Darkhorse Diaries

Being part-owner of a pizza shop, one thing I’ve learnt is that it’s all about portion sizes.

The amount of dough, tomato, cheese and toppings that one puts on a pizza may seem small anyway, but the smallest variation in the amounts that are used will make a noticeable impact on the bottom line.

Though it’s a matter of taste, there’s a trend for thin crusts and to some it indicates a better class of pizza. The difference between a pizza in a take-away (like ours) and the pizza that you buy in a proper sit-down establishment. For the folks in our neighborhood, the latter would always be the preferred option.

The first two and a half years of owning the pizza shop was challenging, the learning curve was steep and The Hobbit spent all his time perfecting and tinkering with the system to scrape out every penny he could to keep it afloat. Part of this was managing portion sizes.

The ladies in the kitchen started calling him “Cups” because he was always on at them to use the designated cups for measuring out the correct amounts.

Then he had a bright idea: roll the bases thinner. You kill two birds with one stone: make the product seem more refined and therefore more appealing to our market, and cut down on the amount used.

It’s made a significant difference.

Every business must be like that. Though the one I know most about is not pizzas, but film and tv. And here too, it’s all about portions.

It’s about working out exactly what you need to produce the kind of show or story you are making. And doing this in such a way that hundreds or thousands or millions of people (depending on your goal and medium) will watch it, enjoy it and, in some way, create a flow of energy (usually in the form of money) towards the people who produced it.

There’s a process of gathering money and resources to this concept for the creation of a thing that exists at this point only on paper. And sometimes only in someone’s head.

Then – depending upon how much you have to spend – cutting, shifting and juggling until you meet a point (hopefully), where the essential part of the film still exists, but within your means, and you have a workable plan.

So it’s important to know the system well enough to provide exactly the right amount of resources for what’s required. And then managing the process that so that these resources are adequate.

The perfect team is lean and fit and inventive. People that can get the best out of the situation that they’re presented with. Not too many of them and not too few.

The question always is – what are the elements you need for your production? What are each of the elements worth in terms of resources? What is their order of importance? Are too many resources going into the creation of an element that is ultimately not that valuable to the end result, but that someone is attached to, for some reason, usually something to do with ego.

Checks need to be in place so that resources are not squandered due to incompetence, laziness, inexperience or arrogance. Arrogance is usually closely associated with power, so this can be tricky but important to manage, to the extent that this is a saleable skill.

And I have the feeling that human history is going be shaped by portion sizes when it comes down to it. We’re still in denial, unable to countenance a world in which enough has to be enough for us to persist. We are attached to convenience and appetite and ego to the detriment of all else.

This has brought us to a very dangerous place. But perhaps we were always destined to get here because of the way we are made.

Because it’s the times when your back is really against the wall, times when you have too little for what you need, and are close to losing it all, that you are at your most creative and find out what you’re really made of.

What are we humans made of, I wonder?