This story happened a long time ago, after the advent of Facebook, but before the advent of tik-tok. Not a very big city, about 100 - 150 thousand people and the spirit of adventurism pushed me to test myself and dispel the myth that high-quality service is possible only in megacities. The inputs were as follows - a large area of the facility and its versatility as an entertainment center. The complex included - a small restaurant, a bowling hall, a billiard room and a mini-hotel with a sauna. Bowling was the only one in the city and at that time it was the locomotive of the project, as was the billiard club, which attracted amateurs and professionals with the quality of equipment and the number of tournaments held. Each of you can imagine the audience that was the regulars of the institution. The areas of these objects occupied approximately 40% of the total area of the entertainment complex.
The task was to develop the enterprise and increase profits.

There were 2 options.
First, adjust to the needs of the existing audience and build a more efficient economic model. The second is to create a new point of attraction while keeping the existing audience as loyal as possible. The problem was that the second option required serious external investments, restructuring of the internal organization and expansion of the staff by 2 times. In the first version, the institution had a stable positive reputation and a little competitive environment. The second option assumed entry into a highly competitive environment and the presence of a reputation in it with a minus sign.
Of course, I chose the second option)

The plan was the following:
We increase the existing area of the restaurant by 2 times, dividing it into two parts. In the first part we leave the dining area of the restaurant, in the second part we make a nightclub.
The competition among nightclubs was high, besides, 2 more establishments of this profile were opened in the city in the near future. Therefore, we went for broke and spent the main investments in this part of the project to make it the driving force for reformatting the entire establishment. Plus, the marginality of this part of the project was the highest. If successful, of course)
In the restaurant industry, the competition was not great, but the location of the institution away from the main routes of residents and the inability to significantly increase the production area made the development of this premises as a classic restaurant very risky. We decided to focus on this space as an addition to the nightclub for gatherings of large companies, birthdays and other holidays. Plus this restaurant has worked with a focus on special daytime service for private and business events.

I will not go into many details of this global restructuring, but for the most part it took place on a mental level. It was a restructuring for the owners, management and maintenance personnel. What made this adventure special was that we had 3 months of time, as we wanted to open in the lead-up to the peak season and around the same time as the other two new nightclubs.
During these 3 months, I probably slept 3-4 hours a day, but oddly enough, the loss of almost 20 kg of weight affected me very positively) The important factors in this process were complete concentration, confidence in success and competent planning. We were late by no more than a week, despite the fact that we brought the last furniture into the hall of the nightclub, at a time when visitors were already impatiently trampling at the entrance.
So, everything was planned schematically like this:

• A clear concept was created for our club and a plan for the reorganization of the management of the entire enterprise. This concept meant to bet on the high level of services provided and the high level of service, which means that the cost of our services will be the highest in the city.
• We hired new staff for this division without work experience and trained from scratch. The level of service provided by our competitors was lower than we had planned, so we could only re-create the personnel potential. There was also an interesting idea in this, which is far from being on the surface, but this is a separate story, which I will return to in other articles.
• Staff training was completely at the mercy of a professional team, we only selected candidates with the greatest potential.
• We outsourced the running of the kitchen and bar to a guest chef and bar manager who stayed and worked with the team for a few more months after the project was launched.

All these professionals have never worked in this city and were invited from the capital. It should be clarified that this is a rather specific country in which the capital is dominant in relation to the province and all the best is really concentrated there. Finance, human potential and more.

• A specific PR campaign was planned and many other interesting surprises for the residents of the city and competitors. But that's an interesting story.)

Where is that famous cracked washbasin, you ask? And you will be right. This is a very revealing and important story in order to realize the importance of mental restructuring in such a major change in the enterprise. So, our renovation and rebuilding were moving towards completion. The main construction work had already been completed and only the work in the bathrooms was not completed. We were already a bit out of budget (this is news) and the shareholders planned to make only cosmetic changes in the bathrooms, not attaching any importance to this in principle. Thus began the famous war for the toilet! In my understanding, we needed to completely reorganize this space and I clearly understood its importance. In the understanding of the shareholders with whom we cut the rest of the budget, I looked strange with this focus on the toilet. I ended up winning the battle to organize the space, but there were more battles to come. Here, excuse me, I will move on to the toilet details. The end point of the renovation, in my understanding, was the complete replacement of equipment: washbasins and other accessories in the form of dryers and holders of towels, soap dishes, etc. What was available left a faded impression, although it struck with its minimalist-brutal practicality. The bargaining ranged from - the physical death of this equipment is still far away and the functionality it still performs - to - in the next fiscal year, we will do this first. I understand the importance of all the little things, and the toilet in a nightclub is not a trifle at all, it is there that an important part of private life takes place, discussions and exchange of impressions take place there, and much more - I was firm in my intentions to continue the aesthetics of our club in these modest 20m2. The last battle of arguments was like this. My argument is that the toilet is a natural extension of the clubhouse and the aesthetics of sophistication should be continued with a complete change of equipment and the acquisition of current samples. The shareholder - the public will be in all sorts of intoxication in the club, plus the audience of bowling and billiards (in this city it looked like regulars from not the most expensive pubs) and as a result all this equipment will live for a month at best. The final counter-argument was that the public will treat us and our property exactly as we treat them. It will be practical-brutal - they will test it for strength, it will be exquisitely neat, we will form the same context. I finished it all off with words - if they break it, then I pay for a new one and emerged from the battle as a winner.

All our plans came true. The project was a great success and extended it to the entire enterprise. For another 4-5 years, the institution remained uncontested the best in the city and region. Many of the guys who came to us to work “from the street” and studied from scratch became professionals in this business, some of them opened their own entertainment business. And who knows, without winning those little battles over small things and seemingly insignificant nuances, could we have succeeded? I still believe that that battle for the organization of a modest 20m2, which I called - "The Battle of the Toilet" was that small puzzle that added up a whole and necessary impression on the guests of the establishment and made them happy within our walls.