The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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Canlis shut down its profitable fine-dining business to preserve staff hours
“Pretty quickly we realized that it would be just as risky to do nothing as it would to do something really radical, and if we were gonna live into our values then, you know, every once in a while that really is probably gonna cost you something, and this way i…”
Mark Canlis predicted COVID disruption would last months, aiming for break-even
“The goal was like, it'd be amazing if for the next three months, Canlis could not lose money. I think that'll posture us really well coming out of this thing on the other side, and I do think of it as a few months, not just a few weeks.”
Canlis COVID pivot served 1,200 drive-thru and 300 breakfast customers daily
“But today we served, you know, about 1200 people through the drive-thru. We served about, I don't know, somewhere in the range of 300 people for breakfast. Tonight we'll send a couple hundred dinners out for delivery”
Mark Canlis says purely defensive sheltering in a crisis guarantees failure
“Protect, and that's a lousy strategy in a lot of things. Soccer being one of them. Like, you see in sports all the time when an entire team sort of switches to defense and loses their offense, like, suddenly you're like, ah, don't do that. Wait a minute. Like,…”
Tock mobilized its engineering team to build Canlis delivery software overnight
“Five minutes later, they called back, and they said, we stood our company down. We're turning it back on. We just called everybody in. They're in Chicago, and we're just gonna work on this so you have the platform, and they cranked it out, working around the c…”
Canlis employs 115 staff to serve 150-200 guests, defying industry standards
“In the world of fine dining, you know, 12 to 15 tables is pretty standard. We have 33. But on a busy night, the most guests we can serve are somewhere around 150 to 200. I have a 115 employees to make that happen. So we are a model of inefficiency and that's j…”
Canlis kitchen requires 20 hours of prep for a five-hour service
“There are four hours a day we don't use our kitchen. So it's 20, it takes us 20 hours to open for what is essentially five hours of dinnertime service.”
Entire Canlis staff volunteered for COVID pivot instead of taking furloughs
“The next night in a staff meeting announcing it to the entire team this is up to you, and you don't have to do this, and every one of them saying, We're in.”
Canlis loses money on bagels but expects delivery to become profitable
“That's to say the bagel concepts clearly does not make money. It's labor intensive. We don't have the equipment to scale that in any way such that we could move that to be a profitable business. We could raise the prices, but that just feels dirty. So the poin…”
Canlis sold out three nights of takeout orders in 90 minutes
“So yeah, we sold out three nights worth of takeout in about 90 minutes.”
Canlis overhauls its internal operating systems entirely every 18 months
“You just don't know it, but we open a second restaurant about every 18 months. I would say that's how often the systems inside of Canlis are changing. And those are being rewritten by new employees and employees that have been here 20 years.”