched Gordan Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmare? If you haven’t, let me tell you a little about it.
It’s one of the most entertaining, & informative shows out there. Kitchen Nightmare revolves around how Gordan Ramsay is helping failing restaurant owners to get them to revive their businesses.
It’s a hilarious show; watching Gordan Ramsay is always a joyride. The show also sheds light on how cut-throat the food industry really is. After watching Kitchen Nightmare (I have stopped complaining about my office workload and politics 😬😬.)
Along with lots of drama, Gordan gives many suggestions, from what food to serve to how to serve many others, but one of the most essential suggestions he gives is first to trim down the menu.
Why Ramsay’s Advice to Trim Your Menu Applies to All Aspects of Life & Business
For a second, think about it. One of the biggest mistakes anyone makes in their life or as an organization is to start focusing and offering too many things. This is one of the sure-shot ways of failing.
In India, a perfect example is the downfall of Videocon.
Where a brand worth 5.5 Billion Dollars crumbled into mere valuation just because they focused on too many things all at the same time. No it was before Covid.
The idea with trimming down is to focus on delivering a few dishes — that are good.
And it makes sense.
If you are a restaurant owner providing 20+ dishes, but generally, your customers are not wowed at the end of each serving, then you are doing something wrong. You don’t want your customers to leave your restaurant feeling like they’ve eaten at a college cafeteria.
Trimming down the menu or offering a few services or products that are worth having makes your customer happy. And delighted customers harbinger success.
Not just Gordan Ramsay alone even Occam Razor also advocates the same strategy.
Save Time & Stand Out
Today, if you are building something, whether it is a business or a skill to sell as a service, you need to be exceptionally great at it. There is no place for mediocracy.
By trimming down and focusing on a few things, you will have time to perfect them and make them more appealing to the customers.
If you look around today, many exceptional brands are doing this. They are focusing on a few things and making them attractive to their customers, which is helping them stand out from the crowd.
For example, rather than starting a digital marketing agency, why not start an SEO-focused agency or Branding-focused agency?
Or rather than becoming a car conglomerate, why not be Tesla?
Today, customers want something that is personalized yet good, and brands that are catering to them are winning the race.
Here are some brands that started by offering a few attractive products that are still killing the market;
- Starbucks
- Mc Donalds
- Netflix
- Boat (Indian Music wear brand)
- Lenskart (Indian Eyewear brand)
- Dollar Shave Club
- Zerodha (Indian trading brand)
If, as a business (or new business), you start offering a few products, it will give you more time to make them better and give exceptional experience to your customers.
The best thing is that as you personalize more and more and offer few but exceptional products, customers will automatically come to you, and soon, you will capture your market share.
It’s a plain, simple age-old strategy.
As you become confident in offering few but best-in-class services, you can any day add new products or services.
In the end, remember the big difference between Michelin-starred restaurants and greasy fast-food chains. One knows what few dishes to add and what to remove, while the other just throws everything on the menu.
