Those of us who own software product businesses sometimes grumble about what a difficult business it is. Although its indoor work with no heavy lifting, it has it’s frustrations: software piracy, customers who moan about paying a whole $0.99 for thousands of hours of work, buggy third party software, RSI, chargebacks and the catastrophic consequence of accidentally offending the great god Google, to name but a few.

But reading Kitchen Confidential brought home to me just what a hard business it is to run a restaurant. You have to make a major financial outlay to fit out the restaurant and kitchen. You have rent and staff salaries to pay every month, regardless of whether customers come or not. Staff turnover is generally very high in the catering business, so you are continually having to hire new staff. You have to deal with drunken, unreasonable and dishonest customers. Possibly also drunken, unreasonable and dishonest staff, who have ready access to sharp knives and boiling liquids. Theft by staff can be a real problem. You have highly perishable stock. If you don’t order enough, you have to turn people away. If you order too much, you have to throw away the excess or risk poisoning your customers. You have endless deliveries from suppliers, which you have to check to ensure they are the correct amount and quality. You have to keep the restaurant clean. Extremely long hours are standard. Even if you are doing well, you can’t seat more people than the restaurant can physically hold. A restaurant that has to turn people away Fridays and Saturdays might be empty on Monday. And success brings its own problems as you can only increase the scale of the operation by expensive and disruptive  measures such as opening a new restaurant or moving venue. The relentless overheads of staff, rent and stock mean that cash flow is a huge issue. It’s no wonder that restaurants fail so frequently.

Running a software product business is pretty cushy by comparison. You can start your own software product business with just a PC and a generous dollop of time. Nearly all the issues related to manufacturing, suppliers, stock and shipping go away when you are dealing with electrons rather than atoms. If you do make a mistake, you can usually put it right just by making another release. The worst a disgruntled customer is likely to do is post a snarky comment on a forum or send you a nasty email. High margins and low overheads means that cash flow is much less of an issue than for most other businesses. Software businesses also scale much more easily than other businesses. You aren’t tied to a particular location and don’t even need to rent an office building (billion dollar company Automattic has a fully distributed workforce and no company office).

The software business is a great business to be in!