Of The E-Myth Revisited

Last December I read a book called the "E-Myth". The title is a little misleading. Many might think it is to do with Email or the electronic world and why it is not up to what it is generally thought to be. But it is actually to do with entrepreneurship and how most of business people continue to get it wrong big time.

The author argues that every entrepreneur should start and develop a business like he or she plans to franchise it. Only then will they create the distance from the day to day activity that will allow them to grow it and expand.

He gives some great examples in his book and looks closely at how McDonalds works its franchise system and how so much of it is done exactly the same throughout the world.

Today, we have a consultant coming into Legal-Island to help us draft workflow processes and begin to put into practice much of the advice dished out in the E-Myth.

Of The Dolce Vita

 I've just spent a cracker of a holiday in Lake Como and I mean a cracker. Beautiful weather, lovely location and scenery and great company.
Now back to porridge. In Antrim. I mean, how difficult can it be?

 

Of Super Mario

I've just had a glorious 12 days in Lake Como, Italy. One of the highlights of this magical place is a little gem of a restaurant called "II Cavatappi" hidden away in the back streets of Varenna about an hour from Milan. It's run by a little gem of a man called Mario. His restaurant contains just five tables and we were lucky enough to get one of them one evening.
The night we were there Mario was doing everything. He would do the "meet n greet" then take the order, then nip into the kitchen prepare your food and serve it with the sort of tender loving care that money just can't buy.

This was Italian cooking at it's very best. Simple food done really well in oils that caused an explosion of taste to linger in your mouth long after the food had gone down.
It's great food like this that makes Varenna and indeed Italy oh and, of course, the distinct lack of restaurants and cafes with signs that say "Full English Breakfast Served here".

Of The Big Girls in the Big Time

I attended the Women's Weightlifting final at the London Olympics yesterday and what a fantastic contest it proved to be. It was the battle of the giants. Zhou Lulu against the Russian Tatiana Kashirina.
The latter opened boldly by starting at a weight that would be a new Olympic record if lifted. And it was. Kashirina then lifted a full 6 kilos more than she's ever put above her head in her life for a new snatch world record at 153 kilos. You'd think this would be enough secure her gold but it wasn't. Lulu came back in the clean and jerk with a new world record of her own making her queen of the weights big style.
These women were lifting almost twice their body weight and they aren't light. Astonishing stuff.

Of The London Olympics

I attended the London Olympics yesterday. It was the ladies' volleyball at Earls Court. I saw two matches in the morning : Algeria v. Japan and China v. Serbia.
It was a long way to travel for just two matches so I decided to try to get tickets for the afternoon games as well. I queued up at the ticket kiosk only to be told that tickets were only available online. So I tapped out carefully on my Iphone all the details required to set up an account only to find that there no tickets for sale. Strangely, the web site said there were no tickets available for the morning session too despite the fact that the hall was only half full. What's really happening with these ticket sales is a complete mystery to me.
The matches were good. I've never really taken an interest in volleyball before so it was interesting to see something new and largely unknown to me.
Each team seemed to consist of very thin ladies on stilts so long and thin were their legs all except one who is rather small. She seems to spend most of her time on the floor retrieving smashes with just about any part of her anatomy that would keep the ball off the ground.
What I found mildly irritating was the habit of every player to high five or at least touch another 2 players after each point whether the point had been won or lost.
Watching the beach volley ball today on T.V it seems the habit is even worse. After each point they high five, they hug, then tap each other! I wonder if they do that sort of thing in mixed volleyball too? I can't imagine us British partaking in all that physical contact - a frightfully unBritish thing to do I would have thought....

Of Borscht - the First and the Last of It

I made some borscht last night for tea. Borscht is commonly thought to be a Russian soup but it is in fact Ukrainian though the Russians like a lot of it too. It consists of spring onions, vegetable stock, creme fresh, seasoning and an awful lot of beetroot.Oh and you can float a halved boiled egg in it too if you fancy it which I did courtesy of "the girls" of course.
The first time I ever tried borscht was in a hotel in what was then called Leningrad in the early 80s. I had asked the waiter for pepper but for some reason he served me a vodka. Shortly, afterwards I thought he asked me if I enjoyed the soup so I reply "Da, Da" but clearly he had asked me if I wanted another vodka because one then another duly arrived. I don't seem to remember much about what happened after that. It's strange what effect a bowl of soup can have on you isn't it?

Of Rain Lots of Rain

I peeped through the blinds this morning thinking surely it can't be raining still but I was wrong. It was. I checked my weather app which assured me that it would be raining for most of today and indeed the week ahead too. As if to rub it in, my app informed me that London, Dartmouth, Seaton, Helsinki and Moscow are all expecting sunshine today.
Apparently, the Irish RTE weather man has just resigned on grounds of stress. He says it was just too hard being blamed all the time for the bad weather. He claimed that some of the remarks he got from viewers were just damn right abusive.
So how do we take comfort in all of this and find something positive to take away with us? Perhaps the answer is in the old Irish saying "we have better quality rain than anywhere else in the world"!