Does it hurt you when you go into a business that you love or used to love and they’re just not that busy? That’s the experience that I’ve been having at a grocery store near me that used to have the best fruits and vegetables at reasonable prices. And I’m not just talking lettuce and carrots and things from the potato family, but lots of exotic fruits that your kids would ask you about and you’d normally say “maybe if we’re ever on vacation in a tropical location” (translation: not happening). In the last 6-8 months though the store has changed and it hurts me to shop there now for several reasons, but most because I know what the store used to be and am sad that they aren’t as busy as they are. Let’s talk about some of the things that are hindering their success.
One of the big changes that has happened is they did a little redesign and started offering more products outside of their original core offerings. So now it’s a lot more like a regular grocery store and less like a farmer’s market. Every business has choices to make about how they’re going to grow if they’re interested in growing. I think the store made a wise choice in what they added and how they’ve displayed it. All the things they’ve done should be adding to their receipts, but instead there aren’t any lines to check out and I’d guess that receipts are smaller than they used to be. Why? Because they haven’t paid enough attention to the core reason they’re in business, the core reason that people are shopping with them in the first place. Their core offerings have been much higher priced, had very little available, and aren’t always in the freshest condition, which means that people think twice before shopping there when before it was a no brainer. Expansion is great, but not at the cost of losing your customers and not being able to replace them.
There’s something though that they’ve never done well, and that’s marketing. Prior to the renovation and lower inventory that they’ve had recently for some reason, they didn’t need to do a whole lot of marketing because people knew that they’d have a large variety of good stuff and could get what they needed at great prices and people would just show up and shop for whatever they had. But they didn’t change and start marketing once they did the renovation, which would have been smart so they could let people know about all the new awesome stuff they had and how fresh the store looked and felt. They aren’t on social media, they don’t have a newsletter, and they aren’t working with local food bloggers, essentially they aren’t doing any of the really simple and inexpensive stuff that would help keep them top-of-mind to local shoppers without taking away too much from their bottom line.
So if you’re thinking about an expansion for your business, make sure that you’re ready with the marketing to tell the world about the awesome new stuff you’ve got going on, and don’t ever neglect the pieces that are core to who you are as a business because it often turns what could have been a great growth opportunity into the end of a business. What lessons have you learned as you’ve grown your business?