Page 33 - Flathead Beacon // 6.1.16

TRANSACTIONS
WEEKLY BUSINESS BRIEFING
DICKEY’S BARBECUE PIT OPEN IN KALISPELL
Dickey’s Barbecue Pit, a bar- becue restaurant chain based in Dallas, Texas, is now open in Hutton Ranch Plaza, across from Walmart and the Cinemark theater.
With more than 530 locations in 43 states across the country, Dickey’s is the nation’s largest barbecue chain. The Kalispell restaurant is the third Dickey’s in Montana, and is owned by local couple Danni and Alex Weinstein.
“’Welcome to Dickey’s!’” is the warm and energetic greeting you’ll hear every time you walk through our door,” Danni Weinstein said.
The restaurant carries slow-smoked barbecue, smoked on site for up to 14 hours. Sides include barbecue favorites like mac and cheese, slaw, beans, and more. Catering options are available, as well as order- ing online for pick-up orders.
For more information, call 406-890-6340 or visit www.dickeys.com.
Opening, moving or expanding a business in Northwest Montana? If you would like to be featured in “Transactions,” please email information to news@ atheadbeacon.com
Lewis & Clark cottages at the Belton Chalet. COURTESY GIBEON PHOTOGRAPHY
weddings. On June 10, the kitchen sta will host a fun pairing of dishes with ne Greek wines.
Seeing the chalet’s splendor and popularity it’s hard to imagine it nearly vanished once upon a time. The Great Northern Railway built the chalet the same year Glacier Park was formed, hoping to create an attractive lodge for visitors. It was the rst of many chalets created in the park, modeled after the Swiss sites. The railroad sold the site after World War II. A series of owners juggled the site over a 50-year period, operating the bar and lodge sporadi- cally while deferred maintenance piled up. Eventually the historic site lost its luster and began falling apart. In the 1970s, the state’s highway department nearly bulldozed the chalet and its lodge to reroute U.S. Highway 2, but the site’s owners, the Luding family, successfully
had the building placed on the National Historic Register. Instead, the train depot was moved to its current location and the highway was paved between the train tracks and the chalet.
For 40 years, the lodge sat closed while the chalet operated intermittently. Overgrown trees and brush nearly swallowed the site into a garden.
And then Cas Still and Andy Baxter drove past. The Yellow Bay residents had restored historic buildings in the past and were eager for a new challenge. They dis- covered the Belton and purchased the site in 1997. Within a couple years, the property was revitalized and restored. “They rescued it,” Dunn said. “The ceiling was buckling and we would’ve lost more if it collapsed. They came in
and totally salvaged this place.”
Today the hotel has 25 rooms along with three large cottages available
year-round.
Keeping the historic integrity intact
amid rising popularity is a tough task, but this grand piece of Glacier Park’s history is in good hands.
“It’s a labor of love,” Dunn said.
For more information about the Belton Chalet, visit http://www.belton- chalet.com.
dtabish@ atheadbeacon.com
BUSINESS IS PERSONAL MARK RIFFEY THE DANGER OF PRESUMPTION
FOR THE LAST MONTH OR SO, I’VE been working on an all-consuming project. Yesterday, during a con- versation with the recipient of this work, it became obvious that both of us had made some assumptions about the work that overcomplicated the project in the short term. In the long term, no time was wasted on this large, multi-phase project, but in the short term the assumptions were stunning.
Despite hours of phone conversations and emails and detailed technical speci - cations, we still managed to have a rather large gap in the work ow of this project. Fortunately, there wasn’t any damage done and the situation merely juggles the position of a few tasks on the time- line, but we didn’t have to be that lucky.
The Root of Assumptions
The root of assumptions, at least in this case, was both groups of people thinking they had properly and com- pletely described the project. Bear in mind that there are mindmaps and API calls and a bunch of other technobabble. Still, this happened.
But why?
Not enough questions? Not enough diagrams?
Not enough work ow description? Not enough conversation?
Perhaps all of those, but there had
been plenty. What ultimately caused this was quite simple: there was a fundamen- tal asset involved in this project that I was unaware of. They knew it would be used. I didn’t know it existed, and I was dealing with a similar asset under my control.
I speak vaguely about these things because the details really don’t matter and I don’t want the technical jargon to distract from the meat of the discussion: assumptions are dangerous.
The project will come in on time and it’ll be good for both parties, but it might not have worked out as well had this dis- covery happened a week later. It wouldn’t have broken anything, but it would have wasted some time, or at least caused work to be done that won’t be needed for a month or more and that would delay work needed soon.
There are many ways that assump- tions can endanger your projects. The key is to have a process that does as much as possible to eliminate them.
Eliminating Assumptions with a Third Party
The most dangerous assumption I made was that the technical documen- tation and the mindmaps would e ec- tively communicate the project’s details to a technical audience. At a granular level that was true. Where this assump- tion got me was at the 10,000-foot level – the level where you break down a ton of technical work ow to 10 sentences (step one, step two, step three ...) in plain old English that anyone would understand.
Didn’t happen. Six weeks went by with- out this critical message climbing out of the technical documentation – and even then, it didn’t. It came out when those 10 sentences were written to clarify some- thing that suddenly became confusing.
Many years ago, I was involved in an exercise along these lines where two people with experience in a eld had to explain something to each other. Once they reached agreement, they had to explain it to a third person who had no background in the subject.
A fascinating thing happened.
The two people who thought they were describing the same thing were still far apart. When each of them described the project to the third party, they were
stunned at the assumptions each of them had made – not big ones, not project kill- ing ones, but di erences that could cre- ate drama, friction, additional cost and so on.
Watching these two people realize they were not talking about the same thing was illuminating and stunning at the same time because the audience was made up of people with similar experi- ence to the two “explainers.”
Of course, the exercise was designed to set them up to some extent and the whole idea was to communicate to all involved that communication is real work and that it is breathtakingly easy to make a few small assumptions that can take two parties on substantially di erent paths even though they think they are talking about the same thing.
Getting two people (or two groups) to understand each other and agree that they are talking about the same thing requires great care.
Next time you have a project to deliver, involve a third party with much di erent skills. Describe the project to them and see where the conversation goes. Maybe you can avoid dangerous and potentially costly assumptions.
JUNE 1, 2016 // FLATHEADBEACON.COM
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