The Breakfast Nook
Dear Friend,
I've been working my ass off lately.
I'd say over the last 30 days, I've polished off well over 200 pages of sales copy for a variety of projects I'm involved with.
One of them was for my Information Marketing Seminar coming up next month in London -- http:www.kingofcopy.com/informationmarketingexpo -- another few sales letters have been for a publishing company I own, along with a couple of other partners (And as soon as those letters are "released", I'll show you them -- we're just in the final stages of "cleaning" up some of our products.)... I have two active client projects I'm working on right now (Again, as soon as the client starts rolling out their product, you'll be the first one to know)... and I've got approximately a half-dozen of my own information products I'm working on right now.
So yesterday, I took most of the day off -- I was really overdue for the rest.
Anne and I had some shopping to do, and we drove around to one of the smaller local malls here, in a town right next to ours, called "Land O' Lakes."
Land O' Lakes is a little bigger than our town (Lutz), but it's still got the same old country feel to it. About a mile up from the road side fruit stand on the east side of State Road 41, buried in a little quiet corner just off a gravel road, is a little restaurant called "The Breakfast Nook".
Anne drives by there often, after dropping our daughter off at school in the morning, and everytime she's passed "The Breakfast Nook", she's noticed how the parking lot is packed with wall-to-wall cars.
And that's always the best tell-tale signal about the quality of any restaurant, true?
So around 1:15 in the afternoon, we were driving by The Breakfast Nook and Anne noticed the parking lot wasn't too crowded. So she tugged on my arm, pointed over across my shoulder, and said "pull in there".
The Breakfast Nook is exactly like every little small country inn you've ever seen on television, or in the movies. The owners, Darrell and Cheryl Croteau, opened the restaurant this past February, and they serve breakfast and lunch there, between 7 a.m. and 2 p.m..
They close at 2 pm so they get home early enough to still have some kind of a life, and so they can spend time with their children who are 18, 16, and 8 years old.
For 13 years, the Croteau's owned a restauant called "Smitty's", but it was an "all day" restaurant, and Darrell used to get home no earlier than 11 o'clock every night, and they decided to shut it down to get some "normalcy" back into their lives.
Darrell and Cheryl and I were talking a bit about marketing, and they said they've been swamped with business since they opened their doors, and they've never spent even a dollar on any kind of marketing.
Apparently, they had a great reputation in the community when they ran Smitty's (I can see why, because the food at The Breakfast Nook was outstanding.), so when they opened this new restaurant, they just put together a few press releases, and the local newspaper was more than happy to write up a short story or two about their new venture, and that's how word spread.
More importantly than any of this, Darrell Told me what convinced him to open The Breakfast Nook up, was...
The fact that there were NO breakfast places at ALL in Land O' Lakes.
So, it was a simple fact of Darrell identifying a market that wasn't being served, and whaddya know, 7 months later, he's sitting on a little cash cow.
See, you don't need a big fancy schmancy product to be a success, and you don't need overblown (but under-qualified) marketing to make a killing either.
You just need to find a marketplace, and then fill its wants.
Easy, right?
One thing I suggested was that Darrel raise his prices a bit -- for lunch I ordered a nice piece of fresh blackened grouper, a HUGE side salad with oil and vinegar,onion rings (which I gave to Anne), and a diet Pepsi -- all for $5.99!
And I don't know about you, but I don't think I've spent $5.99 on a lunch that size since I was 15 years old!
Try doing that at Chili's or Applebee's one of the other local chain restaurants in your town.
Keep the simplicity of these details in the back of your mind the next time you're getting ready to market something, or even the next time you're getting ready to send an e-mail or a sales letter to one of your customers or clients.
In fact, sometimes I wish things were a lot simpler all over. I wish there were no hurricanes... I wish I didn't have to see grown mean screaming in fear on television because their infant sons and daughters have no food to eat... and I wish every time there was a crisis, some cannabilistic a-holes weren't around to leverage someone else's suffering into penny ante opportunities for themselves.
Perhaps it's just better when I'm just holed up in my office writing. Things are simple there. I listen to my stereo and my tapes... I look out over the lake... and right now I'm even watching my older son Nick mowing the lawn (he's listening to his i-pod while he's doing this -- smart kid).
Because in a case like this, a part of me strongly feels...
Ignorance... really is bliss.
Now go sell something,
Craig Garber
Any comments?
Send them to me by scooting over to the contact form on my "Here's How To Contact Craig" page, and maybe I'll publish them -- I appreciate your feedback!
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