Cooking skills are not enough
I wonder if the euro will become the new scapegoat for failure of mismanaged businesses in this new financial year.
Last year gave us foot-and-mouth, BSE and 11 September. Even omitting the last, our dubious business community members needed something other than themselves to blame for their imminent demise.
Nobody wants to take the blame for making fundamental mistakes that lead to their own downfall, so we tend to blame the bigger picture.
Some analysts would say that this is a form of natural business culling that has to take place on a yearly basis in order to rid us all of the deadbeat notions that exist as resource-wasting entities.
Look around you - how many businesses linked to food have failed over the past 18 months? In my opinion, food businesses fail because the managers, whether in the form of chefs, production managers or owners, do not really know what they are letting themselves in for when they adopt this type of business.
They don't understand, because they have never been trained in the complexities of running a business. Technically, their skills may be brilliant, their idea may be the next big thing, but they will fail if they do not realise how volatile the reality is.
All colleges and training institutions should make provision for training their catering students in some form of business economics. At least half of all students trained in bar, service and kitchen skills will be in charge of a team or be approaching management level in a business within five years of starting their training. They may even own their own business.
Our respective governments and training institutions in the UK and Ireland do not do enough to instil the knowledge needed in order to design a business plan.
OK, you could argue that an individual could employ an expert to formulate their business strategy. But I would bet that that expert would still take his or her fees first before offering your enterprise its last rites if it fails.
In my experience of tutoring classes of final-year chefs over the past six years, the only financial training on the course is a very basic food costing and analysis exercise. There isn't even provision for an experienced business tutor to at least speak to students about the pitfalls and responsibilities of owning a business.
So if you're a student reading this and agree with what I say, use your collective influence to ask why you're not being given an opportunity to learn about owning your own business or, at the very least, about managing one for someone else.
Empowerment is the key to success in business. Give the employee a sense of owning a part of your business and watch it grow, instead of believing the only person responsible enough to run it is yourself.
JAMES GRIMES is executive head chef at Clancy's of Cork and director of Premier Event Catering, Ireland.
