In business, all I own is a hammer, so everything looks like a nail.
That hammer is supply and demand. I measure it for every product or service I invest in.
It has worked very well for me.
While I was consulting with restaurant chains, I learned that supplying a great product is only the first step. You still won’t succeed unless you put that supply where the demand is highest.
The Orlando market in the 1990s taught me the rest of it. Whether my chain client’s base was California or New York or anywhere in between, they were mesmerized by the consumers —tourists and workers both — flocking to the Disney-inspired magic kingdom. Demand numbers soared. The fastest growing away-from-home food market in America was Central Florida.
Then we added the discipline of supply-side research, and it steered several of those same clients away from the market on one compelling fact: Supply — the restaurants already serving those growing consumers — had long since passed the burgeoning demand. Everyone was chasing the same gold rush. (Side note: I suspected part of the attraction was taking the family to see the
Mouse while conducting official store visits.)
Seasonality was the second issue of supply and demand. Not only were there too many seats for the number of butts sitting in them, but when school went back in session, demand fell like a piano dropped from a sixth-story window. The result was that discount wars in the down seasons got uglier than anything we saw in the busy months.
Seasonality bent the labor curve too. It is hard to run a smooth operation when four months a year you need forty-five workers and the rest of the year you need twenty-five.
Spend enough years inside one discipline and it marks you. It’s rare to find a surgeon with a small ego or dirty hands — it just comes with the territory. And so it goes with me. I have never been able to stop seeing my own life through the professional lens of supply and demand.
My most basic need — my demand — is for money. My greatest need is for love. Either way, I am always searching for supply, the available means to fill the demand.
Through college and my early working years, on my own, demand for money was relatively low. Then came a spouse and three kids. Career growth was essential just to keep up with what we needed and what we wanted, and I checked those boxes, advancing quickly in responsibility and pay. But eventually the corporate path began to look like Central Florida. This time I was part of
the oversupply. Too many of us chasing too few seats.
Fast forward twenty years. I built a company supplying a unique solution to chain restaurant needs, sold it, and wound up with an oversupply of money. So, quite naturally, I went looking for the demand that would satisfy me the most.
The first part was easy. Buy the car, the home, the vacations our family would enjoy, and live the rest of my life no longer overwhelmed by a dropped transmission or a broken water heater. But what to do with the rest?
At the same time my ship was coming in, Alice and I were meeting ambitious people in inner- city Cleveland where the cards were stacked against them ever getting the chances we’d had. If no one in your family has ever been to college, how do you figure out how to get there? And how do you stay once you arrive?
There was the curve again. Deep demand — people with the desire and the work ethic to make it. Thin supply — tuition, access, and somebody in your corner who has done it before.
Twenty-five years in, it is the most fulfilling work of my life, professionally and personally.
I’ll end where the curve finally breaks down. Our deepest human need is for love and understanding, and that is the one demand each of us must supply for the other.
Beyond the complexity of any other person’s particular needs, the supply we can bring is endless: Love.
PS If you need to brush up on “how to” supply love, there is a 2,000-year-old manual at 1 Corinthians 13:4-8, the one we’ve heard at so many weddings.
Peace,
Tim McCarthy
