Making Meetings Efficient So You Can Grow Your Business by Al Bhakta

As I’ve moved into more of a strategic role in the Chalak Mitra Group of Companies, it gets hard sometimes to stay out of the trenches and stop getting down to a task level. After all, when we started our restaurants, we were doing everything — operations, accounting, even cleaning. Now that we own hundreds of stores, I need to be able to focus on the big picture.

For a guy like me who actually does want to get down to a tactical level, I need to do everything I can to keep from micro-managing. That’s not a good use of my time and it doesn’t instill confidence and trust in the people who I’ve hired to do the work. They’re skilled and smart and good leaders; I don’t need to be doing their work.

That’s why weekly meetings or phone calls with the people who are the managers can keep me up-to-date with what’s going on, without me feeling like I need to get too detailed. It also gives me the information I need to do a good job at the strategic level, and work to grow the business.

Setting Up Weekly Check-In Calls
Throughout any week when I’m not travelling, I have set times for contacting the people I need input from. For example, I have a standing call with the Director of Operations for Fireside Pies once a week. Unless there’s a real conflict, we honor that time and can rely on the call taking place. Likewise, I’ll talk to the CEO of the Elephant Bar Group to see what’s the latest for the week, what we need to accomplish, whether we’re on track with financial issues.

These calls don’t have to take hours. In fact, they’re usually pretty short.
Plus, this ensures that the managers who need my ear will have a set time when they know they can bounce ideas off me, express concerns and otherwise engage me. They don’t have to worry about calling me when I’m in the middle of something else or home with my family. Of course, if there’s an emergency, I’m available.

Meeting With Managing Directors Every Week
Just like it’s important for those who work for me to give and get input, it’s vital that I have a chance to meet with the other Managing Directors at the Chalak Mitra Group of Companies and get their help with strategic decisions. Every week, we hold a staff meeting where we can discuss board-level issues as well as the details of business deals.

These meetings can be as informal as you wish, but I find that having a rough agenda can help us spend the time more efficiently. We’re all pretty good at working through issues quickly.

If you have a managing director who likes to discuss issues at length, you may want to find a different way to give him or her more information prior to getting together. While there should be some time for discussion, it’s not helpful for anyone to spend time in a lengthy meeting. Your goal is to get the input you need and get back to work.

Weekly meetings with both your employees and your managing directors can help keep everyone on the same page. For me, it helps with encouraging me to delegate more as I know I’ll be kept informed. It also lets me more easily allow someone who works for me to tackle a job their own way, because I know I can give feedback as the project goes on.

Restaurants are hard work, and keeping in touch with everyone who matters can be a challenge as more and more stores are added to our portfolio. But with an established weekly meeting, I have a better idea of my schedule and I can keep up with the major developments I need to know about, without getting overly involved in the day-to-day operations.

Al Bhakta

Encouraging an Entrepreneurial Spirit in Your Kids by Al Bhakta

When I was younger, my brother-in-law let me work summers in his convenience store. It was a fun job for a kid, and I really got excited about the contests that different companies would put together for creative ways to do merchandising. I always tried to win whatever prizes they would offer.

Later, in college, I’d work with friends to buy and sell cars so we could earn a few extra bucks. Then we started renting Indian movie reels and showing them at theaters around West Texas. I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit and wanted to be involved in the work I was doing from a business standpoint.

I’ve thought back on what shaped me to think this way, to want to be in business for myself. Part of it comes from my family. My dad got laid off from his engineering job in New York City. So did he look around for another position as an engineer? No. He took his severance money and decided to buy a motel in Texas. Talk about taking a risk!

And you know, that risk didn’t pay off. As a family, we all worked hard running that motel, but he ended up handing the keys over to my mom’s brother — my uncle — and walking away. His next venture was a motel in Wichita, Kansas. We were there for 7 years, but that didn’t end up working out either. My dad as a business man was not the most successful of people.

What my mom and dad did do was instill the desire to be an entrepreneur in me. They taught me a few things that I use today as a managing director in the Chalak Mitra Group of Companies:

You have to work hard to succeed.
Being in the restaurant business now, I see others outside the industry think of it as being sexy. Running a restaurant isn’t sexy, I can tell you. You’re working nights and weekends, because that’s when other people want to relax and go out to eat. You’re responsible for making all these moving parts come together.

