Why Andrew Ridgeley (of Wham!) Recruited Me

In 1987 I was working behind a cocktail bar, and I had started to learn a bit of bartending flair: the art of juggling bottles, cocktail shakers and anything else around the bar to entertain customers while making their drinks.

The Manager sent me on a 10-week structured flair course run by a guy called Bas Basian, a real genius and innovator of the art who subsequently worked with Tom Cruise on the set of the 1988 film Cocktail.

It was a skill I had learned, and which would attract attention (and big tips!) and impress people, but which in reality was really nothing more than determination, attention to detail, correcting mistakes and hours and hours of dedicated practice.

One evening, my performance behind the bar was spotted by Andrew Ridgeley of Wham! fame, who invited me to go and work in his new bar, 92’s Bar and Brasserie, which provided a more glamorous stage for the ‘outward performance’ of my ‘behind the scenes’ commitment to perfection.

People would say to me that I must have lightening reflexes, fast hands, or really good eye-to-hand coordination, always with an undertone of ‘I wish I could do that’.  Even now it still amazes me that people are so fast to assume natural talent and rarely consider that it might just be hard work and commitment.

From an early age, I was practicing ‘perfect’ things which helped me when setting up my own businesses, as well as my time as a CEO at a plc.

What’s really important when applying the idea of ‘practice makes perfect’ in a business environment is that you need to be practising ‘perfect’ things. That is why being able to identify what 100% looks like and amend anything that falls short of that mark is so important, because once you have set up the goals that you are trying to achieve and shared the vision with the people you are trying to achieve it with, you need to make sure the actions are effective. Often the only way to achieve this is trial and error. 

When I was working at 92’s I’m proud to say that I never dropped a bottle (we didn’t have rubber mats, just stone floors). It simply never happened, but in the hours before we opened the doors, and in my bedroom at home, there were many times that I made mistakes, which were quite often to the sounds of breaking glass and vanishing vodka.

When you’re developing, systemising and streamlining the processes behind your products / services that you’re delivering to your customers, you are going to make mistakes. The important thing is to learn from the mistake, find a way to remove or manage it, and then (this is the massive learn) ensure that it is highlighted if it happens again. 

Finally, if you do not have alerts in place to tell you that here is a problem in the system, then you will never get your business to a place where it can bring you perfectly executed results.

This week, let me take you to the place, where membership's a smiling face... (sorry to any non-Wham! fans)...please take time out to think about these lessons and how they may be applied to you so that you can consistently get perfectly executed results across your business. 

BW,

Martin

Martin Norbury

Investor | Business Mentor at Advocate | Author of I don’t work Fridays