Lessons from Restaurant Makeover

I was watching another episode of Restaurant Makeover today. If you're not familiar with the show, they take a failing restaurant and send there a chef and designer, and then re-build the entire store in 6 days.

One of the key (and somewhat poignant) moments of the show is when the chef and the designer ask the owner to pony up cash (usually $15K, matched dollar-to-dollar by the show) for the project. Today I noticed that every time they talk money, the designer asks this brilliant question:

"If Restaurant Makeover didn't come, what would've happened here?"

This line is brilliant in so many ways I think it's worth of a separate post to talk about it.