You can’t be afraid of failure.
I remember when we opened our first restaurant, and on opening day, from 4 to 10 p.m., not a single person came in. Of course, that motivated us to keep working on the marketing side of things, but it took a good 18 months for us to break even.

My dad showed me that you can fail, and it’s all right. You still have your family, you still are the same person. If you have good morals, and you work hard, and you fail anyway, just pick yourself up and move on to the next thing. Apply the lessons you learned from your past to the new endeavor.

You’ve got to understand money and how it works.
Like I’ve said, my dad wasn’t a great businessman. But by working with him, I was able to learn something about finances and how to plan and manage the financial side of running a business. I applied what I learned in my own initial projects, and was able to build on that knowledge.

You need to be able to work as a member of a team.
When my dad ran a motel, the entire family was involved. I had five sisters, and we all had a role to play, whether that was working at the front desk, cleaning or running errands. Now, at the Chalak Mitra Group of Companies, I work with six of my best friends. I’ve been doing that for the last 15 years, and while we’ve had disagreements, we have all been able to handle them with respect for each other. The ability to pull together, even under stressful conditions, can help you make a success out of a struggling business.

You have to lead by example.
My parents had a great set of core values, and they taught me to be responsible and honest. My values have helped me to be a good businessman, but also to be a good husband, a good dad and a good friend. They taught me to set an example for other people. Have I always been able to do it? Let’s be honest, no — but I’ve tried to live by the morals they displayed and the leadership they showed.

My son is 3 years old right now. He’s not going to start his own business right away, but I intend to model for him the behaviors that make a good entrepreneur. Whether he goes into business for himself, or works for someone else, I hope to give him a good understanding of the work and character it takes to be successful.

Al Bhakta

Why Health is a Key Part of the Work-Life Balance by Al Bhakta

You already know the importance of living a healthy lifestyle. I’m not going to shock you by telling you that eating right and getting plenty of exercise helps you to stay at a healthy weight, sleep better and be more mentally focused.

But I bet if I had a magic solution for actually doing this, that you’d be eating it right up — pardon the pun. I sure wish I did have some secret for working hard, spending plenty of time with family and still having time — and the motivation — remaining to eat right and work out at least an hour a day.

The fact is that if you’re a successful entrepreneur, you’re likely to be using much of your free time that’s not with family and friends to work on your business. In my case, my business is food — and that can be a recipe for overeating or indulging too often in high-calorie meals.

That’s why a healthy lifestyle needs to be integrated with your family and with your work, and it has to be flexible to take into account your schedule and your needs.

Setting Up the CMG Health Challenge
I work with six of my best friends — we’re all managing directors at Chalak Mitra Group of Companies and we spend a lot of time together both in the office and outside of it, relaxing and hanging out. So when we did start talking about how we could maintain our health, we decided to create the CMG Health Challenge.
Our challenge puts all of us who want to participate, including spouses, in a friendly competition with each other. Everyone is assigned to a team, and on Fridays we check to see whether we each stuck with our goals. We use an online tracking tool, myfitnesspal, to record our food and exercise for the week.

It’s simple, but it gets us working together as co-workers and families to do the right thing. We support each other, even though there’s an element of competing with each other to help spur us on. Even thought it’s not super serious, the desire to improve your team score can help you adopt healthy habits, one day at a time.

My Keys to Staying Healthy
Being a busy entrepreneur and working on maintaining healthy habits can be tough when I’m in meetings all day, traveling or simply putting out those inevitable situations that come up and need your immediate attention. But I’ve lost 30 pounds now over the year and a half or so that we’ve been doing the CMG Health Challenge at Chalak Mitra Group of Companies. That’s a very reasonable time frame and by taking weight off slowly, it helps me to sustain the loss.

It also means I don’t have to stress about times when I can’t work out or when I do want to enjoy an especially decadent meal at one of our restaurants. (I have to admit to a particular love for Fireside Pies.) There’s a cliché about weight loss that rings true: You didn’t put the weight on overnight and you won’t take it off immediately, either.

I try to schedule time to engage in the activities I really enjoy that keep me active, like hiking, basketball and tennis. And I make it a point to spend time being active with my wife and 3-year-old son. It helps him burn off some energy and, at the same time, he sees that we value physical activity as part of our regular routines.
The dividends? I have more energy to invest in running my businesses. Keeping a healthy routine for my body helps my mind to work more smoothly and focus better. I strongly encourage you to make time for improving and maintaining your health — it will pay off in business and in life.

