When the Chicken Rice Stall Was in the Wrong Place: A Lesson on Positioning and Systems 

In the Restoran LHY project, I was in charge of the chicken rice stall, the supposed core product and main profit engine.
On paper, it made perfect sense: simple, familiar, fast-moving, profitable.

But once we opened, the silence was louder than any feedback.

Our shop was set up as a kopitiam, yet unlike a typical one, we had only two stalls —
one for drinks, and one for chicken rice.

Customers walked in, looked around, and walked out.
They expected options: noodles, dim sum, mixed rice, something else to choose from.
Instead, all they saw was drinks and chicken rice.

That’s when it hit me:

💡A good product doesn’t fail because of taste — it fails when it doesn’t fit the system it lives in.

Even the best chicken rice can’t carry a kopitiam that doesn’t feel like a kopitiam.

By then, the kopitiam model was already perfected in our market.
The main stall sold drinks; every other stall was rented out to independent vendors. It was a system built on diversity, shared cost, and collective foot traffic.

We broke that rule. We ran both the drink stall and the chicken rice stall ourselves.At first, it sounded efficient. In reality, it meant:

• Higher costs with no rent-sharing,

• Limited menu variety,

• No buzz, no energy.
  
  

Every morning I’d see customers pause at the entrance, glance around, and quietly leave. Not because the food was bad, but because the place didn’t feel alive.And that’s when I realized:

💡Positioning isn’t about what you sell — it’s about what people expect to find when they walk in.

Then came the part I could control — the product itself.The master who trained me stayed for three days.Ten days later, we were already open for business.

Every day, I roasted one chicken, taking notes on temperature, marination, drying time. But every result was different. One day, it was perfect — crisp skin, juicy meat. The next day, too dry or too oily.It was exhausting.Eventually, I understood:
the issue wasn’t that the recipe was “hard to learn.”
It was that we never built a system that made it repeatable.

Traditional food relies heavily on “feel” — the master’s intuition.
But when intuition isn’t documented, it becomes fragile. When a business depends on a person instead of a process, that’s not craftsmanship — it’s risk.

💡“Skill depends on people.
System depends on logic.
And business depends on systems.”

That experience gave me a new lens to see the entire F&B industry.

Restaurants everywhere are quietly evolving from craft-based to system-based operations:

• Pre-prepared ingredients turn complex recipes into stable outputs.

• Central kitchens guarantee consistent taste across outlets.

• SOPs reduce training time and prevent chaos.

Some say this industrializes food, stripping it of “soul.”
I see it differently — systemization doesn’t erase soul;
it preserves it, by making it reproducible.

Because what good is tradition if it dies with the last master?

A true legacy is one that can be documented, taught, and scaled —
a taste that survives beyond the person who first made it.

If we had followed the usual kopitiam model —focusing on tea and chicken rice while renting out the rest of the stalls — the business might have survived, even thrived.But the failure gave me something more valuable: system awareness.

I learned that:

• Positioning defines who recognizes you.

• Process determines if you can sustain yourself.

• Systems decide whether you can grow.

That chicken rice stall taught me more than any recipe ever could.
It showed me that good taste is not enough.

💡Every good product needs the right system to hold it up.

💡True professionalism isn’t about perfection —
it’s about consistency that endures.

💡“Real innovation isn’t changing the menu — it’s changing the system.”