A couple of weeks ago while walking through the town centre, I saw several people carrying armfuls of stuff from a large van into a shop. From what I could see, they had taken over the lease and were preparing to open up the shop as a café-come-shop.
You know the type, the ones which are mostly a café but have shelves of tat for sale dotted around the sides.
The hand scrawled cardboard sign in the window informed the passersby of the name and open date for the new café-come-shop.
It looked a mess.
But with them carrying stuff into the shop and setting up, that’s forgivable… I mean, they are setting up, it’s not open day… it will look a lot better on open day, won’t it?
Wrong.
My wife walked past the other day and the café-come-shop is now open… and it looks just as bad as the day they were setting up.
Even the hand scrawled sign was still in the window.
I get the feeling that this was a business set up by chancers with no funds, chancers who had the ‘good’ idea to open up a café and a shop.
They couldn’t decide which to do, so they went with both.
It works for IKEA, so why couldn’t it work for them?
But unlike IKEA who spend millions on their stores, these guys spent no time or money on new signs, furniture or shelving.
Basically, it looked like a charity shop which sold a few sandwiches.
Actually, that is rather unfair on charity shops today, they spend a lot of money on their branding and shop frontage… and so they should.
If something doesn’t look ‘the part’ or doesn’t look ‘right’ in anyway, it will kill off your chances of success right from the get go.
Another example of this would be when Andi went to the local Sunday car boot market which is held on a former World War Two airbase. It used to be one of the biggest in the country and so every Sunday it would attract thousands of people.
As you know, people get hungry and they like to eat and drink so the car boot would also attract several food vendors.
Chips, burgers, jacket potatoes, fish and chips, you name it, there was a van selling it.
Andi recalls that the day he went, there was a battered old red transit van there with three ‘dirty dodgy’ looking guys – his words not mine – trying to sell hot dogs cooked on a camping stove set up on a rickety camping table.
They too had a hand scrawled cardboard sign saying something along the lines of “Hot dogs, £1.00”.
They were selling hot dogs far cheaper than any of the other stalls.
The reason Andi said they were dirty is that they were dirty.
Their attire was muddy wellies, jeans covered in mud and oil and they were wearing jumpers or jackets which too needed a good wash.
As soon as Andi and his good lady clapped eyes on the makeshift food stall, their reaction was more of repulsion than attraction.
They did not rush over to buy the bargain hot dogs… well Andi wouldn’t anyway, he doesn’t eat meat like us normal people.
I cannot fault their entrepreneurial spirit. They went and set up a stall selling something that people wanted at a price which was better than the competition.
However…
People were put off at the fact that they didn’t look like they were:
- Clean – Hygiene is incredibly important for people when they are buying food.
- Legally compliant – They can undercut prices if they are not paying for insurances and certificates. And if they aren’t prepared to do what’s ‘correct and legal’ what else are they prepared to NOT do? Like wash hands and equipment taking us back to point 1.
The way their makeshift stall appeared to the people at the car boot raised more questions than ‘Mavis, do you want a hot dog?’
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Very few people looked at the stall and just thought ‘Ohhhh, hot dogs, they look good’.
They looked at it and promptly walked past it as fast as they could preferring to pay an extra pound or two at the other food vans which looked… well, like actual food vans.
The same thing will happen to this new café-come-shop.
They simply do not look the part.
Yes, they may appeal to a few people. Those who have very little spare money and can only afford £0.50 for a cup of tea and need a natter to lift their spirits.
The kind of people who want to buy a pair of shoes for fifty pence from Oxfam and moaned when Mary ‘Queen of Shops’ Portas insisted that charity shops should increase their prices so that they can raise more money for good causes.
Those are not the type of people which keeps a business running.
Most people will walk right past that café-come-shop and pop into Costa Coffee and pay £2.50 – £3 for a coffee and possibly £4.80 for a sausage roll.
Yes, you read that right… Costa Coffee are – at time of writing – trialling the sale of food from Marks and Spencer’s and currently an M&S sausage roll costs £4 to take out or £4.80 to eat in.
That might be a price too far when you can walk a few metres further up the street (or across the street) and buy a sausage roll from Greggs for a pound or so.
Anyway I digress, that is a discussion for another day…
But the point stands, if your company or business doesn’t look the part in any shape or form, people will take their money elsewhere.
It’s called professionalism… or in this case, the lack of.
Looking scruffy and having a messy workplace doesn’t mean that you personally cannot deliver a decent service or supply properly cooked tasty food, but it will minimise the amount of people who will give you a chance to prove it.
Fortunately, when it comes to making money from home, your appearance and professionalism is unimportant.
You can sit on your sofa in your pyjamas with toast crumbs around your chops and still make money.
There are many ways to make money today from home where you are completely anonymous. No one needs to know who you are or what you look like.
You only need to focus on making money. All of the other problems and concerns offline businesses have to deal with do not matter to you in the slightest.
Take Roger Blake for instance, he turns £7.50 into a huge £75+ profit without ever leaving his home and without anyone actually knowing who he is.
No one speaks to him directly online or offline.
Yet they spend over £75 to buy from him something they need which he paid only £7.50 for.
And he does that from home at a time that suits him because the actually buying and selling process is managed by other people.
If you would like to know more click the link below.
www.MagicMultiplier.co.uk
Kind Regards
John Harrison
PS… This is one of the simplest methods we have see in recent years where you buy a simple digital asset and then sell it to someone else for a huge £75+ profit.
And you can get started today for as little as £7.50!
Here’s that link again.