As the Principal and Gourmet Coffee Roaster of Lake City Coffee, I can confidently say that just having a great product isn’t enough to succeed. A successful business is also built upon tried, true, and tested processes, procedures, and tools. The challenge is that testing everything from one end of your business to the other takes time.
If you study the history of business, you’ll find that from the Romans to the ancient Chinese, from the British Empire to the American colonies, all the way to the present era, what you’ll find is that growing a business is a slow and arduous process. In spite of modern technology, growing a business still takes time. A lot of time. And there are NO short cuts. But there is a faster way to test what works and what doesn’t.
Who & What Are We Serving?
In my experience, it takes the first year to just figure out exactly what you’re truly selling and who your customers truly are. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard successful business owners say that they started out doing one thing, only to end up doing something entirely different.
If business owners have one thing in common, it’s that we have a high tolerance for failure because we are the eternal optimists, having far more faith in our ideas and plans than they certainly deserve. Long past the point when a reasonable person would have quit, we’re still in there trying to quickly figure out what works and what doesn’t work.
Old But Not Dead
Wash-N-Repeat
I was attending a business-networking event in Coeur d’Alene Idaho, when I met a fellow businessman and entrepreneur Arthur Shaw. Arthur owns an ITEX franchise. ITEX is the country’s largest bartering service consisting of 25,000 small business owners like me. It also has an online marketplace where its members advertise and sell their wares to each other.
Our Rapid Testing Platform
Thanks to my ITEX broker Arthur and his tireless efforts in promoting our business to the ITEX community, the first month we did over $2,000 in ITEX sales. By the end of the first full year we did over $29,000 in ITEX sales. But more importantly, we had a viable and repeatable testing-platform.
Lessons Learned
Most significantly, we quickly learned exactly what people wanted and we learned exactly who our customers were. If we never made a dime from our ITEX membership, these lessons alone would have been worth it. Without using ITEX as a testing platform, it would have taken us years to learn these lessons. Instead, we had a handle on our problems in a few short weeks. Then it was just a matter of tweaking, re-testing, and doing it all over again, with near instant feedback.
Moving From ITEX to Cash
As a result of our SEO efforts, Lake City Coffee is now very highly ranked on Google for:
- Coeur d’Alene Coffee Roaster
- Coeur d’Alene Gourmet Coffee Roaster
- Coeur d’Alene Coffee Roasting Company
- Coeur d’Alene Whole Bean Coffee
- Coeur d’Alene Gourmet Coffee
- Spokane Whole Bean Coffee
- Spokane Gourmet Coffee Roaster
- Spokane Whole Bean Coffee
- Best Spokane Gourmet Coffee Roaster
Including about a dozen other cities.
Gourmet Coffee Roaster Ranking
Albert Einstein said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” We never would have made it as a Gourmet Coffee Roaster if it wasn’t for our very efficient and effective testing platform. My advice is, when starting a new business is to fail fast and fail small by using a testing platform like ITEX.
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