Quality or Quantity??

One always wonder which comes first; Quality or Quantity? I guess It is pretty subjective matter as this might applies differently to various type of fields. Let’s take business for instance. Would you concentrate of quality first then only quantity? Or would your greed take over and open vast amount of chain restaurant/shops/outlets within a given time?

For example, the optical shop that my family, which includes my uncle and auntie, always go to. Ironically, my cousins are into this optical business as well and I do not get my prescription glasses from them. It’s the matter of personal opinion as well as family’s. Anyway, back to my topic. The shop is raking profits insanely because firstly, they only have one shop to handle and secondly, the quality they inherited. They have vast amount of quality products in their shop for customer’s satisfaction. They source for good products and discarded the idea of bringing in cheap goods which I don’t think it will last long. In other words, they have confidence in what they are selling rather than having customers comeback with lots of complaints. Besides, they are providing good, if not great, customer service (before and after). Friendly, cheerful and helpful, and in my honest opinion, these are the ones sales personnel should have in order to succeed in their respective industry. They will give their best advice and recommend suitable glasses for their customers.

Now, take this shop’s scenario and compare it with my cousin’s vast amount of chain outlets that he owns currently. The last thing I know about it is that one of the outlets in a popular area closed down. I’m not sure what’s the reason behind this closure but my bet would be too many outlets till it affects its primary objective, that is to make profits!! In my point of view, he owns too many outlets till the point where he could not control his business effectively. Worst of all, he uses one of the outlets profit to cover another outlet’s account, if you get what I mean. I don’t have any experience in business field but it is no brainer that the way he is conducting the business is deemed to fail in longer term. Having him bragging on how many shops he owns makes me laugh my ass off but at the same time, I felt sorry for him as he really needs to understand what he is about to get into, a big pile of mess that is. Besides, some of his staffs are jokers. They have no passion in their job and giving wrong advice to its customers. They are jeopordising instead of helping the business to grow. And this, in turn, boils down to management of the company (literally my cousin’s fault).

Now, I’m not here to diss about my cousin’s business but it is just an example that I can relate to. This might be prefect case for Quality vs. Quantity issue. You have to make sure that you are making stable profits as well as providing great quality at all times before investing that very same profit into new outlet/shop/business. Once Gordon Ramsay said, he waited for 5 years before he opened his second restaurant. He made sure that his first restaurant’s booking list was full (for lunch and dinner services) everyday before another restaurant pops up.

p.s. : If you might wonder why I brought up Gordon Ramsay’s name suddenly. Well, that is because I watched too much of Hell’s Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares!!