Want to hear some of Gordon Ramsay’s success lessons?
Ramsay is known for not taking any sh*t when it comes to his restaurant businesses. If someone’s not performing as well as they should be, then he will speak his mind and get them back on task.
There’s a reason why Gordon Ramsay is so successful in his line of work. He does not take no for an answer and knows exactly what he wants from people.
Gordon Ramsay’s Success Lessons
Obviously most of the below have been applied to cooking and restaurant owning, but these are 10 success lessons from Gordon Ramsay that you just can’t ignore.
1. Don’t Be Too Clever
Okay look, we know you’re clever and you have a lot to offer, but trying to be too clever at something so simple can end up ruining things.
Gordon Ramsay explained this when he was talking about food dishes. Trying to add loads of clever touches at the end can ruin a dish.
If you’re a blogger, you’ll probably want to try and add every snazzy widget you can and make the site look as busy as possible.
This is actually quite counter productive. Just stick to the simplistic look of blogs such a ProBlogger.net and it’ll help people focus on your content more.
2. Know Your Market
Gordon Ramsay says you have to know the market that you’re appealing to. For the restaurant example, if you are opening a business in an area of people that love one food, and you’re offering them another, you’re not going to be as popular.
Know your market and what your customers want, and then use this to produce products that you can tell them they will want! This is the exact strategy that Apple have used with the IPod and it worked beautifully.
3. Ask for Help When you Need it
There’s no point in not asking for help either because you’re too stubborn or too shy to do so. Even if you tell yourself you have all the answers, believe me you don’t.
There are plenty of people out there you have done what you’re now doing, or will be doing it now.
Ask them any questions you have and answer any that they might ask you, help each other out.
In the business world, you should be working as a team to help each other and increase your productivity. If you’re stuck but don’t want to ask anyone, be prepared to be stuck for a lot longer.
4. Believe in What you are Doing. Find your Bollocks.
We talk about this so often, as said in 50 Cent’s and Richard Branson’s rules for success. You need to believe in yourself and push yourself. Don’t just constantly doubt your ideas and your thoughts, have the balls to pursue them.
I don’t know how you can expect to succeed in what you’re doing if you don’t have the guts to be able to actually believe you can become successful and to actually do what it takes to get there.
5. Don’t be Afraid to Talk to People
This sort of ties in with the ask for help part, but you should still be willing to talk to people, whether it be your employees, fellow businesses in your niche and so on.
Networking is a big thing and if you’re not putting yourself out there then how do you expect to be heard and noticed by others. After all, that is how you become successful right?
6. Quality Can Never be Compromised
You should never rush anything just to get it done, or move forward with something when you know it’s not good enough. You don’t win any medals for ‘nearly amazing’. Either what you’re offering is amazing, or it’s not good enough to be amazing.
Not being too concerned with consistently high quality, is where mistakes are made and people are left less satisfied, or even unsatisfied all together. Take the time to do the job properly, or do it again until you get it right.
7. Always Be Getting Better
If you’re not improving then what the hell are you doing?
Just waiting for things to start getting better? Always try and improve yourself and get better at what you are doing. It’s how your business will be able to grow and will mean that you’re able to keep up with any changes in the environment around you.
8. Always Communicate
What’s a business without communication?
Especially when it comes to a team of cooks working in a high profile restaurant. If you didn’t have good communication with those around you, you’d get absolutely slaughtered.
Remember this as it’s incredibly important. Keeping up the level of communication means that you’re always kept in the loop and that you’re always aware of what’s going on around you.
9. Don’t Get Too Ambitious for Your Skills
Again, keep everything nice and simple. If you start to get a little bit too ambitious for a business of your size, you’ll end up spreading yourself out and not be able to keep up a good relative audience.
A good example of this is where you may start to promote a website on various Social Media accounts. Let’s say a Facebook page, a twitter account and a Pinterest wall.
If you just start with one and build on this, you’ll be spending a lot more time on it, become better and marketing with it and be able to build a larger, more engaged audience.
If however, you try to split your time between the three, you might just lose any engagement with your audience and end up sucking at all of them. Nobody wants that.
10. Addition by Subtraction
My economics teacher in sixth form was the first to teach me about the law of diminishing returns, where by as you hire more employees the total output of work will increase until you hire one too many, and they get in each other’s way and productivity starts to drop.
Gordon Ramsay uses the same rule. If you have an employee who’s not able to contribute enough to the job and ends up lowering the businesses productivity, get rid of them, lower your costs and increase your profits.
Summary
Here’s a quick recap of Gordon Ramsay’s success lessons:
- Don’t be too clever
- Know your market
- Ask for help when you need it
- Believe in what you are doing. Find your bollocks
- Don’t be afraid to talk to people
- Quality can never be compromised
- Always be getting better
- Always communicate
- Don’t get too ambitious for your skills
- Addition by subtraction