Al Bhakta

How Traveling and Learning About New Cultures Can Make You Better at Business by Al Bhakta

Traveling is one of my favorite ways to spend time. I travel a lot as part of being a Managing Partner at Chalak Mitra Group of Companies, visiting restaurants that we own, checking out other restaurants to learn from what they do and assessing new business opportunities.

I also enjoy experiencing how other people around the world live. Africa, Central and South America, Europe, India, Dubai… I’ve been fortunate to see a lot of the world and I’ve learned a lot from my travels. I think that visiting other cultures can really help you develop your business skills. Here’s how:

It’s a good way to get out of your established routines.
Traveling and having new experiences breaks up the monotony of your typical schedule. Maybe you’re sleeping at different times, eating at different times, talking to more people about different things than you would do at your 9-to-5 job. Breaking up your regular routine makes your brain work harder and encourages you to be more creative.

Being in new situations helps you learn to trust yourself.
Ever get a gut feeling about the right way to go or the people to avoid? Honing those instincts can help you in the business world, too. Traveling helps you rely on yourself and your ability to figure out a situation, which is enormously beneficial when you’re running a company.

Flexibility is key to surviving.
Can’t find your way to the hotel you were planning to stay at? Find out that the restaurant you wanted to visit is closed for the week? Instead of lamenting what you can’t do, learn to go with whatever works best for your current situation. You can end up finding some hidden gems when you travel, and you can end up finding some great solutions for issues in business.

You have to rely on more than spoken words.
In other countries where you don’t speak the language, you have to rely on gestures, phrase books and doing whatever it takes to be understood. You also have to learn how to understand other people without language. This is important in business because you can learn a lot about other people by their non-verbal cues and their actions.

Meeting people is an important part of the experience.
When you travel, you come to value the small moments with other people whom you may not have known before and may not come into contact with again. You learn how to be respectful of all types of people. That’s vital in the business world, where making connections and earning goodwill — even from someone you may not plan to see again — can pay off down the road in the form of referrals and networking.

You understand cultural differences and similarities in ways you never could before.
Whether you are in a global business or not, you run across a number of different types of people every day. In your business life, knowing how to be sensitive to cultural differences and help understand the values that different people hold dear can help you with your communication skills. The ways you learn to observe cultural differences without passing judgment at you travel can benefit at home in the meeting room, too.

You can make a difference.
I went to Africa with my nephew’s charity organization, PovSolve. We worked for a small community in Zambia, helping set up a school, planting a garden and installing mosquito nets. When you actually get to be a part of the giving process, it’s life changing. Other Managing Directors at Chalak Mitra Group of Companies have gone on trips where they’ve been able to give back, too, and it’s been incredibly important in shaping their views of the world and looking at what’s really important in life.

I encourage everyone who wants to be in business to expand what you know through travel. Be open to new experiences, meet as many people as you can, and learn from the good and the bad. These skills will make you a more valuable team member in your business and give you confidence in your abilities.

Al Bhakta

Boomerang: Six Reasons to Schedule Email For When You Can Better Manage It by Al Bhakta

Everyone’s heard of Gmail, but not everyone knows what Boomerang is or what benefits you will see by using it. Boomerang is one of the productivity tools I’d have a hard time without, and it’s simple to use. It’s a plug-in that adds functionality for scheduling emails and reminding me what I need to do. So I have my familiar Gmail interface, but with some added functionality.

Boomerang also has some handy features, like automatically suggesting a better time to send a message back to me and being completely accessible on my smartphone.

Here are five ways I use Boomerang to manage the restaurants that I’m responsible for in the Chalak Mitra Group of Companies.

Follow up.
These days when we have access to email everywhere we go, it’s easy enough to overlook a message. Plus, restaurant managers and other key organizational leadersI work with are busy folks. I don’t want to blame anyone for not seeing an email from me, but I don’t want to lose track of it either. So I set Boomerang to return my email to my inbox if I haven’t received a response in a set amount of time — anywhere from a couple of hours to a few days. Then I can see that I need to follow up with that person, either with email or a different method of communication, in order to get a response.

