What Waitressing Taught Me About Being A Kickass Business Owner

I’ve been swamped with design work this year. That has required me to utilize many of the skills I acquired being a waitress for six months after graduating early from high school. For the first three months, I sucked at my waitressing job. The night supervisor Wanda used to get really annoyed with me. I couldn’t seem to wait on more than one table without falling apart, without feeling tremendous pressure. Then she gave me some advice that catapulted me to “best waitress” category: be friendly, listen, constantly circulate through my station of tables, update them on their orders, and never go into the kitchen empty-handed.

When I gave Wanda my notice a month before I left for college she said, “I had decided to fire you! But then you found your waitressing groove.” And groove it was. I sometimes had four gigantic parties of ten sit down within ten minutes of each other, all wanting coffee refill after refill. But I kept them all happy!

I’ve adapted Wanda’s advice to keep myself moving forward with all my design projects. I organize my clients like they’re all seated at imaginary tables. Instead of only focusing on one client and ignoring the others until the first one is done “eating,” I keep moving through the tables making sure everyone has what they ordered, starting with drinks, appetizers, main course, desserts, check. (And I’ve added follow up.)

Be friendly.Too many business owners want to keep their clients at arms length, creating these artificial categories of client and friend. I attract cool clients that I want to get to know. Do you really want to tip a nasty waitress or ask to sit in her section the next time you venture into the restaurant? If you don’t like your clients, you may want to tweak or revamp your brand.

Listen. Take the time to listen to what your clients really need. If you aren’t listening, you’ll waste everybody’s time creating the wrong design. If they tell you they hate brown, don’t create a logo that’s brown (Even if it’s your favorite color :). You’ll just have to add the color redo to your already long list of things to do. Wouldn’t you be annoyed if you ordered Black Raspberry ice cream and got served Frozen Pudding?

Keep them informed. If there is going to be a delay or if I’ve screwed up, I let them know. Why make a client contact me to find out where his or her food (aka design) is? And they WILL call. When you keep folks informed, they won’t get mad at you! (Well, maybe sometimes …)

Stay cool, calm and collected. Once I completely screwed up the page count on a long document. I started to freak myself out, shaking like a leaf and then said, “I’m going to take responsibility for this and call up my client.” I explained what I did, what it would take to fix it and then did so. They are still my client five years later …

Manage my time well. If I’ve got a lot of design projects like I do now, I need to do one thing every day to keep that project on track. Every time I go into my office, I pick up something and go into the design kitchen with it … Better yet, chunk the tasks up. That way you can do the same task for different clients in the same period of time.

Say, have you waited on tables? Any more helpful hints from your days of carrying trays? Please enlighten us. Thanks, G.