Some Simple Ideas

We are still adjusting to our new surroundings in Michigan, and as a result we have been wandering around looking into businesses both new and familiar. Most of the national chain companies you would expect to find anywhere have already colonized Michigan, but the regional businesses one would expect to see in the Southwest are absent here, and not all of the same niches are being filled. The business climate of the upper Midwest seems to be different from any of the other regions I have visited, and even some of the familiar companies are doing things differently here. I have already noted several relatively simple concepts that are unheard of in Los Angeles, and yet appear to have great potential, especially in this environment…

Take, for example, the sandwich company known as Jimmy Johns. They appear to have franchised operations running in about 35 states, including California, but have not reached the West Coast cities yet. It’s a fast-food sandwich company that would compete for market share with Subway, Quiznos, or Blimpie. But where the competition has attempted to widen their product line, offering salads, soups, wraps, hot/toasted sandwiches, cookies, and other products, Jimmy John’s appears to have narrowed their focus to just making sandwiches (and chips and drinks, of course). Instead of offering a wider range of food products, the company concentrates on speed and high-quality ingredients. As a result, their production time is faster than any of the competition, and the limited number of traditional sandwiches they do offer taste better than any of the competing products…

Now, this is hardly an advanced, high-tech concept. The company has effectively abandoned those segments of the lunch market that want salads, wraps, soups and the like to their competition, and is instead offering a lunch service so fast that anyone should be able to make use of it, and food that is generally superior to the competition’s equivalent. If you are looking for any of those other food products you would probably not select this chain, but if you just want a simple turkey sub, for example, I can’t imagine why you would go anywhere else – especially on a short lunch break. It’s unusual to see a company electing to emphasize both speed and quality in their business model, but within this context it works very well – and it’s worth noting that the Jimmy John’s we visited was also cheaper than the competition (presumably because of the simpler equipment and supply requirements)…

The other new idea we encountered last week was even simpler: a large, empty room with seating for about thirty or forty people around several large tables. What makes this a business concept is that the room is located in the basement of the Barnes and Noble location just off campus in East Lansing, and signed “Spartan Reading Room.” It’s a study center, ostensibly for students from the giant university across the street (Michigan State’s athletic teams are called the “Spartans,” and therefore so are all those who attend the school), but actually open to anyone who wants to come down there and quietly read or study. It’s probably not much of a draw during the summer, when school is out and the town’s population has dropped by more than half. But I’ll bet you can’t get a seat down there during finals week each semester, and it’s probably a hugely popular location any time the library is crowded or the weather is bad – which is going to be fairly often…

Now, I realize that both of these are relatively simple concepts, and may not be anything that your business can make use of. But they do beg the question: what simple innovations could YOU come up with, if you thought about it? In both cases, we’re talking about simple ideas that do not cost the company anything to provide (in the first case they actually lower operations costs), but offer increased value to the customer. It’s an idea worth thinking about…