Schedule messages for a better time.
I am in the office on a more typical 9 to 5 schedule, but many of the restaurant managersand other key organizational leaders I’m communicating with are working nights and weekends. I can figure out when to send an email so they can get it right as they arrive for the day, even if I’m writing it first thing in the morning — which is when I typically respond to email messages.

Respond to non-critical messages later.
It’s time for a meeting and I don’t want to lose track of an email that needs a response by the end of the day. I can set Boomerang to resend that message to me later to deal with. Alternatively, I can have messages I need to respond to tomorrow Boomerang back into my inbox at the time I normally reply to email.

Adhere to Inbox Zero principles.
Inbox Zero is a critical method of organizing your email that all the managing directors at Chalak Mitra Group of Companies rely on. Like it sounds, the idea is that you end each day with no emails in your inbox — they’re either archived, filed or deleted. If you can’t achieve that with an email for any reason, you can Boomerang it to a future time when you can decide what to do with it. That way, nothing slips through the cracks and you’re still ending each day without lingering email messages to manage.

Send task-related emails when I’ll be tackling that task.
I can have the information I need to accomplish a task resent to me when I want them. Here’s an example: The marketing committee for the Elephant Bar Group is tasked with evaluating an advertising campaign. I can take all the emails related to feedback on those ads and send them to myself when I’ve scheduled time to review the ads and provide my own feedback. That way I have everything coming in to me at one time, and I don’t have to search or risk losing some of the messages related to that task.

Manage emails while I’m traveling.
I’m out of the office visiting restaurants frequently. With Boomerang, I can receive messages while I’m on the road and schedule them to be re-sent when I’ll be back in the office. I won’t lose or forget about anything while I’m traveling.

By using Boomerang and other productivity tools, I can increase my efficiency and avoid having to waste time dealing with emails throughout the day. I can also more easily work with managersand other key organizational leaders who have vastly different work schedules than I do.

Al Bhakta

Pros and Cons of Being an Open Book

I often get asked by interviewers and industry professionals alike about what secrets I have for them. Sometimes, these questions are pointed, entailing that I have something to hide. At other times, these questions are more positive, attempting to elicit a response that details how I attained the success that I have attained. The truth is, however, that I am an open book, and at times, this can be both a benefit and a negative.

Why I Consider Myself an Open Book
Before I get into the pros and cons of being an open book, both personally and professionally, I want to explain why I feel the need to be an open book. Honesty and truthfulness are the keys to success in any type of relationship. Keeping secrets is a path that can only lead to a bad ending. Even if you don’t catch up in a lie when you tell it, you’ll eventually find yourself lying to keep track of the lies. It’s a house of cards that will eventually crumble under its own weight in time.
In business, as in personal interactions, many people feel that they can “get one over on you” by lying. What these people fail to realize is that most individuals are intelligent enough to know when someone is trying to play a game, even if they are trying to play the same game with you. In daily interactions, however, most people are either too polite to call someone out on perceived deceit or they are simply planning their own counter-deceit. None of this works out for anyone in the end as someone is eventually going to receive the raw end of the deal, and in some cases, everyone gets stuck in the end.

The Cons of Being an Open Book
When it comes to being an open book, I first want to discuss the negative consequences. Being open and honest with people, as mentioned above, can leave you vulnerable to attacks, criticisms and deceit. People often try to take advantage of an honest person, especially in the world of business. The key to countering this type of behavior is to be honest across the board. Instead of just being honest about who you are, you also need to be honest about how you feel about how you’re treated. Too often, honest people will receive unfair treatment, but that’s where their honesty ends. Instead, you need to be honest with others about yourself, and this includes being honest when you recognize that you’re being taken advantage of in terms of how you are treated as a result. If you’re only honest about the positives in a relationship, you’re doing everyone involved a disservice.

The Benefits of Being an Open Book
Although people may try to take advantage of someone who is open and honest, I’ve found that standing your ground and proving these people wrong is the best policy. I refuse, both in my personal and professional lives, to be someone who hides from the truth, however hard that truth may be. It often takes guts and a true belief in yourself and your cause in order to lead a life that is honest and open. The easy way out is to hide and lie, but I simply cannot do that, not just because it’s wrong, but also because I’ve been instilled with values and morals by my family that go completely against lying and hiding from the truth.

