Small Ideas, Big Impact

Sometimes simple things can make big positive impact on your business and change the future of your business 360 degrees !

I am  going to share some instances of how simple things employed by
small shops in various parts of India were very effective in attracting customers, improving revenues and cutting costs.

Here is a question to readers – Have you spent time on thinking about some basic simple things you can implement which have power to positively turnaround your business?

Here are couple of real-life examples that will probably get my point across:

Scene1:

I did my schooling and undergrad in Chennai. For most part of my life I
lived in a place called Saidapet which is one of the biggest residential areas in Chennai  for middleclass and lower middle class people.I stayed just opposite to  the railway station and there were two streets on either side of my house leading to the residential areas.Both these streets had similar shops like a PCO, Xerox, Ice cream parlour, Peanut vendors etc.

I will cut out directly in to business part without further explanation. I noticed that a peanut vendor on one of the streets (shop A) made more money and attracted more customers than the peanut vendor (shop B) on the parallel street.

This was quite confusing, since the amount of population moving in to both the streets are approximately same and their spending capacity also seems to be similar. Being inquisitive, I spent a couple of hours watching  these shops on a weekend. Better than I expected ‘shop A’ seems to be having 7-8 times the customers what ‘shop B’ was having.

It took me a while to find out the reason , but then it was actually quite simple and evident. ‘shop A’ had a big oval 1000W neon bulb hanging at the front of his shop (I am not sure of the watts:). In the evening, kids, teens and people coming out of the railway station got psychologically attracted to the shop and  bought peanuts for 1-2 re. But the better part was people going in cycles and bikes also noticed this shop and stopped for a minute to get their favourite nuts.

This reason cannot be verified but I am sure that a very brightly lit
front end was raking in good profits for the ‘shop A’ peanut vendor.

Scene2:

Once the Punjabi dhabas  in western India situated on the highway side, faced some serious problems when the number of customers increased during the start of the month. The problem was it was very difficult to make  "lassi" for more than half a dozen people at once.

Most customers to these dhaba wanted to finish their meal only with a lassi. So these dhabbas spoke to some industry people and asked for a special lassi machine that can make lassi for 50 people at once.

The machine was designed and it was supposed to cost around 50K since only dhabas wanted it and no one else. One of the  shrewd Sardars came up with a  stunning idea. It was simple & effective ! He asked,

Why don’t we buy second hand washing machines and use them to mix & make lassi?

The cost was less than 5k and today lot of dhabas on the highway belt
use washing machines to mix and make their lassi.

[I do not remember the source of the above instance (my apologies), but it is a fact].

Have you come across such simple things that have made major impact on businesses? would love to hear that..

[This guest post has been submitted by one of our regular reader –Ganesan Vijay Srinivas]