What Business People Can Learn From Cooking

recipeLong time cooks know there are certain things you can do to come up with a great meal. These are lessons that can also make your business great. If you want to build a great business (or life) here are some cooking lessons you need to learn.

  • It all starts with recipe.
    The first thing any cook does with a dish is to learn the recipe. It may start with someone else’s recipe or it may start with trial and error, but the first step is creating the recipe. For businesses that recipe is your operations plan. Figure out what all the steps are to accomplish your task. Write down the plan so you can refer to it. Every task has its recipe.
  • Once you know the recipe you can play with it.
    Once you have the recipe mastered, then you can improve on it. In a recipe an ingredient can be replaced or the type of preparation can be changed to create a new dish but if you don’t have the original recipe mastered you are flying blind with the changes. In business, once you have your operations set you can start to improve them. Your operations plan has to keep everything running smoothly before you can start making changes to improve your business.
  • Ingredients matter.
    No matter how good your recipe is, if you use inferior ingredients the meal will not be as good. Having a great operations plan won’t make a great business if your have poor employees, contractors, or equipment. There are books that state that as long as employees follow the plan everything will work well. This is not true. You need the best ingredients to make the best meal.
  • Little changes have big effects.
    Change the temperature on your oven from 325 degrees to 300 degrees. You have adjust the recipe to compensate. Every change affects the entire meal. Every change you make in your business affects the entire operation. You business is an integrated system and any change will require the rest of system to adapt.
  • When things go wrong it requires a lot of clean up.
    Things go wrong. Maybe you got distracted and didn’t take the pan out of the oven in time. Maybe you used a small pan than you needed and everything overflowed. Whatever the mistake requires clean up. The same goes for business. When you make a mistake, clean up the mess and learn what the mistake was so that it doesn’t happen again.
  • The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
    Every ingredient in the meal may taste good but it doesn’t taste the same as when you put it all together. (My son likes macaroni, he likes cheese, but he loves Mac and Cheese.) Your business works the same way. When everything melds and works together the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. You can accomplish more when all the parts work together than when they are trying to stand out on their own.