Criticism Will Always Be There
No matter what you do, you will always face criticism, so living a lie won’t help. People will always find a way to get to you, and they will always find something to knock you about. This means that closing yourself off won’t truly amount to anything, but it will require you to continue lying and then compounding upon those lies. This is another reason why I choose to remain open and honest. I don’t want to have to find myself trying so hard to remember what I said to one person and what I said to another. I don’t want to be caught up in that kind of negative spiral.
Instead, I’d rather rest easy at night, knowing that I have treated all people fairly and with dignity. If you’re tired of living a closed-book life, I highly recommend opening yourself up to a higher level of living and thinking. When you lead from your heart instead of what the world expects of you, you can have peace of mind, and that self-offered gift is priceless. Trust me, it’s worth it.

Al Bhakta

Business Evolves and Life Evolves Will You Evolve? By Al Bhakta

Evolution in life can be easy to miss. Each day, new experiences take place, both professionally and personally, but unless you’re willing and able to take a moment each day to take stock in these changes, you may end up missing the bigger picture. I don't mean evolution in the strict sense of science. Instead, I mean evolution in the sense of change and growth within the person, a spiritual changing that correlates to every aspect of our lives.

My time with the Chalak Mitra Group of Companies has been nothing short of amazing, and I cherish each second that I get to spend doing what I'm doing. I get to work with my best friends, experience new things, solve new challenges and represent some of the best brands in the world; however, despite all of the fun I have working with CMG, I find that I need to take extra steps to really find a work-life balance in the evolution of things. I take these steps because I recognize just how precious life is and how hard we must work together as a society to protect the sanctity of life.

I recommend that anyone, in any industry, take the time to do the same. Because of my evolution professionally, I’ve increasingly found myself in places where my time is stretched to the limit. In times like these, it can be easy to focus too heavily on business. After all, we’re here to ensure that our brands’ customers, employees and investors are happy. But what happens when you lose sight of your own happiness? What happens when you can no longer see why you're in business in the first place?

My wife, our son, and our soon-to-be-adopted little girl play such a huge role in my positivity and overall happiness, so wouldn’t it make more sense for me to make my family a priority in my evolution as a person? I’m extremely proud of all that we have collectively done at the Chalak Mitra Group of Companies, but I am much more proud of being a husband and a father. Sadly that’s something that I and many others in business lose sight of all too often due to the continuing demands placed upon us. So, here’s what I propose, both to you and to me:

Personal relationships are the key to true happiness. The way I look at things, I could be working anywhere, doing anything and making any amount of money, but as long as I have my family and friends, I have it all. The human connections that you have access to each day? Don’t ignore them! You already know that you can never get that time back, but in the day-to-day evolution of your life, do you take this for granted? We all tend to think that there is always more time, just another day, just another hour, but when that time is finally up, will you be able to know that you really maximized the opportunities that were presented to you? Will you be able to truly say that you grew as a person while maintaining relationships with those you loved?

I know that I’m still working on finding this balance, but I would encourage you to take stock in each moment to ensure that you know what’s truly important, what truly matters, and focus on those things. You can always work, you can always make money, you can always build a business…but you will never be able to regain missed moments with loved ones.

Likewise, I encourage you to focus on your health. I’ve personally lost nearly 30 pounds while working with my friends and partners at Chalak Mitra Group of Companies. We encourage each other to live better, and we even challenge each other to see who can get in the best shape. In doing this, we include our family members as well because we know that our business success is a team effort. If my wife is not on-board with my fitness goals, then I won’t receive the encouragement I need to get healthy. Likewise, if I am not available to encourage her because I’m too busy with work, then she will be less inclined to support me. This is, once again, where business professionals have to strike a balance as they grow and evolve, both at work and at home. We need each other in order to make the most of our time here.

So, in the end, evolving professionally and evolving personally requires true attention to the ones you love. At the Chalak Mitra Group of Companies, we are certainly dedicated to our brands and investors, but we are also completely dedicated to our families, our friends, our communities and each other. Without such connections, the process of evolving as a professional and as a human being gets stopped dead in its tracks.

As for me, I enjoy the process of evolving, and I never want to become a stumbling block to this process because I didn’t pay attention. I pass along to you the idea of mindful thinking in all that you do, and I wish you the best in finding what is truly important so that you can also join me on the journey of finding the right balance in growth and in personal happiness.

Resource By -  http://www.albhakta.com