Somewhere close to New York City’s Central Park, more than forty years ago, a young Spaniard enamored with the United States noticed a menu structure that he had never seen before. Appetizers were included in the price of the main courses, which made choosing easier. It made people order an appetizer, and because they felt they were getting something for free, they felt what they were paying was worth the price.

Miami restaurant owner Carlos Galán has opened several locations in Madrid and Miami integrating this type of menu. The menu offerings change regularly, but Galán believes how the menu is organized has been key to his restaurants’ success and also their survival during difficult economic times since this structure helps keep dining out affordable and attractive to customers.

In entrepreneurial research , “serendipity” is defined as an “active process of turning unplanned, surprising moments into valuable outcomes.”

In the trajectory of building a business, there are many moments that seem to work this way. Though we only catch this meaning if we look back and narrate how we remember it all happened. What matters is being open to recognizing them as potentially important for the business, leaving room for them to happen without becoming frustrated when they do not.

So there is no closed method or a set of steps to be serendipitous in business.

Rather, it is a reminder that being in business means dealing constantly with change, uncertainty, and events that cannot always be predicted. What matters is remaining open enough to recognize unexpected possibilities when they appear, while also accepting that not every one of them will become important.

Researchers often talk about a mindset, and this has come across in my conversations with Galán and others as something close to what has been identified as the individual-level engine of serendipity: the “prepared mind.”

Can Businesses Organize for Chance?

There might be an organizational side to this. A business can be structured in a way that allows noticing something unexpected, recognize its potential, and then organize around it.

Openness can itself become a way of doing business.

This may help explain why a 1923 fire station in Miami’s Brickell district now operates as Dolores But You Can Call Me Lolita, one of the city’s most well known restaurants. It happened so fast. The Brickell financial district of 2007 certainly was not a place where the success of a restaurant could be taken for granted. Galán was already looking for his next move with a model in mind that he knew could work.

In that sense, the story is less about simply getting lucky than about encountering an unexpected opportunity and being prepared to do something with it.

By his own account, Galán was never supposed to end up in the restaurant business at all. Born in Madrid and, never a good student, headed toward a boxing career when the sport took him to California and introduced him to the United States. What came next has the shape of a lucky streak: three restaurants in Madrid, La Misión, El Recuerdo and El Olvido; a move to Miami in 1997; a South Beach restaurant called Macarena that ran for a decade; and, in 2007, the firehouse, which became the flagship of what is now Passion Restaurant Group , alongside Crazy About You and, later, Love Is Blind in Coral Gables.

To file all of this under luck would be a mistake. There is a line between luck and serendipity that comes down to agency, The Serendipity Mindset explains. While luck simply lands on you, serendipity is alive.

One thing to be cautious about is that doing something around an unplanned moment has a lot to do with memory, and especially with how entrepreneurs remember their own trajectories. It would seem hard, if not contradictory, to develop plans for serendipity.

It is when we look back, when we find that serendipity; i t is when retelling one’s business story that we give coherence to events that, when they were actually happening, were much more uncertain, fragmented, and difficult to interpret.