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Unlike the previous two installments of Businesses I Like, this one isn’t inspired by a specific recent experience but rather by a continuous positive impression over time.

I’ve always liked Chipotle Mexican Grill. Their food is tasty and fresh, reasonably inexpensive, and very filling. Their restaurants are clean and slick-looking, and they seem like a good company with a commitment to the environment and a sense of humor.

What I really like about Chipotle, though, is how earnestly they’ve taken to heart a simple truth: you can’t be good at everything. This is a lesson that every human being comes to understand at some point in his or her life, yet somehow, when these enlightened humans come together to form a business, the whole manages to be dumber than the sum of its parts. Stories abound of businesses that failed because they tried to be all things to all people, and today we interact with businesses all the time that seem to do everything under the sun but nothing well. These businesses feature devilishly complicated product and service offerings in the name of diversity or completeness, leaving the customer to wonder what exactly these companies are good at, if anything.

Chipotle is exactly the opposite. For all intents and purposes, they make one product. Sure, there are a bunch of variations — burrito? taco? bowl? — but everything on their menu is a combination of a relatively small number of ingredients. The customer only has to make a few choices in succession to get from the front of the line to the register.

You can tell that Chipotle realizes what a huge differentiator this is by looking up at their menu. The font size of the text on that menu must be five times the fast food industry average — it’s like they are saying to you, “this is supposed to be easy.” Just make a few simple decisions, and when you’re finished, there’s no waiting — you have your food!

There are a lot of advantages on Chipotle’s side, too. First of all, their inventory is much easier to manage because it contains such a small set of ingredients. Quality assurance is correspondingly simpler. Employee training is easier and faster, because there are relatively few different tasks that one needs to learn to become a fully effective Chipotle employee.

Moreover, similar to Subway, structuring the ordering process as a series of steps rather than a single ordering event followed by a wait for your food serves to pipeline the ordering process. The impact of this pipelining is that it increases the restaurant’s throughput — the number of customers it can serve per unit time — and also reduces the customer’s perceived latency — his wait time — since his food is ready for him as soon as he gets to the end of the line to pay. All this makes for greater revenues and happier customers.

Above all, the simple fact is that if you only do one thing, it is very easy to do it extremely well. This benefits Chipotle, because they can minimize the effort required to achieve their desired result, and it benefits you and me, because we can feel confident that we’ll get great food every time we set foot in any of their restaurants.

And to think this place used to be majority-owned by McDonald’s!

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What food service businesses (large or small) do you like? Chime in with a comment!

This evening, I attended a BASES mentorship banquet at the W Silicon Valley hotel in Newark. The W is Starwood’s contemporary, youth-focused brand; the atmosphere in the hotel was trendy and chic.

Despite the yuppie overtones, I had a fantastic experience in this hotel. It may seem silly to praise it when I didn’t actually stay the night there, but I am a firm believer in first impressions, and these were praiseworthy indeed.

The event began with appetizers; fruit and cheese plates were laid out, and the banquet service staff circulated throughout the room bearing hors d’oeuvres. As one server offered me ceviche, crab cakes, and chicken saté, I had to decline repeatedly; as most of you know, I am a fairly strict vegetarian. I was more or less resigned, therefore, to filling up on fruit, cheese, and bread.

Moments later, however, the same server returned with a new plate, tapped me on the shoulder, and said, “Sir, you’re vegetarian, right? Here we have some spanakopita you might like.”

I was shocked. At no time had I ever expressed any specific dietary preference to this woman; I had simply declined each of the items she presented. She guessed from my choices, my continued consumption of other items, and probably my ethnicity that I was likely to be a vegetarian. While this may not seem to be an extraordinary logical leap, the fact that this server made the effort to deduce my preference and came and found me in a crowded room was extraordinary indeed.

Not much later, we discovered that they were serving Chinese food for our group in the next room. Though there were no formal place settings, it seemed to be dinner, so I decided to check it out. I asked the sous chef, Adam: “could you tell me which items here are vegetarian?” Predictably, he pointed to the spring rolls…and only the spring rolls.

What happened next surprised me. “I’m sorry about that,” Adam offered. “But you know what? I’ve got a fresh pan down here that hasn’t touched any meat, some veggies and some sauce — I can sauté them up for you in just a minute.” I was very impressed by his offer and graciously accepted, pledging to return in a few minutes.

That alone would have been enough, but this thoughtful sous chef had more in store for me. I came back as promised, and he said to me, “I have a surprise for you.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, I went in the back and pan-fried some tofu for you. I’ll throw that in with the veggies and you’ll have a nice, hot dinner.”

