I touched on this idea previously, in High Hanging Fruit, but let's explore the idea further:
When I was in the gallery business, we had a similar philosophy to Viaweb. We never had it easy, because our physical location was such that nobody could find us "by chance." Upon first thought, it seems that a low-traffic location would be a liability for an art gallery. But it turns out, the "bad" location was really an asset because we had to, by necessity, "run upstairs."
Here's what that meant in practice: We learned what works in advertising and what doesn't. We perfected phone follow-up systems. We took detailed notes about each customers' likes and dislikes...and we used those notes to match them to artwork...even if the match came years later [2]. We loaded up vans full of art and drove to clients' homes for in home sales. We developed computer systems to streamline all these processes.
We hired a professional photographer to teach us how to properly photograph artworks and then invested in the equipment to do it ourselves. We Fedexed photos all over the country. We invested in a great website and kept it up to date every single day. We learned what works and what doesn't in email marketing, shows, direct mail, and events. We took sales courses and got really great at selling. We treated our customer list as our biggest asset and invested huge amounts of time and money nurturing real relationships with those customers. We became friends with them. I'm still friends with some of those people. This is what all the Internet gurus tell you to do now, but back then, we figured it out on our own. [3]
Since I had never previously been in the gallery business, I had no conception of what was "normal". So to me, everything we were doing was normal. And I really didn't understand that we were "running upstairs" until one day, we hired an experienced salesperson who had cut her teeth at galleries in Scottsdale, Santa Fe, and Laguna Beach, all big art resort towns. She had sold very well in those towns and I was extremely excited to have landed a salesperson who had worked for the "big guys".
But, a couple of months went by and she had made virtually zero sales and started constantly complaining about our lack of walk in traffic. Eventually, she complained that you just couldn't sell much art in San Antonio.
But that had to be a false statement. All the rest of us were selling at breakneck speeds and we were in San Antonio. So, I tried to teach her our system of "running upstairs". But "that's so much work!" she complained.
She just didn't want to work that hard, so, after a couple more months, she moved on.
The reality is, I didn't want to work that hard either. But when you're running a business, you want to give yourself every advantage possible and build every asset that you possibly can.
