This weekend my husband Fred and I took our house guests, Steve and Carolyn Winstrup from Cincinnati, to one of our favorite spring events: A mud sale in Lancaster County. These sales, put on by local fire departments, are called mud sales because it's usually raining this time of year and the fields are muddy.
Everything is auctioned off - from horses to hand made quilts to plants to junk. For us the fascination is not in the goods being auctioned but in the people who attend. The Amish, by far, out number the "civilians" by probably 4 to 1. It is a sea of black suits and straw hats. 
What struck me this year at the Gap mud sale were the number of young Amish entrepreneurs taking advantage of people needing help. Every time we turned around, another enterprising young boy was scooting with a hand made advertisement on the back of his wagon looking for a customer who needed a ride, a lift or a way to get their goods to the car parked a half mile up the road.
And it made me ask my self, how much do you go out of your way to help your customers? What do you do to "give them a lift"? After all, isn't the first rule of marketing, "Find a need and fill it"?So what are you going to do today, in your business, to tap into that raw spirit of the young Amish boys and find more ways to help your customers? How are you going to help them do the "heavy lifting"?
No comments:
Post a Comment