I thanked Adam multiple times, and I meant it. In twenty-one years I have never once encountered people who were so eager to accommodate my dietary preferences. The W staff really outdid themselves.
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In a business, culture is everything. I don’t have to stay the night at this hotel to know that it would be a phenomenal experience (assuming I could afford it). I feel confident in saying that the courtesy and go-the-extra-mile attitude of the staff members I interacted with today were indicative of a pervasive approach to running this hotel shared by all employees. Their creativity and proactivity are worthy of emulation by any customer-facing business.

The people I met understood that finding any way possible to make the customer happy isn’t just being nice, it’s forming a lasting relationship that has real economic value. Kudos to the W Silicon Valley for remembering that service really does matter.

A few days ago, I used StubHub (www.stubhub.com) to purchase tickets to tonight’s Golden State Warriors game (which was, by the way, a lot of fun, despite the disappointment of the loss). StubHub is an online marketplace for tickets to live entertainment events (such as concerts and sporting events). You can think of it as a ticket-specific eBay or Craigslist — an appropriate analogy, given that eBay acquired the company in January — except that you obtain your purchased tickets directly from StubHub, who obtains them electronically from the seller.

During the course of this transaction, I interacted with a few different representatives of StubHub. The first two interactions were by telephone, and they were fantastic: the people I talked to were courteous, straightforward, and helpful. Before clicking “Buy”, I had to find out if I could avoid the stated requirement that I have the purchasing credit card physically present when I picked up the tickets I was ordering, because I was using my mom’s card. Instead of hiding behind inflexible rules and treating me like an idiot as many companies would, the representative simply told me, “yeah, we understand that requirement isn’t very realistic these days, so our pickup centers generally don’t enforce it, but if you like, we can send an email to the center to guarantee that you won’t need to present the credit card at the time of pickup.” Not only did he acknowledge that I had a legitimate concern and say that the company had already thought about it, but he also offered me the opportunity to take further action to address it, just to give me an added sense of security. That made me feel great about using StubHub to buy the tickets, so I went ahead and placed the order.

Then, when I called back this morning to ask them to send that email, I explained my situation to a new representative. Instead of forcing me to step through a frustrating list of irrelevant questions (as so many call centers do these days) just to get up to speed, she quickly understood exactly what I wanted and offered to complete the request immediately. She knew precisely what her company’s policies were and what another representative would have told me, and she was able to act on her own authority to give me what I wanted. I had been expecting this second call to require me to explain myself several times (“I’m sorry, sir, I’m not sure what another representative may have told you, but I can’t do what you’re asking”), and when it didn’t, I was so shocked that I actually told the woman I was speaking with, “By the way, you guys have great customer service.” That’s something I never do.

Finally, when I picked up my tickets at a hotel near the Oracle Arena, everything was silky smooth. I just walked in, showed my driver’s license, and the woman handed me an envelope with our tickets, assuring me that I was all set. The whole thing took less than sixty seconds.

This all might seem pretty straightforward, but these days, interacting with businesses is often anything but. As a result, basic customer service has become something to write about instead of something to expect as a matter of course. For some reason, most businesses seem to think that when I present them with a problem, I want them to restate the problem, or even better, tell me about new problems I didn’t even know about. Here’s a hint: when your customer has a problem, give him a solution. He doesn’t want problems or excuses, only solutions. People and companies who are solution-oriented instead of problem-oriented will always do a better job of delivering what their customers want.

It seems so simple to me. Companies these days think their business is about them. It is not. It is about their customers. When a rep tells you that your perfectly logical request is “impossible” or “not how it works”, what he is really saying is, “I work for a company whose culture encourages us to think about our problems first and your needs second.” Companies like StubHub, on the other hand, understand the simple truth that it doesn’t matter what you do if your customer is not happy with it. And if you do make your customer happy, he will be your customer again. That’s not naive philosophy or head-in-the-sand silliness; it’s straight-up good business.

When I first saw what I was paying for my Warriors tickets – a 10% commission plus a $15 handling fee, on top of the price the seller was demanding – my gut reaction was anger. “Greedy bastards!” I thought. After going through the process, I believe it was worth every penny. I didn’t have to talk to drones with fake names in international call centers; I talked to real people who treated me like a real person with a real name, and when I had a problem, they gave me an easy solution that ensured that I would give them my business.

That kind of service costs money, and I’m willing to pay for it, every single time.