This is an excellent article en read in the Investor's Business Daily a few weeks ago. Very insighful on how to read your environment and get a competitive advantage over your competition.
Innovate: He gave train travelers long-sought satisfaction.
The early years of rail travel were tainted with bad food at stations.
Passagers had to deal with spoiled meat and coffee made with alkali-tainted water.
Service crawled, with meals arriving as the train was about to depart.
The uneaten portions could then be scraped off the plate and reserved for the next arriving train.
Fred Harvey (1835-1901) had been victimized by such hospitality in his travels as a railroad ticket and freight agent.
And he said enough.
He knew he could provide high-quality food and service at an affordable price.
And spotting the lousy competition, he kwew he could make a fortune doing it.
So when the head of Atchison, Topeka & Santa-Fe Railway offered Harvey the chance to run a tiny restaurant in its Topeka, Kan., depot in 1876, he bit on the deal.
The immigrant entrepreneur established a string of Harvey House restaurants and hotels - America'sfirst national chain in stations along the expanding Santa-Fe railroad.
Many historians say Harvey's hospitality and Harvey Girls - the well-groomed and well-trained women he brought in to staff his establishments - civilized the rough-and-tumble West at the end of the 19th century.
The Santa-Fe sped with the food and hospitality of Fred Harvey, says Walter Borneman, author of "RivalRails: The Race To Build America's Greatest Transcontinental Railroad."He calls Harvey that company's "ace in the hole."
"The Santa-Fe pretty quickly came to realize that, hey this is something that people are talking about in a positive way," Borneman told IBD. "And if you keep floks warm and well-fed, they will come back to you."
It is a simple concept. But in Harvey's time, it was a novel one.
Across The Atlantic
Harvey was born in England to Charles and Ann Harvey. The family went broke when he was young, and by his teenage years the boy was living with an aunt in London.
In 1853, the 17-year-old boarded a steamboatfor New York in search of a better life, according to Stephen Fried, author of "Appetite for America: How Visionary Businessman Fred HarveyBuilt a Railroad Hospitality Empire That Civilized the Wild West."
He soon found a job as a pot scrubber at Smith & McNell's, a popular New York city restaurant. There he learned the business from the establishment's quirky proprietors, Henry Smith and T. R. McNell.
They taught him the importance of quality service, fresh ingredients and the handshake deal.
Harvey quickly worked his way up to busboy, waiter and line cook.
After 18 months he set off for New Orleans.
Soon he headed noorth to St. Louis, running a saloon and restaurant with a partner.
But his partnership - and the nation - were soon divided over the Civil War. Harvey abhorred slavery. His partner was a Southern sympathizer, ran off to join the Confederate cause and took everything the two had saved - about $1,300, according to Fried, or $33,000 in today's dollars.
With the business dead, Harvey moved farther West to St. Joseph, Mo. He dabbled in river shipping, then helped devise a system to speed up mail delivery by sorting it on trains.
Before long, Harvey was working for the railroad itself as a ticket and freight agent. The war was still raging on in the East, but everyone knew that when it ended, the race would be back on to connect the vast West by rail.
Eastern railroads went as far as Missouri. Harvey and his family moved to Leavenworth, on the Kansas side of the Missouri River, in anticipation of the coming tracks.
There was tragedy in his life, too. His first wife, Ann, died giving birth to their second son when they lived in St. Joseph.
He soon remarried, to Sally. But in Leavenworth in 1865 Harvey lost his first two sons - Ann's children - to scarlet fever.
Sally then bore more children in Leavenworth. Harvey would live
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