Then we went to work. I focused our session on finding specific behaviors their customers could do in order to create an emergency fund, and these are a few of the ones we came up with.

• Call your cable company and scale back your service to the lowest level 

• Empty your pocket change into an emergency-fund jar every evening 

• Announce a garage sale, then put all the revenue into an emergency fund 

In the end, we came up with more than thirty different specific behaviors. Some were better than others, but all of those behaviors had a shot at helping the bank’s customers take concrete steps toward reaching the savings outcome.

It was thrilling to see what was possible. One afternoon, Hani flagged one of my reports—he’d noticed that food costs at a particular restaurant were way up, and for the second month in a row. He pulled another of my reports from the pile; the restaurant was selling a lot of lobster. Yet another report: lobster prices had skyrocketed. A quick call to Ken to confirm: yup—demand had outpaced supply, and prices had gone through the roof. A call to the chef: Were we undercharging for the dish? Definitely, given what we were paying for the ingredient, but he couldn’t raise the price high enough to get costs in line without sticker-shocking our guests. So the path forward was clear: the dish, popular as it was, had to come off the menu, at least until lobster prices dropped. Luckily, the chef had been playing with a scallop dish he could replace it with. Meanwhile, in our office: “Will! Figure out who else in the company is selling lobster.” Another series of phone calls. . . . Lobster season at Restaurant Associates was over.

In a restaurant-smart company, that phone call most likely would never have happened. And if the controller did happen to catch the mistake (if the company had a controller at all!) and reached out to the chef, they’d likely be told to stay in their lane. But overhearing that phone call taught me that someone in corporate wielding that kind of control isn’t always unwelcome. The chef’s bonus was tied to his food costs, and if his numbers were consistently below par, he’d be out of a job. That explained the relief I’d heard in his voice when Hani told him where he’d been bleeding. Our back-office efficiency meant that guy didn’t have to worry about the numbers and could go back to being a chef. We weren’t stealing his creativity; we were returning him to it.

I wrapped up that first strategic planning meeting by telling the team, “The moment you start to pursue service through the lens of hospitality, you understand there’s nobility in it. We may not be saving people’s lives, but we do have the ability to make their lives better by creating a magical world they can escape to—and I see that not as an opportunity, but as a responsibility, and a reason for pride.

Even when we were down, we’d played offense, and it had worked. Not only had we made it through the recession alive, but we’d emerged stronger than before.