Fix It
My mother taped a sign to our refrigerator door when I was a teenager. It read: “Complain about anything, but only if you have two possible solutions.” I guess I wore her out! Mom’s sign came to mind as I wrote about the Panera Bread story.
In the 1980s, Ron Shaich partnered with Au Bon Pain to sell their croissants in his cookie store. But as a client, he realized the business was broken. Their products were great, but the company was disorganized: sometimes they delivered, sometimes they didn't. Sometimes they billed him; sometimes, they didn’t. “To this day, I still wonder if I owe them money,” said Shaich.
He saw an opportunity to fix Au Bon Pain. He bought the company. Then he had to fix it.
Shaich says that once he took over Au Bon Pain, he discovered that it was more broken than it appeared. For example, they didn't have a way to remove the water from the frozen spinach they used for spinach croissants. Shaich bought a dozen commercial clothes dryers to run off the water from the frozen spinach. After it defrosted, they put the spinach in a dryer and turned it on, like doing laundry. That worked until the top blew off one of the dryers and spewed spinach throughout his 3,000 square foot production space.
Entrepreneurs have no choice: you just have to fix it.
Jeff Divine is a surfing photography legend. He served as photo editor for Surfer and the Surfer's Journal for 35 years. This image from the 1970s reminds me that there's not much use complaining when stuff breaks. You just have to fix it.
Jeff Divine. From the “Wipeout” series.
It's been so much fun to get to know these artists. Jeff Divine’s book 70s Surf Photographs is a history lesson of surfing and surf photography. Very cool. And, as you can see below, “stuff that breaks” is theme throughout surfing history!
This post is part of a series of entrepreneurial lessons from Panera Bread. Subscribe below for updates as each is released.
