Nestled between my neighborhood light rail stop and my apartment building there’s a tiny restaurant called Ltd Edition.

I’ve never been in, but you can see through the windows it’s an 8-seat omakase-style sushi restaurant.

Assuming you walk by during their, ahem…limited…business hours (Monday-Friday 5:30-9:30pm), you’ll notice every seat is always taken.

In fact, on several occasions I’ve noticed people running from the station or rushing out of an Uber to grab their seat at their allotted time.

​

As a contrast, a few blocks up the street, there was a restaurant called Meliora.

A fine-dining restaurant with 5,000 square feet of space in a dense neighborhood, it never really caught on.

Tables were never at a shortage, and unfortunately it became best known best as “that restaurant where Canterbury Ale House used to be.”

​

Of course, there are dozens of variables that make a restaurant viable, but at the end of the day, you have to fill enough seats to cover your overhead, or you’re cooked (pardon the pun).

​

Ltd Edition opts for a niche, high-ticket, low-volume game, and doesn’t struggle to fill it’s 32 spots per night.

Even better, the exclusive number of spots makes the margin play even easier.

​

Meliora, on the other hand, tried to win on both fronts, high-ticket and high-volume, and went out of business quickly.

​

Now, our businesses are a bit different — a consultant’s overhead is quite low relatively.

But the question still stands:

Do you want to run a margin game or a volume game?

​

Ask the landlords of the Meliora space?

Before leasing it out again, they’re opting to split the floorplan in two.

​

💡

-Wes