Flex it up for some lunch money

Once a week we buy lunch for our team. Today I had a gorgeous oven baked fish fillet on a salad with rustic cut chips. Last week a gourmet burger. The week before that burritos. And so forth. My tummy is rumbling just thinking about my favourite work day of the week.

There are eight of us, sometimes more and we ask for just one tiny special thing. We order about a week in advance. When we get our lunches (we have them at our weekly meeting) we don’t want to spend a whole heap of time figuring out who’s lunch belongs to who. (I also absentmindedly forget what I’ve ordered nine times out of ten). And so we ask wherever we get our lunches from to write our names on each order (we provide the names of the person with the order).

You’d think it’d be a simple request, right? Not so much. Four out of five places get it right, and we reorder from them, typically doing an order once every six weeks from the places we love. And for those that can’t find a sharpie? One order – and then we move on.

When we requested names from one place the answer was “yeah – we used to do that, but we can’t anymore”.

I’m all for having systems and ways of doing things that work in your business – but I’m even more for common sense! When should you hold firm and when do you need to flex?

Kirsty Dunphey is the founder and director of Elephant Property. She is also an author, avid blogger and property investor.