As we continue with the quest to save people from the evils of bad coffee it is becoming more evident that just our mere presence at a location is not enough to draw in the uninitiated and that we have to “hustle” to bring people over. By “hustle” of course I mean give out free samples of our product or other free swag to let people know exactly what we serve. Recently we participated at Hellderado Days and had a prime location and I was confident that we would just crush it, but midway through the first day we hardly had any sales. A quick look around told me what the problem was. Every other vendor there had numerous signs pointing out their various products or services. All I have is the trailer with the Grouchy John logo and although the logo is awesome, it’s not enough to attract people to get a drink (especially when it’s not cold…more on this later)
So that’s when we decided to start serving samples to the masses and guess what, it worked. Okay it wasn’t like an opening of the flood gates but I would attribute at least 20% of our sales on the 2nd and 3rd day of Hellderado to our “hustle”. Some of you reading this might think that this was such common sense that we should have been doing this all along, but honestly it never really occurred to me. Besdies would you take anything from two guys who look like this:
Not to say we didn’t try but we had much more success when Princess Amy volunteered a few hours on each day to be our third and hand out samples. So lesson learned. Get more signage and a cute girl to hand out samples. Of course all this “hustle” goes out the window when it starts getting cold because then for some reason everyone knows exactly what we do and where we are at when the temperature drops below 70 . On the last day of Hellderado it was windy and cold and once the sun went down we have a line 10-15 deep waiting to order and we ended up having to call for a resupply half way through and even then we still ran out of product.
But the “hustle” doesn’t stop there. We have other ideas for when we start our route to drum up business other then tweeting out our location. If you follow us on Twitter (@grouchyjohns) we also occasionally will tweet out a BOGO (buy one get one) word that will either have to be used in a sentence or pronounced correctly. We have also been talking about visiting businesses around the area we are serving the day before and posting flyers, or on the day of visiting all adjacent business with samples for their office.
I guess you could even classify this blog as part of the “hustle” even though it is just a way for me to record my progress through this adventure. I guess I’ll just chalk this up to one more thing I have learned that I should have know all along (there are a lot of those).
