There’s a Catch 22 of Advice: when your business is doing well, you can afford good and expensive advice … when you don’t need it!
However, when your business is in trouble and you really do need the best advice, you can’t afford it … as your business is in trouble!
Have you thought of getting advice from your marketplace?? This story is from Britain, where there are three times as many people than in Australia and, therefore, business trends are more exaggerated and easier to determine:
Alcohol Down, Coffee Up
In the UK there are 52 pubs closing a week* and this trend has been going for many years. As usual, everybody is blaming everybody else for the slump in the pub trade – the pubs are blaming the government, the government is blaming the economy and so on. The blaming hasn’t helped anyone.
During the time that 52 pubs a week are closing, the three largest coffee chains have opened 1,900 new cafés - Starbucks 750, Costa 750 and Nero 400. There are many other café chains and, while these numbers are small, compared to the numbers of pubs, there is definitely a trend here.
So, what have the pubs been doing about it? Well, the answer seems to be nothing much at all. They’re offering cheaper and cheaper drinks and meals and that’s obviously not working. What most of them seem to have overlooked is that there has been a bigger trend – people preferring to relax in a coffee house than in a pub. No one is sure why and it doesn’t matter – that’s what customers are preferring.
The Whitbread Experience
Whitbread, which sponsors the annual, round-the-world yacht race and is one of the biggest brewers and pub owners in UK and Ireland, have done something about the trend. Realising that people are preferring to relax in different surroundings, they studied cafés and then started their own – Costa, mentioned above.
Your Experience
Now, if you’re feeling a bit like the people at Whitbread, watching your customers walking off to spend their money elsewhere, you have two choices:
- Continue doing what you’ve always done and perhaps have to close, eventually, or
- Go out and see where your customers are now going and turn your business into something they like.
Like the Whitbread people, you don’t have to pay for expensive advice at all. Just nip next door to your (successful) competitors and observe. Take your note book along and write:
- What products they’re selling and how they’re packaging them.
- What type of facility (e.g. shop, warehouse, factory, office) they’re selling from – is it a quaint old barn, a swish new corporate office … note the architecture, the colour scheme, the carpets, the walls, the floors, the smells, the ornaments and everything else you can about the facility.
- What the staff are wearing and how they treat you. Note what words they use to greet you (if they do greet you at all!), how old are they, what gender are they, whether they’re in a uniform and anything else that’s different from your staff.
- How they promote their business – is it on the lowest price, the best quality, their environmental policy, their fair trade policy, their support of particular causes or organisations or their long history and/or expertise?
- What they use to get the customers back – loyalty programmes, newsletters, promotions and so on.
- Talk to their staff and ask what they like about working there and what changes are happening there.
- Talk to their customers and ask what they like about going there and why they keep going back.
There are a hundreds of things you can observe.
Look at how your business differs from theirs. Trying to work out why people do things is a waste of time – none of us know why we do most things anyway! Just become very objective, stop blaming and look at the facts – the differences between you and your more successful competitors. Then start implementing the changes you see that are working for them.
It may sound too simple but your competitors are often your best management consultants – use them!
*Don’t worry, there are still 53,400 pubs open in UK so there’ll be somewhere to drink when you visit!
Philip Bradbury CA
