The other night my husband and I went to one of our favorite restaurants.  We discovered it a little over a year ago while eavesdropping on a conversation where someone who worked there described it to the bartender.  He was the describing the food, the atmosphere, the culture in such a way that we had to try it out.  We visited it a short time later and loved everything about it.  It was tucked away in an obscure strip mall.  It was small, extremely quaint and cozy. As soon as we walked in we felt immediately welcome.  The owner hung out with us and we got to know him and his wife, the chef.  The food was delicious, the wine spectacular and the prices great.  I had found our new favorite place.  I told everyone about it.  I wrote glorious reviews.  I tweeted, posted on Facebook, had all my special occasions there.  Every time was spectacular.  The wine was always flowing, the conversation great, good music playing and of course the delicious food – everything you want in a neighborhood restaurant.   We saw it get more and more popular, receive a Zagat rating, start to generate a buzz in the restaurant community and quickly get to the point where if you didn’t make a reservation you couldn’t get a table.  I of course secretly took credit for all of this.  All was good.

And then little by little we noticed some of the “specialness”, the “uniqueness” that we had grown to love start to minimize.  As a fellow business owner, I could understand they needed more structure if they wanted to grow.  Some of the changes we noticed included things like instead of being greeted/hugged by the owner, we started getting received by a “manager” who was not friendly or warm and who didn’t treat us with any  familiarity, even though we were coming in once every couple weeks sometimes with 5 or 6 additional people.  No more free flowing wine – the “manager” now made sure everything got accounted for on your bill.  The staff was so busy there wasn’t as much chit chat between them and the customers which created a different vibe between the customers themselves.  There started to be more formality and seriousness to the place.  Logically it made sense what they were doing as they grew – just emotionally it didn’t feel right.

So getting back to the other night when we went back, I could no longer relate to why I liked (see I can’t even say love anymore) this place so much.  All of a sudden it was generic and like so many other restaurants in our area.

It made me start to wonder how many times this happens in everyday business.  When you are just starting out, your business is special, unique – it has soul.  Then as you grow and scale, little by little, that uniqueness starts to dissipate.  Your business begins to lose it’s “point of view” and start to look like – or probably better said “feel” like- everyone else.  The things that made your business get noticed and start to generate “buzz” are the very things you begin to standardize and systematize.

The dilemma becomes can you grow a business without giving up it’s soul?  Can you scale and add processes and organization and all the things everyone says you need to do without taking away the personal attention, the extra perks, the friendliness and all the very things that made is special in the first place?

I don’t know, can you?