How to Stand Out in a Crowd
A good friend was asking my thoughts on opening a second location in a town that already has quite a few breweries. It really got me thinking.
Typically I suggest things such as offering much more than beer. For example making your brewery out of a movie theater or bowling alley. Or laundry, or coffee house for that matter. There are plenty of examples of this for sure.
But then I started thinking about business in general. To me, one of the driving forces that customers follow is a sense of value. Let me give you one example and how I discovered this maxim that goes back, oh, probably centuries.
When we had our big fancy Italian restaurant (Scalo Northern Italian Grill), it was really hot stuff. We spent so much effort making our customers happy. No really - it was time consuming. If something was off just a teeny bit, the customers wanted something for free: a dessert, a drink, or the whole damn meal!
Then we opened a little wood-oven pizzeria ( IL Vicino) across the street. It had a completely different vibe. Where Scalo took reservations. The pizzeria did not. If someone showed up for their reservation at Scalo and the table wasn’t quite ready for them, they would start their evening irritated and then it could easily go down hill from their (unless we bought them a drink). Whereas the pizzeria had a line at the door from the time it opened. No one complained.
Why was this? Well, it occurred to me that when people walked into Scalo with its white table cloths and wait staff with bow ties, they had really high expectations. Our job was not only to meet those expectations, but also to beat them.
In the pizzeria on the other hand, shoot, it was just a pizzeria so expectations were really no more than hoping the pizza was OK. It was super easy to beat those expectations.
Isn’t that really one of the keys to success? You have to exceed the customers expectations, and this creates in the customer’s mind a sense of value.
My friend’s current brewery fulfills all those expectations and more. He and his wife really work their rear-ends off running a successful operation. They follow the business system I teach, and their beers are great. They offer much more than a simple brewery.
So given what they do now, I can’t think of any “hook” or gimmick that they could do in the second location. They simply have to offer up a feeling of value for the customers, that is better than the competition. It’s still a gamble of course, competing against other, established breweries, but put simply, if you are exceeding your customers expectations by whatever voodoo you do so well, then over time you will attract more customers.
Sometimes I think business is a lot like beer ingredients. You only need the four basic for your recipe:
Quality
A Great Business System
Low Overhead
Offer Value to Your Customers
Sorry this was a little late this week. I’m on a biking trip. Yipee!
