This is the 2nd post in the NON-MBA blog series. You can see the full collection at The NON-MBA.
If you haven’t seen Jon Favreau’s new film “Chef” yet, I highly encourage you to do so.
He plays a chef from Los Angeles and at one point he’s teaching his 10 year old son how to make Cuban sandwiches that they’re giving away to people on the street.
He goes into detail about how it’s important to wait until the cheese is ever-so-slightly melted and that the bread is golden brown. If it’s undercooked then the cheese won’t be melted correctly. If it’s overcooked then the bread will be burned.
It needs to be just right.
After he’s done explaining this, he goes back to doing other things while glancing over every so often to make sure his son is doing it correctly. At one point, the chef looks down and sees that one of the sandwiches is burned.
He quickly says to his son,”Oh. That one’s burned – just throw it away and make a new one.”
His son replies,”But why? They’re not paying for them.”
He immediately stops what he’s doing and tells his son to follow him outside. He explains to his son that he cares about the food that he creates. That through food, he’s able to touch people’s lives. That it’s not about whether or not the person paid $100 or if they paid nothing at all, he refuses to serve anything other than his best.
He refused to sell a product that he didn’t care about.
You need to believe in your product. Quality needs to be placed above all else. Lots of people can sell products that they don’t truly believe in (or to people that don’t really need them), but this is a short-term strategy that’s doomed to fail.