Are you turning away customers at the front door?

Business is HARD! We all know that or everybody would be a business owner. It’s not for the faint of heart, that’s for sure.

But to run a business, you’ve got to work it smart. And part of that means not losing customers before they’ve even set a foot in the door!

I was inspired to write this post today after an experience I had yesterday which made me think some people really shouldn’t be running a business!

What happened?

We had a 10 am meeting yesterday with my accountant and we decided to meet at her office as we were doing a training session and she had suitable meeting facilities. We arrived at the venue early at 9.30 am and decided we’d go for breakfast since we had half an hour to kill.

There was a row of small cafes and restaurants in the block beside my accountant’s office so we walked down to explore. This is in a location at the base of a massive office building, and a few others nearby besides, and there were plenty of people around at the time also looking for a place to sit down and have a drink or get breakfast.

In other words, if you are a cafe owner, it’s the ideal location to run a business serving the early crowd. If you know how to run a cafe at all.

Except that none of the establishments on the row, except for one, was geared up for business.

We had a walk down the row and checked out the boards outside each cafe, deciding which we fancied eating. There was one cafe which seemed quite busy, but the menu wasn’t very healthy so it definitely wasn’t a first choice for me. We walked on.

Two of them weren’t open until 10 am.

The first we went into looked promising. We tried to place an order only to be told that they were only serving drinks and the food menu would start at 10 am! Why would you not be ready to serve people who walk in during opening hours?

So we had no choice but to seek another option.

The next cafe made it really hard to buy from. The menu wasn’t clear, the staff clearly weren’t interested in getting any business in and the layout made it look like a cafe in a war zone with plastic screens separating patrons from the staff. Very weird. Anyway, we worked out the menu and opted for an avocado spread which had the option of sourdough bread, croissant or bagel. My daughter wanted the croissant and I wanted the sourdough, but of course, they only had bagels. What kind of cafe doesn’t have the stock at the beginning of the business day? So we chose to leave it and try another cafe. By now our options were running low.

In fact all that was left was a takeaway from the seven eleven or the previously mentioned busy cafe with the less healthy food menu. The latter is where we ended up eating. Now this cafe also wasn’t great - we had to wait a long time for our order, service was dire, and our food came in dribs and drabs. However, the business had customers, partly due to its lower price point and partly due to having zero competition on the row!

Any of the other businesses that took time to take stock of the competition, and set themselves apart based on a USP that took advantage of where all the others had failed, would have made a killing.

It wasn’t that the other cafes didn’t have willing customers ready to buy. They just weren’t able to serve them. They were literally turning away walk-in customers at the door when it was painfully obvious they needed the clientele!

This would have been a problem solved if any of them had followed my Get Ready Get Seen Get Business Framework. In each case, they simply weren’t ready to Get Business and maximise the business opportunity they had in front of them because they hadn’t done the groundwork necessary to Get Ready.

I cover how to avoid this problem in my My Business Launchpad coaching programme and course now open for enrolment. If you are thinking of starting or have just started your own business and you know that business foundations are really important to get right, book a call with me and let’s see if we are a fit.