MISSED CONNECTIONS

There’s a breakfast place we like with great food and about six tables, so the line can get long at times and there is no indoor space to keep warm in the winter. When you get to the front door, you just put down your name, number of covers, and your cell number. When they get to your name, they ping you.

This is an improvement from those clunky pagers that restaurants handed you in the olden days (two years ago!!!), the devices that buzzed and blinked and alerted everyone within 50 feet that your table was ready. And, for sharp owners, this little sign-up sheet is a potential gold mine.

While a sign on the wall implores guests to like the place on FaceBook only 1,000 people have bothered to do so in the past five years. During that time period, though, at least 20 times that many (five/day?) have handed over their cellphone numbers.

This is what we in the consulting business call an opportunity. At the end of each day, the restaurant owner could send a 50-word thank-you to all the customers who left their phone numbers. The owner could ask for permission to add the customers to a list to receive future communication, ask the customer for a FaceBook like, offer the customer 10% off if they come back within 10 days and show the text on their phones. The potential benefits of noninvasive texting could be substantial.

At the end of each day, though, the owner tears the sign-in sheets off the legal pad and tosses them into the trash. And with those jotted numbers go all kinds of opportunities to build repeat business, strengthen relationships, and possibly identify a location for a larger restaurant.

What opportunities are your customers providing to you, and how are you leveraging the messages they’re sending?  This week, key customers will be providing insights to someone in your organization about their needs for next year, upcoming challenges that your firm can resolve, other businesses that could become your clients, and a myriad of opportunities that can build relationships, reliance, revenue and referrals.

Most likely, your customers aren’t accommodating enough to stop in and write all of those ideas on a single legal pad. Still, it is a relatively straightforward process to assess client needs and respond profitably.

___________________

• Identify the shortest path to stronger profitability.
• Build enterprise value in advance of a liquidity event.
• Develop a strategic plan that can be implemented successfully.
• Perform customer/market due diligence on an acquisition target.
• Accelerate profitable integration of a merged business.
• Protect against customer turnover or lost sales.
• Recoup the cash that is wasted on unprofitable marketing/sales initiatives.

To learn more, please contact Michael Rosenbaum (michael@quadrantfivefocus.com) or visit our website (www.quadrantfivefocus.com).