1: It was 6 AM, and more than fifty people were standing in line outside the Au Bon Pain bakery cafe in Boston’s Copley Place mall.
“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Ron Shaich writes in his terrific book Know What Matters. “I’d spent months desperately trying to figure out how to get people to stop walking past our door.
“And now, here they were, waiting in line,” he recounts. “I could have stood in the doorway all day, drinking in this incredible sight.”
“Hey man, are you going to let us in or what?” said the man at the front of the line.
“And so,” Ron remembers, “I hurried back behind the counter and started selling sandwiches.”
2: Yesterday, we examined Ron’s “a-ha” moment when a customer asked him to cut the baguette from end-to-end so she could make it into a sandwich.
At the time, Au Bon Pain only sold French bread, pastries, and coffee.
Based on that observation, the small chain of cafes transformed itself and began selling sandwiches, “from a bakery into the American version of a bakery cafe,” Ron writes.
“When you strike gold, you know it,” he shares. “The bakery-café took off like it was the best thing since, well, sliced bread! Every developer in America wanted a French bakery cafe in their mall.
“The world had changed; our once near-bankrupt, broken-down concept was hot again,” he remembers. “We’d hit a sweet spot with our ‘good food fast’ formula.”
So much so that even the “stuffy folks in the Harvard Square Business Association,” which prohibited fast-food retailers, gave Au Bon Pain a permit to operate.
“Our cafe across from Harvard Yard, with its outdoor seating and yellow-checked umbrellas, quickly became our most successful location and was the iconic setting for movies like Good Will Hunting.”
3: Ron believes there are several misconceptions about what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur.
Starting with the belief that capital is an entrepreneur’s most important resource.
It’s not, Ron argues. “Sure, capital matters. But I don’t share the mindset of the classic venture capitalist, with their focus on leveraging capital for maximum return on investment over the shortest period of time.
“To me, entrepreneurs are opportunists, not capitalists.
“In this paradigm, value is created through the ability to see opportunity—to recognize a need and a possible solution before anyone else sees it and then have the courage and creativity to perform that job for a customer. That’s what it means to be an opportunist.”
If we have a distinctive enough business plan, we can find capital. People will invest in us.
“For entrepreneurs, the asset that’s nonrenewable—and therefore far more valuable than capital—is our unique capacity to identify customers’ unspoken needs, to see and seize white spaces in the market that others have missed.”
Misconception #2 is that successful entrepreneurs are risk-takers.
“In fact, we’re risk-averse,” Ron writes. “The swashbuckling entrepreneur of popular imagination is just a myth and rarely succeeds. Real-life entrepreneurs develop the skill of seeing patterns to the point where they’re so confident in the opportunity they see that the greatest risk would be to miss it.
“Venture capitalists see risks as financial,” he observes. “Opportunistic entrepreneurs see risk as missing out on an opportunity to meet a need.”
Misconception #3 is that entrepreneurs are “some kind of novelty-producing geniuses.”
“We don’t create new things so much as we take a wide-angle view of all the ideas and possibilities that we come across,” Ron notes, “edit out 99 percent of them; focus on one bright, promising possibility; and execute against it better than anyone else.
“At the outset, we may not really know what we are looking for,” he shares. “But we recognize it when we see it.
“I knew when I saw that customer making a sandwich that it was significant,” Ron writes. “Entrepreneurs are always on the lookout for moments like that. It’s a never-ending search. Even as we are engaged in some other task or responsibility, we try to ensure that at least a part of our attention remains alert to the first faint signs of an emerging opportunity.”
When Ron and Au Bon Pain struck restaurant gold, his dad told him he should retire to Florida.
“But I wasn’t in it to cash out,” Ron writes. “I was in it for the joy of building a business. And I was just getting started.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Am I making space in my day to notice the unexpected, tuning in to unspoken customer needs that could spark a breakthrough?
Action: Devote extra attention this week to customer interactions—observe, ask questions, and let curiosity guide me to opportunities for true innovation.
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