Measurable waste
During these lockdown waves, some of the businesses I’ve felt sorriest for are small owner-run food outlets: cafes, lunch spots, restaurants, bars. In pre-COVID times, they could estimate with some accuracy how many avocado toasts they’d sell each Monday. This meant they could keep waste — and costs of spoilage — low.
Now though, the variability is huge. Wade is the owner of one local cafe, Sullivan, He told me that some days during lockdown, they’re abysmally quiet, while on others they’re run off their feet and sell out. Worst of all it’s unpredictable. So, what to do with the food waste?
Wade and others in my area have signed up for Cirque du Soil. No, it’s not a typo - it’s an innovative circular economy business where hospitality businesses pay a modest fee to have organic waste (food ingredients, bones, oyster shells, even paper) collected. Then, CdS uses a proprietary method of converting this into useable high nutrient soil, in just 24 hours.
But, one side benefit of all this, Wade says, is that the system compels them to measure their waste, as it’s paid for by the bucket, on subscription. After all, every kilogram of waste in those buckets are inputs that Wade has paid for, so it’s heightened their awareness of what they’re buying, and what they’re throwing away.
Question: Do you know how much waste costs in your organisation?
3 Questions
Here’s a short one. I’ve just ticked over 22 years as a management consultant and I reflected that I could almost run my business by asking just three questions.
In case you want to use them, be my guest. Here they are:
Why?
How do you know?
By what criteria?
That’s it. Now, there’s more to strategy, or leadership, or change, than those three questions. But, you can’t do strategy, or leadership, or change, without those questions.
Question: What are the three most powerful questions in your business?
Audacious goals
In Australia and New Zealand we have famously generated much of our vast wealth from the land. Even today, 75% of our export value is from mining and agricultural products. But, our third is technology.
And, Michael Blatko and his partners at Startmate (which include the founders of Atlassian) have some audacious goals to make tech overtake even mining. Their goal is nothing short of AUS / NZ being countries where startups generate the majority of GDP.
They want to build a million-person startup city: yes, bricks and mortar. They want to educate 20% of all tech workers, including a disproportionate number of women. And, they want to seed thousands of early-stage startups (they already have done so for 170 startups, with market capitalisation of over $2b).
You can read about it here.
If nothing else, their vision provides an exemplar of how to think without constraints, yet realistically; and how to consider significant success ‘just the start’ of something much bigger.
Question: Which of your goals need to be more audacious?
It would mean a lot to me if you clicked the ‘heart’ link to say you’ve got all the way to the bottom — and enjoyed reading.
I hope you do something audacious this weekend — and I’ll see you next Friday.
Andrew
Great to have this positive message on a Friday
Congrats on 22 years Andrew. Over 50% of your working life! Would be interesting to note how many milestones have occurred in that time.