What You Can Learn From My Wife, The Consultant
A new cupcake shop opened on Main Street in East Greenwich. This is the most affluent city in the state, sometimes called a “country club of a town,” and these niche shops are all the rage in many states.
My wife (a home economist by training) has always loved sweets, so she visited it one day and reported to me at dinner, “They’ll never make it.”
“And why is that?” I asked, studying my class of Far Niente.
Her reasons:
• They were overpriced for a new shop, where no bakery of any kind had ever been successful on Main Street in the 25 years we’ve been here. They either didn’t know that or ignored it.
• The cupcakes were cosmetically attractive, but not sufficiently differentiated in taste and quality. A lot of sizzle, not enough steak.
• The sold nothing else, it was cupcakes or nothing.
• They did no marketing, no advance promotion in the local media.
• There were no free offers or even free samplings in the store.
• The proprietors were interested in baking, not in customers, and response time was slow and not gracious.
• They did nothing with surrounding businesses, with firm clientele, to help promote their store.
Two months later they were gone, as were two different lunch places a mile away. A new breakfast place is struggling to hang on (when we went there, the first and last time, we were told to expect a minimum 20-minute wait, they did not stock any cereals, and they had one server).
Avocation doesn’t lead to occupation. If you want to make money, you have to understand the customer, value, and business principles.
My wife does. She’s obviously a great consultant. This profession is not rocket science, so stop trying to make the simple complex and start making the complex simple. You can observe what’s working and not working by using your judgment.
I saw a guy in the NSA Speaker Magazine the other day with eight initials after his name, not ONE of which I could decipher. What we do is not about credentials, it’s about comprehension.
That’s why I can drink Far Niente. It’s convivial, but not complex.
© Alan Weiss 2013
