Don’t Bite The Hand The Feeds You

Recently we had an experience with a local coffee shop that I had to share with you.

Now anyone that knows me knows that I spend a lot of time in coffee shops. I like them and I do love a large mocha (or three). I tend to spend a lot of money with a good coffee shop that I like.

Now I don’t know if you know this or not but I also co-host an Internet TV show with a friend of mine (you can check it out at www.WhatIsTheFusion.com). We had been hosting the show at this small independent coffee shop both because we liked the place but also because we wanted to help get them some extra exposure.

Recently the place was sold to another owner. We go in and set up for our show (not knowing it had been sold) and meet the new owner. It was obvious right way that she wasn’t kicking us out for that taping but she really didn’t want us there.

It seems that she expected to get a flood of people (more than the usual 10 that we usually see while we are taping the show) and that she wasn’t pleased with us taking up space in her new place.

Now, let me set the stage for you. We promote the location at least twice on every show. We blast it out to all our Social Media sites (about 5 people involved with this all doing this), we post their link on our website, we tell all our friends and other people we meet about the place and tell them to come down and watch the taping live.

On top of this, I know that between us every time we go in just to tape a show we end up spending over $30 during that one hour.

You would think that alone would encourage the support from the new owner.

But she was not seeing the big picture. She saw us as “taking up space” instead of seeing all the publicity we gave her just for letting us use the chairs in the corner once every two weeks.

There’s more to the story that fed into us finally not only moving the show to a new location but also to telling others about the experience and that we were not welcome in this place any more.

Long story short, her lack of seeing the big picture had lead to what I would estimate as easily over $200 per week in coffee sales. For a small independent coffee shop, that’s a decent amount of income. Especially since we were helping grow the business by our word of mouth.

The point of the story is that you need to look at the big picture in your business. Are there great raving fans that you are driving away because of policy or small picture thinking like “are they taking up space for other customers?”

Remember that we all need to keep a pulse on our customers and take care of them. Make them feel cared for. Make them feel wanted. And don’t let small thinking cloud your vision of how things should look.