Market VIsion Hospitality
Market Vision Hospitality (MVH) was a restaurant group that owned 2 award winning restaurants in the Salt Lake City area and was simultaneously developing 3 more. I got a bottom to top working experience with this company as I did everything from bussing tables to working with the owner expanding his business. To this day, I did some of the work I'm most proud of with MVH. I got to participate in designing and building a 13,000 square foot food hall, design some pieces of food service equipment never made before, and participate in some proprietary software design that had never been done before. The owner was also a design genius and working side by side with him really helped me in my ability to execute creative projects.
The restaurants operating were Sea Salt, and The Paris Bistro, and we were developing Oddfellows, Teotihuacan, and Tartine.
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MY Roles
I began as a busser, then a server, then a bartender, and all throughout the way a "helper" adding value wherever I could (basically, I did whatever needed to be done, that made me a laborer, a janitor, and more, as needed). At that point, I approached the owner with an idea to build an internal intranet for the company to streamline training and company information - it turns out he had a lot planned on that already. This led to us working together administratively on many different things. Through my journey working with him I really started as the "whatever gets it done guy" and ended as a "co-entrepreneur".
During my time working with him I fulfilled the following administrative functions:
- Business Development
- Facilities Management
- Finance (budgeting, project finance)
- Marketing
- HR (hiring, training, performance management)
- Operations Management (procurement, delivery, logistics)
- IT (intranet, systems administration, proprietary systems development)
- Project Management
My work evolved into mainly Business Development as I worked on expanding & building his new restaurants. In this role, I fulfilled the following functions:
- Strategic Planning (identifying and pursuing new business opportunities: identifying potential customers, partners, or markets, and developing strategies to reach them, building and maintaining relationships, analyzing market trends)
- Business Expansion
- Design (drafting, 3d modeling, kitchen design, operations design, architectural design, equipment design, software design, customer experience design, product design, graphic design, menu design)
- Project Management (graphic design, menu designs, construction management, contractor management, restoration management, equipment manufacturing management, equipment implementation management, systems implementation management, etc.)
The key takeaway about my experience with MVH is that I am the type of person who will learn anything or do anything to get the project completed.
ODDFELLOWS DEVELOPMENT
The main project I worked on was Oddfellows Food Hall. Oddfellows was a 13,000 square foot food hall in downtown Salt Lake City. It was a $4MM project and was the first high stakes project I helped manage. I fulfilled many different roles for OF.
Design Work
A lot of our design was on the fly, and we didn't have the time or money to go to professional designers, so I learned to draft, architect, and CAD our creations.
Systems Development
During my time with MVH we also worked on systems administration and proprietary software development. The basic issue was, all the SaaS on the market were modularized silos of information and data that didn't really flow with proprietary business logic from one to another. Additionally, there were some vital flaws in design - namely, there were many manager inputs required that could instead be quantified and automated to prevent bias and error.
The ultimate vision we had was a system of proprietary software modules and market provided SaaS modules that fulfilled administrative or operational functions; that were pieced together with business logic in the form of middleware; that allowed the system to not just manage information, but to make decisions.
The essential process was taking business data, generating business insights from this data and the owners knowledge bank, taking those insights and turning them into business logic, coding that business logic, embedding that code in a broader UX that made it manageable.
We did some things that our coders were blown away with (one example was an RFID in name tags that tracked movement and helped predict server industriousness that fed into a broader system for calculating the objective value of a server that would then determine speed of upward employment mobility and raises). There are opportunities to break down processes into quantifiable steps that can be leveraged into self-managing software modules everywhere. You just have to be cognizant of these opportunities and have an intuition for what processes can benefit from a more comprehensive solution.
Below are some basic system outlines we started with. It gives you an idea of how we conceptualized things, but the proprietary business logic is where the real value is, and that is not mine to share.
Summary
Market Vision Hospitality provided me with my apprenticeship working under someone immensely capable and immensely demanding. Every project seems easy now compared to the intensity of those projects. I feel completely capable now to take on almost any project - no matter the liability, no matter the accountability, no matter the public scrutiny, no matter the stakes.
The owner ended up closing his businesses due to some personal issues, a lot of it reads like a Greek tragedy actually. It was surreal to see all that I had worked for go up in smoke - but the skills and character I developed will last forever.
Much of MVH I miss. The owner was insanely demanding - past the point that most could deal with. I've heard many people complain about being held accountable for things that weren't their responsibility, but for me it cultivated accountability to the shared higher purpose. It made me realize that everyone in a team is accountable to the higher purpose, and drawing lines of accountability, though useful for project management, doesn't reflect reality. For high performance teams, there should be lines of responsibility, but completely shared accountability. This radical accountability also forced me develop intense awareness (bordering on project paranoia) & become zealously proactive.
All of this sounds like a turnoff to most, but the level of creative freedom and manifestation that was fostered in this company was unbelievable.
Not a day goes by that I don't use something I learned at MVH.
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