Get Hopping

If anyone is still reading this blog, you may recall a story I commented on last summer about the City of Los Angeles using goats for brush clearance. It’s a very green measure, in that it helps to reduce the risk of brushfires while at the same time not using any gasoline-powered equipment in an environment that still suffers from excessive smog. That didn’t keep the Union people from hating it because it only provided work for a single goatherd for a few weeks, instead of a squad of City employees for the whole summer…

This week, with wildfires burning in the Santa Barbara area that were supposedly started by a spark generated by gas-powered brush-clearing tools, I read with great interest a story about an enterprise in the UK that is selling wallabies, which they breed for the purpose, as lawn-maintenance (and, one assumes, grass removal) measures. You can read the story in The London Times website if you want to, but the basic theme is the same: wallabies start at about $300 USD, cost almost nothing to feed (they mostly just munch on the lawn) and require no more care than a large rabbit does. They don’t need to be sheered, dipped, wormed or herded, and you don’t have to worry about them head-butting people, ripping the grass out by the roots (and eating the roots) or trying to eat the siding off of your house. You need at least half an acre of lawn, and a rather tall fence, but otherwise you just turn them loose and let them feed…

Of course, the wallabies aren’t going to be much help with brush clearance; for that the goats (which are renowned for eating almost anything they encounter) will be more useful. I call this to your attention more because of the ingenuity of the businessman in the story than because of its revolutionary nature. Granted that natural and organic gardening methods are probably a good idea, most of us do not live on an estate in the English countryside, and will therefore not be keeping a wallaby in the garden anytime soon. The idea of breeding large marsupials for sale as family pets, and then discovering their dual-purpose nature standing in for sheep or other grazing animals as groundskeepers, however, is truly brilliant – and leads me to ask you to take another look at your own business model one more time…

It has been said that there is no tool so useless that you can’t find something to fix with it – assuming that you bother to look, and that you know how to fix things in the first place. The same is also true of most, if not all, business models. The next time you’re thinking about how to boost sales of your product or service, take a moment and consider if it could be repurposed, converted to a different application, or just marketed to a different group of potential customers. Just because you were planning around the domestic pet market doesn’t mean that you can’t sell to the landscape management market as well…

Particularly if your main product consists of large marsupial herbivores…