Who is your role model?

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anna_lallerstedtanna_lallerstedtanna_lallerstedtanna_lallerstedtWe all have different role models and maybe more than one depending on which category they are active in. I have been working in the restaurant world for a long time both full time and extra combined with school. It is a profession that I both love and hate, but always will be close to my heart, it is a way of living. One of my role models in this line of work is Anna Lallerstedt, who recently took over after her father Erik Lallerstedt.

The reason why I admire her is not only because she is running three restaurants, Eriks Bakficka, Gondolen and Eriks vinbar, with an attitude that is both driven, humble and good against the employees, but she also tries to improve the whole profession. The restaurant world has a bad reputation, and a lot of people think that it is just something you do for extra income or that you are not good enough to do something else. I have experienced this first hand. Often guests asks what I do other than work in a restaurant, if I reply; this is what I do, the response from the guest often is; “oh!” with a negative vibe, and they stare down in the table. But if I say; “I am studying”, they get impressed right away and becomes really chatty.

What Anna is trying to do is show that you can work in the restaurant business and still have a family, improve and advance in the business even though you do not work “ordinary hours”. She is the first employer that has implemented a kind of certificate, “gesäll brev”,  that shows your skills and knowledge, so you actually can prove that you know what you say you know. I believe this is the first step in giving the business a better reputation. Anna is not only a entrepreneur in the aspect of running three restaurants, but also in the aspect of the progress the whole business taking a positive direction. And I have not even mentioned that she is a woman in a man dominated trade, she dedicates money to charity and is nominated to “Restauranteur of the year 2016”.
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So, who is your role model?

19@19 startup event with SUP46

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Hi everybody!

Last night I was attending 19@19 for the first time. The name comes from the idea of having it at 19:00 the 19th every month. So this is an ongoing event that frequently allows people with a common interest, entrepreneurship. During the events they invite different guest speakers to speak about their visions as well as allowing you to mingle and interact with new people.capture

During this event the guest speaker, Per Clingweld, who is an innovator and value based leader, currently working at “Nova” and “Just Arrived”.
He spoke about ideas and their importance, people and the purpose of having a good team and the evolution of technology and what kind of effect that has had on people and their innovations. He also talked about how to take an idea from just the idea, to actually fulfilling the idea. With various examples, quotes and polls he showed that it’s not just the idea that is important in succeeding as an entrepreneur. It’s also a matter of executing it correctly. As someone mentioned during the event, “It’s 10% idea, and 90% execution”, which to me sounds true.capture4

 

Per mentioned a truck manufacturer that managed to make $680 million with a 20%+ profit in just six months with a team of 80 people. The core of this team were members of the google car project and took the idea further to implement a similar idea in a more industrial perspective. So they developed the self driving truck. And this proves that with the right people, you are able to produce tremendous results by executing it in the proper way.capture3

But remember, you should not sit on an idea for too long. Go out there, interact with new people in order to find the people that can help you execute your idea in the perfect way. So prepare yourself and go to the next startup meeting at 19@19.capture2

An example of innovative development of an old product

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Thinking of innovation gives me thoughts about developing new products or services based on recent inventions or discoveries. Unfortunately that makes one forget about other opportunities to innovate something old that already exists on a “mature” market like developing new ways to offer, manufacture or advertise an ancient product. That kind of innovation is something that Mackmyra, a Swedish brand of whiskey has developed and based their business model on. The company is blooming and is noted on OMX Large cap and has today a stock market value of 105 MSEK. The business model is “low tech” but still pretty innovative in my opinion…

The company offers whiskey slightly above the price of an average bottle of “water of life” to customers sold in stores and they also sell larger amounts of whiskey in casks to restaurants and bars. BUT, the innovative side of Mackmyra is that they offer undeveloped whiskey in casks to private customers, which means that anyone can buy their own barrel of whiskey and have it aged in Mackmyras storage until it is finished i.e. aged correctly. In this way they differ from other liquor companies on the Swedish market because of their way of selling a product. This could be a great business opportunity as they offer a product combined with a service that provides great customer value. This makes the product much more of an experience as you get the benefits of being a whiskey maker without having to invest a lot of money. -You get to choose the characteristics of your whiskey, you will own the product during the time its aging and you will be able to treat yourself and your friends with hopefully great whiskey when the time is ready. This is an innovative approach of selling whiskey and I’m not sure if this is innovation in its true form, but since it is revolutionizing for the Swedish whiskey industry I would at least say that this business model really is innovative.

Do you have any examples of something similar in terms of ideas and innovation for traditional markets, or do you oppose my opinion regarding the innovativeness of Mackmyra..?

My entrepreneur experience

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My interest for entrepreneurship goes way back – it probably all began with my father. My father is working in a bank, where medium sized companies will contact him asking whether they can lent money from the bank or not. Because of his job he had a lot of experience about how the financial part of a company should work or be arranged and was daily in contact with different companies. I remember the days where my father would come home from his job and tell us about the exciting ideas he had been presented for doing his working hours. His technical understanding about the companies and their products was not great, when i think about it now, but it didn’t matter at all for me and my brother at that time. We just thought i was cool to make your own money by selling something you had figured out yourself and we decided that one day we should do that.

“It’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen.”  
Scott Belsky, co-founder of Behance

My parents have a house on the countryside with a big garden. A nearby crossroad splits the main road into to smaller roads, where one of them is running in front of our house and the other one leads to the sea. In that garden grows some very large cherry trees, there annually grows more cherries than we can eat no matter how much you are trying. It mean also that the birds had a annually feast every summer, but for us it was frustrating to see all the cherries getting eaten.  

So one day my father had the idea, that we should pick a lot of cherries, weight and pack them in small plastic bags and make a small stand at the crossroad, so people who was going to the beach easily could grab a bag with them. They money we earned from the selling could my brother and i keep, as long as we made sure that the business was running.

And so it went on all summer. My father on a ladder picking cherries and fighting with the birds about how the berries actually belonged to, and my brother and I on our bikes driving in pendulum speed between our house and our stand, always curious about how much money we have earned since the last time we had been at the stand. We didn’t think about price regulering, bigger signs, competition or any thing, which belonged in the “adult’s way of making money”. We had fun running our own business. We earned about 100 euros that summer which doesn’t sound like a lot, but for two boy in the age between 10 and 12 it was a fortune, and more important than the actually profit; it was money we had earned ourselves.