Why doesn’t anyone come to our church?  Why is it so difficult to find a job?  Or as I remember high school, why was it so hard to get a date?!  We begin to think that success is impossible.

I love the TV show Restaurant Impossible.  Chef Robert Irvine comes into a failing restaurant and with two days and ten thousand dollars, he redecorates, makes a new menu, trains the staff, and markets the restaurant.  TWO DAYS!  He changes everything!

There are always the same problems in each restaurant.

• The owners have lost touch with reality.  They blame their problems on external things, like the economy, the staff, or even the customers.
• The owners have lost their passion.  The most exciting part of the work day is getting to go home.
• The owners have stopped leading.  The staff goes any direction they want.
• The customer has become the problem.  Customers only create more work and make the problems look even worse.  Customers are critics.
• The owners have stopped cleaning.  Watching them clean almost every restaurant makes you never want to eat out again.
• Conflict is never resolved.  You can almost guarantee that mad people are walking around the restaurant.
• The owners think the Urgency is to make money.  The urgency can never be about making money.  You can’t make money if that is all you care about.

So what does Robert do?

• He finds someone at the restaurant who loves food.  That may sound really odd, but there has to be somebody who loves to cook and loves the taste of well prepared food.  Often, they have to hire an outside chef but not always.  He rekindles their fire for why they opened a restaurant in the first place.
• He shows them reality.  It often feels really harsh around Robert because he can’t change anything unless the owners see the problem.  Your food is terrible.  If your food wasn’t terrible, people would be here eating your food!  Your restaurant has a bad smell.  You don’t even smell it anymore, do you?
• He brings in outsiders.  At the beginning of every show, he brings in several guests to try the food and experience the service.  The owners need to hear it from several people before they believe the problem is the food.  The regular customers can’t see the problems either.  You have to bring in someone from the outside to show you.
• He trains the staff with exact steps.  This is an important leadership skill that people miss.  According to The Center for Leadership Studies, if a person is unwilling and unable to do a task, you calmly tell them exactly how to do it.  The owner has to step up and lead.  It is lonely at the top.  But you ARE the owner.
• He creates a new atmosphere and menu.  The first three items in my list are coaching.  But this bullet point is genius.  Irvine is a genius, and his decorator (who redesigns the whole restaurant for $10,000) is a genius.  You’re probably not a genius.  Find a genius.  Read books.  Read blogs.  Ask someone for help.  You only need one or two good ideas.

Which area is the most important for you right now — facing reality, renewing passion, or finding some genius?