stuff4restaurants

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed so you don't miss any of the NEW IDEAS posted twice per day. Thanks for visiting!

The very nervous owner of a small suburban donut store stepped up to the microphone. In a trembling voice, that betrayed his obvious inexperience of public speaking, he told the audience of 300 other donut store owners: how each day, he placed a card table loaded with “take home packs” outside his store, he told the gathering, this simple display had resulted in a $200.00 per day increase in sales.

Beside me, the expensively suited head of corporate marketing did a very bad job of trying to disguise his professional disdain for this seemingly amateurish promotional initiative. After all, he had just finished delivering his full Multi-media PowerPoint presentation on the upcoming launch, of the new multimillion dollar T.V. Advertising campaign.

The date was November 2000. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had just witnessed an event that was going to profoundly change the way I conducted by business consulting career.

You see, just four weeks later, whilst analysing the past months sales figures, which included the initial results from the new T.V. campaign, We discovered unexpected trends.

Yes, the T.V. campaign was increasing sales, on average, by about $300.00 per store, per week, not a bad result, but not exactly “breakthrough” stuff.

However, upon further analysis, we discovered some stores were showing increases of over $1,200.00 per week. So, in an effort to understand this anomaly a little better, I got on the phone to a few of those stores, was it that they were doing a better job of staff involvement or were their point of sales displays being positioned differently?

I quickly discovered that their dramatic sales increases were not a result of the multimillion dollar T.V. campaign, instead, they were a direct result of putting card tables, packed with take home packs, outside their stores.

One simple, seemingly amateurish, IDEA, scoffed at by the office bound marketing professionals, had by far, outperformed their multimillion dollar Advertising campaign.

Just one simple idea, when shared, resulted in 300 stores discovering a way to increase their sales by over $1,000.00 per week, each.

You do the maths, that’s $1,000.00 x 52 weeks x 300 stores, Yeah!… that’s right, an increase of fifteen million, six hundred thousand dollars.

JUST IMAGINE…
What would happen if every franchisee shared just one idea each that resulted in an increase of even $500.00 per week. To save you the effort, I’ll do the maths for you but please feel free to check…

300 stores x($500.00 x52 weeks)x 300 new ideas = YES, AN AMAZING $2.3 billion extra dollars per year.

We immediately established a password protected corporate blog site and sat back and watched as individually tested ideas poured in. Today, the owners continue to tell each other exactly what worked and what didn’t… it’s astoundingly, exciting, powerful, stuff…

Now, seven exhilarating years later I can tell you IT WORKS! and not just in donut stores, it literally SUPERCHARGES every single business I have introduced it to.

If you are not harnessing the collective ideas from all your stakeholders you are missing out on a HUGE opportunity, and I can absolutely assure you, right now, somewhere in the world, your potential, emerging opposition, is…

Trackback URI | Comments RSS