Will Guidara built Eleven Madison Park in New York City into the number one rated restaurant in the world. Eleven Madison Park not only served innovative, out-of-this-world, delicious, multicourse tasting menus that were the dreams of foodies across the globe, the restaurant was also stunningly beautiful. Eleven Madison Park was always ranked in the top 50 world restaurants, however it did not reach number until it started serving hotdogs.
Would you like to be happier? Who would answer no? Happiness makes you perform better, feel better and to better enjoy life. Some people may believe others are predisposed to look at the glass overflowing rather than half full or half empty. It’s not realistic to believe you should be happy all of the time, writes University of Texas professor of Psychology, Human Dimensions of Organizations and Marketing Art Markman. However, Markman offers guidance on how you can lift your spirits and raise your happiness quotient.
Charlie Brown said, “Potential is man’s greatest burden.” Charles Shultz’ insight also is applicable to kitchen and bath showroom owners whose fundamental roles include putting their team members in the best position to succeed. Top performers are not necessarily those with the most experience or highest credentials. The rainmakers in organizations are those team members with the ability to learn and grow faster than their peers, writes Robert Glazer in his new book, Elevate Your Team: Empower Your Team To Reach Their Full Potential and Build a Business That Builds Leaders.
Buzz readers who are a bit more senior or fans of older movies may remember the famous line in Cool Hand Luke where a prison guard tells a rebellious, sarcastic inmate played by Paul Newman, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” The inability to get a message across is not confined to movies. It occurs every day in showrooms and other businesses.
How many times have you thought, if only I had more time? As John Doerr points out in his best-selling book, Measure What Matters, every time you elect to do one thing, you are simultaneously choosing not to do something else. For kitchen and bath showroom owners there may not be anything more important than choosing where you spend your time. How can you make the best decisions? Take five minutes every morning and write down everything that you are thinking about, advises Donna McGeorge author of The 1-Day Refund: Take Back Time, Spend it Wisely. Documenting what you are thinking about adds clarity to your day and lets you focus on the ideas and tasks that are most important.
Jonah Berger is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of several New York Times bestselling books on social influence, word of mouth marketing, consumer behavior and how and why products, ideas and behaviors catch on. His latest tribe, Magic Words: What to Say to Get Your Way offers guidance on selecting the right words to get what you want.
There have been voluminous works published on the changing nature of consumer behavior. Today’s kitchen and bath showroom clients are not renovating their kitchens bathrooms or building new homes to impress neighbors. The primary emotional driver of the decision to redo a kitchen, bath or build a new one is to become happier. Happiness is not the byproduct of what someone buys. Instead, it stems from experiences or what people do, and turning a kitchen into the epicenter of the home or a primary bath into a personal retreat is an attempt to live a happier and more rewarding lifestyle.
It’s been an amazing run for many kitchen and bath showrooms with unprecedented demand and unimaginable challenges from supply chain shortcomings, quality control lapses and difficulty in attracting and retaining best-in-class team members. Many showrooms have been running at an unprecedented pace. As one showroom owner related, “Last year was the best year in the history of our company. I never want another one like it again.” One lesson that the last several years has taught us is that going full speed ahead all of the time has a downside. It increases stress and fatigue and erodes your ability to think clearly. Donna McGeorge, author of The 25-Minute Meeting: Half the Time, Double the Impact claims that your brain will function better and more productively if you build in more downtime. To achieve peak performance, you need to be engaged, happy and relaxed. She recommends the following techniques to improve productivity and performance.
Michael Lewis’ (of Liar’s Poker and Money Ball fame) book Flash Boys explains how companies use mathematical algorithms and stock market analysis to gain competitive advantages that enable them to analyze the movement of a stock and then they cut in line to buy the stock at a lesser cost or run the numbers up after buying it. They do this by optimizing the speed in which their purchases are processed. There are 11 different centers where stock purchases are processed, and these guys know which orders arrive faster than the others. Their buys, sells and profits are garnered within milliseconds.
John Burns Real Estate has published a recent trends report on the state of the kitchen and bath industry which historically has served as a bellwether for home improvement. JBRE, which will be presenting a new market update at the 2023 BKBG Annual Conference, found three green lights, two yellow lights and two red lights for the kitchen and bath market.
