Your best product won’t save you
Nobody chooses to do a bad job, but choosing to leave things as they are is still a choice.
A few days ago we went to one of the best restaurants I've been to all year. Stunning setting, warm room, delicious food. Traditional Catalan cooking brought up to date, no fireworks. Just one "but".
We arrived at three, the only slot they had left, and we didn't get the menu (or the water) until quarter to four. When we finally ordered, ten minutes after that, a waitress who couldn't quite follow us and couldn't quite explain herself ran through everything they'd already run out of. We ordered one by one and, when it got to my wife, she asked for a dish the waitress hadn't mentioned. Not only was it off, the waitress told us off, sharply, insisting she'd already said so.
Quite a "but", isn't it?
Two years ago I wrote "The bad habit of bad service" and, ever since, all I've done is confirm that service has stopped mattering to a lot of companies.
The owner will complain that she can't find people, and that the ones who show up aren't professionals. But what about training them herself? I know, everything is expensive and costs have multiplied in recent years, but that shouldn't be an excuse for not training your staff. At the end of the day, that waitress is the public face of the business. And if you think the food will make up for it, think about how many customers quietly stop coming because they can't be sure what they'll get. I'm one of them: whenever I've had to take friends or clients to a restaurant in the area, that one has never crossed my mind, because bad service there is a constant, and constant uncertainty is the last thing you want when you're trying to make a good impression.
Plenty of business owners complain about the shortage of skilled staff. Very few do anything about it. And there is plenty to do, both in the short term and the long one.
Short term: there are clothing brands where every employee spends a few weeks working the shop floor to learn how the business actually runs, office staff included. Others assign an internal mentor to every new hire to guide them through the company. Many run regular free training, often subsidised. In every case, the company has understood that training is part of the cost of hiring, if what you want to pass on is not just know-how but values and culture.
And long term? A while back I decided to work with Fundació Impulsa, which offers grants and mentoring to young people from difficult backgrounds so they can learn the trades companies are looking for. Since then I've recommended that foundation, or others like it, to a lot of my clients, so they can help build the talent they'll need before they find themselves short of it.
Everything has a cost, which is why the restaurant I went to has a choice to make: raise prices and deliver better service, or keep things as they are and live with the consequences.
There's a slogan the Catalan government made popular back in the eighties: "work well done knows no borders; work badly done has no future". I think we need that mindset now more than ever if we want to grow, prosper and leave something behind.
© Oriol López Villena 2026