We have written extensively on Cafe Javas primarily because it’s a prime example of outliers. It’s also almost impossible to talk about sustainable brands and not talk about Cafe Javas in East Africa. And they also happen to be in the trickiest of places, in the restaurant business. We have often asked; ‘why is it impossible to replicate the Cafe Javas success story?’ There’s something about Cafe Javas that can’t be copied.
You know, you can go and copy their recipes. You can go and take their front service staff and double their salaries. You can go do the best of interior designs and set up a new restaurant. You can do everything, but there’s that one thing that can’t be copied. And the thing that can’t be copied, is Cafe Javas’ competitive advantage.
And to understand Cafe Javas’ competitive advantage, you must understand something called ‘Activity Fit.’ Activity Fit is the reason everyone misses everything about Cafe Javas. When we go through strategy, it often starts with one’s aspirations. That’s to say, the vision and mission. Once we’ve done that, we always retreat to understanding the external environment. Often it’s things such as rolling out the PESTEL took, understanding the political, economic, social, technological and legal outlooks. We then love to do the study of the industry. Studies have showed that if you are a great business but in a bad industry, you will lose 20% of your net profit. And the airline industry is always one of those that fail the criteria of a good industry. We would add the restaurant industry in our context of Uganda. Here we often use PORTER’s famous five forces. Now we speak of six forces ever since complements became the sixth force.
It’s the internal exercise that most businesses tend to do so poorly. It’s often where strategy fails. The ability to know the organization internally. At this level, you are doing a resource-based view analysis, reviewing your primary and secondary activities and making the necessary trade-offs. We say trade-offs because this is where most businesses lose it. Strategy is about alignment and alignment means you can’t be everything. You must be clear about what you are not so then you can be great about what you are. And once you do the trade-offs, then you find that activity fit. What Cafe Javas has cracked is activity fit, activity fit is about competing to be unique not the best.
We say Cafe Javas has cracked it, because they have mastered one thing- predictability. Predictability means they have become consistent. No business can do this unless it has achieved activity fit. Cafe Javas may not have the best meals. In fact, they’re not in the business of proving this. They’re not competing on showcasing the best of meals. They’re competing on predictability. That one can be certain wherever one orders a Cafe Javas meal, if they say 15 minutes, it will always be 15 minutes.
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