Originally published on October 18, 2009.
It’s been almost 2 1/2 years away from the corporate world and my urge to produce Power Point presentations has waned considerably. (Waned….but not disappeared. I’m afraid that may never happen. Ever.) But I still love a good debrief, and last week’s “Grand Opening” is as good an excuse as any.
Key learnings:
1. It’s impossible to throw a party in a 320 square foot store during business hours…and actually do any business. I kind of already knew this, but figured to try it anyway. We close at 8.00pm, but decided to start the party at 7.30pm. Because who actually comes to a party on time? Well, to this party…apparently everyone. By 8.00pm, the store was packed (in 320 square feet, packed = 25 people) and we had to physically drag paying customers through the crowd to the cash register. OK, not really, but it was tough to do business during the party. Not a surprise, really, but a good debrief never shies away from stating the obvious.
2. People never use the spit buckets. Not a new learning. Maybe after the 10th time stating this, I’ll just stop putting them out.
3. You can never have enough glasses. Even if you have 50 glasses for 25 people, somehow, you will run out. This appears to be an immutable law of wine physics.
4. A two-tiered wine offering system sounds like the height of snobbery, but it really is a necessity. I’ve always hated the idea that you pour one wine for the special guests and another for the general population. I’ve been to parties where I was actually invited into a storage closet to partake of the good stuff. But when faced with a store full of thirsty people and only one bottle of 1994 Chateau Musar, a two-tiered system becomes less an exercise in snobbery than plain old common sense.
A NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: That Chateau Musar 1994 was really, really good. It was a vintage that had a refermention problem in some bottles. This one, I think had probably done a bit of refermention at some point in it’s 15 year history, but it had worked to its benefit somehow. The wine was almost overtly fruity, even juicy and based on my non-statistically significant sample size of bottles opened, it’s always been a crowd pleaser.
5. People will not leave until you force the issue. Luckily, there are easy ways to do this. 1) Take away the food. 2) Take away the wine. Then, if necessary 3) Turn up the lights and watch the guests scatter like roaches. Voila – party killed in three easy steps.
Debriefing over…next time, perhaps I’ll put together a Power Point presentation.