The Stages of General Manager Nick Adopting Nobu by fake Larry Chiang

Larry Chiang’s 5th book, WTDTYASBS, launched at a Harvard Law School keynote, so he knows about grand openings (He even attends and promotes the ones he isn’t invited to also). As CEO of Duck9, he leads an army to help college student consumers get a FICO over 770. Post H.L.S. keynote, Harvard Business wrote: “What They Don’t Teach You at Stanford Business School” (his latest Harbus post: “Setting an intention for SXSWi”.

Today we build a charity dog wall at a local bar here in Austin, TX.

We do these things because we learn while businesses get the benefit of more business.

So in this case, we are doing the Brady wall which donates to a puppy charity.

The interesting thing about this experience is the progression of adoption from our initial idea inception to hours after execution.

So here’s the general flow:

• Idea: Let’s do a dog charity wall called the Brady Wall and repurpose a shitty wall at the front lawn of the bar into something people want to hang out at.
• Getting Approval: Mentioning to the GM that we have the dog wall ready to go. To which they responded “Oooh, I can’t wait to see it”
• Installation: We leveraged the construction crew next door to follow safety protocols and ensure that the BRADY sign and other decorations were installed correctly.
• Intrigue: The staff at the bar wanted to know about it. Each one of them absolutely loves the idea.

What happened next:

• The GM comes in the afternoon, while we happen to be there doing other awesome shit to hep the bar (see one of our posts on “Food for Lead Gen” — we used their food to get the bar leads). He ends up taking down the wall for some reason.
• David and I are there so we ask why he was taking it down. This is when we realized that it was maybe confusing that we had executed without hesitation, double-checking for approvals, etc… So we caught the GM Nick up to speed on how much people loved it.
• We even showed him photos of the women that were coming into the bar because they loved it so much:

So what started with a confusing tear-down of quality puppy charity craftsmanship, ended with GM Nick putting the entire wall back up himself (after he & his team taking it down).

On top of that, Nick ordered corn dogs for us to hand out at the front while we were doing food for lead gen. “We want to make sure the food is hot”, was what he said, evolving into an event better form of teamwork.

In closing, you may do things so well that managers get uncomfortable that you are operating in such a great light. When this happens, just reframe on why you’re doing what you’re doing. In our case, when we got pushback from GM Nick, we reminded him that we were doing this to bring more business for him.

P.S. Details matter. Be ready for people to analyze your work under a microscope in cases like this, especially in cases where you are pioneering a legendary improvement like the one above.