## Metadata - Author: [[Bo Burlingham]] - Full Title: Small Giants - Category: #books ## Highlights - The employees thrived in this atmosphere. Just one of every twelve job applicants was hired. Those who made the cut had the opportunity to experience Sarillo’s “trust-and-track” approach to management, which involved educating employees about what it takes for the company to be successful, then trusting them to act accordingly. He contrasted it with command-and-control, wherein success is the boss’s responsibility and employees do what the boss says. Think of the Navy SEALs versus the National Guard - Take the process of opening and closing the kitchen. In a typical, command-and-control restaurant, a supervisor is responsible for both, has a long checklist of things to be done, and tells everyone what to do. At Nick’s, by contrast, the whole kitchen crew was responsible, and the crew members had an elaborate system to make sure all the different steps were taken every day. That level of responsibility is a lot to expect from young people—almost half of whom were of high school age and 70 percent under twenty-five—in jobs that pay barely minimum wage. But, far from complaining, the team members adored the culture that resulted. “When I come here, I really don’t feel like I’m coming to work,” said server Aubrey Judson, twenty-five. “My boyfriend doesn’t understand it. I just like to be here.” She worked only on weekends, she added, because she had a full-time job at an online advertising agency during the week. And the employees weren’t the only ones who appreciated the way that Sarillo ran his business. “Parents tell me, ‘I don’t know what you did to my kid, but whatever it is, please keep doing it,’” he said. To be sure, no one was more enthusiastic about the culture, the community, and the customer experience than Sarillo himself, and he wanted to share what he’d created with the rest of the world. But he took his time going from one restaurant to two. Everything that made Nick’s special could be lost, he realized, if he tried to grow too fast. He therefore decided to hold off expanding until he had the training programs and management processes that would allow him to create a common culture at multiple restaurants. - In your ignorance, you may borrow more money than your business is capable of paying back. You’ll also become more vulnerable than you realize to unexpected problems. (In Sarillo’s case, it was road construction blocking access to the Elgin restaurant for six prime months of the year.) - He borrowed $800,000 from another local bank to buy land and then raised $1 million from ten investors, took out a $1.2 million loan from the Small Business Administration, and added a construction loan from the bank, bringing the total investment to $4.7 million, of which all but $200,000 was debt. The second Nick’s Pizza & Pub opened for business in April 2004. - In the bureaucracy of growth, you lose your distinctiveness.” - An ESOP is unlikely to do much for a company if it is not combined with some form of participatory management such as The Great Game of Business, the system of open-book management developed by Jack Stack and his colleagues at SRC Holdings Corporation, in Springfield, Missouri. Ownership, after all, is not just about having an equity stake. There are responsibilities that come with it. If employees don’t understand those responsibilities or have the opportunity to act on them, the ESOP is at best a retirement plan for them