The food: Muscle with onions and crushed peanut
Where to find it: Ut Lien Seafood Restaurant, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
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Welcome to another edition of #FoodEntrepreneur Friday, where I serve up an order of international food with a side of insight for entrepreneurs.
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In entrepreneurial terms, burn rate signifies the rate at which a business venture spends money or resources in excess of its income. This is not a good thing. It’ll worry your investors and could kill your company financially and otherwise.
In the past, I wrote about how Vietnam sizzles up street-side snails and seafood at “just barely burning” temperatures. Despite the heat of the dishes, the meals always end up delicious and never over-cooked. They’re just right, in fact.
Likewise, it’s prudent to understand that an enterprise must spend money to make money, to operate at ‘just right’ rates. But just like grilling food on the fire, it’s all about working within limits without ‘overdoing’ things. Neither your company nor your grilled foods should suffer from ‘the burn.’
In order to get a handle of your startup’s burn rate, makes some considerations:
• Calculate your burn rate. Just like monitoring the time and temperature the grill cooks your meal, make sure you have a grasp of your company’s financial outflow from month to month.
• Hire the right people. You know the term ‘too many cooks in the kitchen spoils the broth.’ If you don’t have the right team or team members, then that could cook up financial degradation in your payroll.
• Know when to call it quits. Even if you think you have a great business idea, if it’s not panning out well financially, then you might want to consider pivoting.
• Hold off on big expenses. Try to avoid projects that will require large amounts of capital without assured ROI. If your portable Weber Grill can grill muscles as well as the Vietnamese can in Ho Chi Minh City, then why start cooking on a grill that’s the size (and price) of a Ford F-150?