Even long-established companies can use startup tactics to stabilize when markets plunge
Sam’s Chowder House, named one of the 100 most-scenic restaurants in America, sits on a bluff overlooking Half Moon Bay. It is a multistory wood building with terraced decks and seating for hundreds. On March 15, the company sent an email to patrons announcing that shelter-in-place policies would be closing the dining room indefinitely. Another email came two weeks later announcing 150 employees had been laid off.
This was personally distressing news for Stefanos Zenios, the Investment Group of Santa Barbara Professor of Entrepreneurship at Stanford GSB and codirector of the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies. Sam’s is one of his favorite Bay Area restaurants, and he was sad to see the establishment suffer.
But from a management perspective, Zenios was more engaged than distressed. He decided that the restaurant’s response in the weeks to follow — offering curbside pick-up options, clearly communicating hygiene precautions, and creating a new online ordering system — exemplified the kind of agile thinking that he discusses with his students in Stanford’s Startup Garage. As best it can, Sam’s Chowder House is working around the economic hole created by the coronavirus pandemic.
“They’re a great case of how companies today need to, and can, be adaptable,” Zenios says. And the world of startups with which he’s so familiar provides a valuable blueprint for reorienting and stabilizing companies when the economy has plunged into such novel territory.
Quickly Define the Problem
Solving a problem requires first understanding it. Managers from different parts of a company, Zenios says, must make time to meet and share, from their distinct vantages, how the pandemic is placing pressure on the business. One manager may be struggling with shifts in consumer behavior, another with problems of supply, a third with fractured partnerships.
This piece originally appeared in Stanford Business Insights from Stanford Graduate School of Business. To receive business ideas and insights from Stanford GSB click here: (To sign up: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/about/emails)