E198: The Power of Cultivating an Adaptive Mindset with Simran Bakshi

<p>When the crap hit the fan in 2020, a lot of restaurants shut their doors due to the lockdown. Several restaurants shut for almost a year before opening up because they didn’t know how to adapt to an uncertain environment – and it was too late by the time they figured it out.</p> <p>Simran Bakshi, the owner of Spice Bazaar, decided to do exactly the opposite. His restaurant stayed open, set up a ghost kitchen, then expanded by setting up multiple ghost kitchens, and his business exploded!</p> <p>Sim was one of the very few people who cracked the code and figured it out. &nbsp;During the first six months of the shutdown, they did more sales than they did prior to the shutdown – and the doors weren’t even open yet.</p> <p><strong>Here are some power takeaways from today’s conversation:</strong></p> <ul> <li>The credit card system as a trap</li> <li>Sim’s eureka moment when he got a DUI</li> <li>How he got into the restaurant business</li> <li>Business hack: opening a ghost kitchen</li> <li>Leveling up to opening multiple ghost kitchens</li> <li>Building a culture that can thrive in an uncertain environment</li> <li>The power of cultivating an adaptive mindset</li> </ul> <p><strong>Episode Highlights:</strong></p> <p><strong>The Business Hack: A Ghost Kitchen</strong></p> <p>If you have a restaurant, and you serve Indian food, for instance, you can cook multiple other cuisines or even just one certain item. Then you could sell from that restaurant online such as DoorDash, UberEATS, or GrubHub with a different name. It's a ghost kitchen because it's embedded into another facility that has nothing to do with the cuisine that you're selling online. You’re basically running two restaurants in one location so it's a passive way of income within your business. It's an amazing business hack since you're maximizing your floor space or real estate to create multiple businesses running out of it.</p> <p><strong>Leveling Up: Opening Multiple Ghost Kitchens</strong></p> <p>For instance, you're in the mood to go ea