Interviews: Complete

I finished what I believe will be last interview today with Andrea and Pony Morrell (Pasta Wench and Andrea's Organics). This was an interesting interview as I had the pleasure of sitting down with both of them simultaneously. Although we talked a lot about what they had done individually, they have been running businesses together for over 20 years, so we talked a lot about what they had done together. Honestly, we just did a lot of talking in general. I couldn't believe it when I saw what time it was when I was leaving. Not only had we been talking for over two hours, I had over twelve pages of notes from the interview. This was probably my most successful interview. This was largely due to the fact that they had lots of experience to draw upon and hence had lots of interesting insights. Additionally, at this point I've gotten a lot better at helping the people I'm interviewing understand what I'm looking for out of the interview. With this one in particular I let them know at the beginning that I was basically interested in their story, and that I had some questions to supplement it (i.e. best decision, regrets, advice, etc...). Fortunately our discussion hit a nice flow and we were able to answer most of my questions without actually having to ask them.

At this point I'm remembering that I'm pretty awful at keeping up with this blog, so I haven't even mentioned the other two interviews (Mike Nelson of Hob Nob and Jim Latendresse of High Country Mac). Mike has been my boss for nearly 4 years so we've already talked a lot about these sorts of things. For this reason our interview was a bit more casual. Regardless, it went quite well. Additionally, the interview I had with Jim went way better than I expected. I was a bit skeptical about interviewing him since he has no experience within the restaurant industry, but I decided he fit the description of "self-made individual" and that was reason enough. Furthermore, we have a weekly chess game and have had some insightful talks, so I imagined he might be a good person to talk to. My hunch was correct. Ended up with over six pages of notes from an awesome conversation.

I also went to a meeting for the Boone Independent Restaurant Association. For those of you that haven't heard of them, they are a new group consisting of local restaurants that have banded together in hopes of uniting against corporate competition. I honestly was just curious what went down at a meeting like this and I have to say I learned a lot. Surprisingly, most of what I learned involved reading between the lines a little bit. For example, all of the sponsors were in attendance but less than half the restaurants that payed $600 in dues were there. Apparently there has been some concern that they are paying for nothing. In reality, the group has money as well as ideas, the only thing holding them back is an inability to communicate with each other. For example, their biggest project right now is they want to put out a local food guide that they can distribute at hotels and such. Unfortunately, they can't get the restaurant owners to e-mail them back with 80 words or less describing their restaurant. Anyway, I don't mean to bore anyone with details, but I definitely made some interesting observations.