bwagy, the blog of Ben Young

It is industry practice to give the worst room to walk in guests. (Travel tip: never accept the first room they offer).

Sure there are many reasons behind it but to be honest I don’t really care.

If you have a walk in and rooms are available – give them the best damn room you can.  Hell if the best room is empty.  Upgrade them!

You need to obsess about each and every visitor.  They may only visit once but for every person they tell about their trip or provide tips to a friend heading the same way, you want them to recommend you over and over again.  If you impress them you might get decades of referrals – what better way to build a solid business.

Makes complete sense to me.

Or the upsell – depending how you look at it.

Buy a Playstation – what’s the next thing you buy? An extra controller, a game, a stand.

Playstation3 even lost money for every unit they sold.  Why? Well they needed to establish market share as all the profit is in peripherals and games.  If they can gain that market share they can keep profiting for each and every add on purchased.

You see the same with iPods, Beds, Tvs.

But how can you do the double sell for services?  Whereby you sell an excellent product but you can maximise your profits through the value added peripheral services.  You are probably creating more problems with your solution anyway – so why not do the double sell and solve them.  That would be a real big win.

This is the message you’ll get if you send me an email to [email protected], I’m out of town for the rest of the week taking some time off.

So if you’d like an email telling you how good looking you are to cheer you up whilst the blog is away feel free to flick me an email which will trigger my vacation responder.

Catch you all on the 8th! -Ben

I help organise a local tech entrepreneurs drinks once a month, it was at the last one I was discussing Chris Andersons article Free… with Nic of Litmos a few night backs, we both agreed that yes you can get undercut by free.

BUT

If you look at the long run, who is still about, who keeps turning up? It’s those that persevere.

(Especially when you look at bootstrapped startups.)

In order to do so you must be making money somewhere.

You must also have a passion for what you do.

Sure someone can undercut your service by making it free but do they have the passion to keep at it? Through the hard times, the ups and the downs.

You see you can be undercut by free and still thrive but being undercut by passion? That’s a hard hard battle.

You should stick to what you’re passionate about.