Hi all,
Here we are, mid-September already and for the first time in weeks I walked into Frank’s Market last Saturday with some proper free seats :).
And I can tell you that living where you go on holidays, is also the perfect place to feel immediately when the season starts to turn. No more RV cruising at 5mph, energy changes, the team looks slightly more destroyed (excepted for the LOBBY Studio one as we start back in September…) But September is where you have enough space in your head to ask the question you avoided all summer: what the fuck just happened?
This is usually the moment where I open the numbers for all my different summer-related businesses (FM, House rental and hotel). Giving a look to the margins, average basket, occupancy, whatever applies to the business. Then we decide whether the season was good or bad based on the result showing up on my screen. You know this feeling of coming back home thinking you have a major surprise for everyone or the worst news (and you partner in crime that will need to hold you til the end of the week…)
But yeah, I think that’s a pretty limited way to read a summer.
For two or three months, hundreds of people came into your place and used it however they wanted. They sat where they wanted, ordered what they wanted, ignored things you spent weeks designing, became obsessed with things you thought about, arrived at hours you didn’t expect and asked for stuff you never planned to offer.
And they did all of that without reading your concept deck.
That’s the useful part.
People used your place exactly as they understood it, which is often slightly different from the place you thought you had built.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot with Frank’s Market this summer. We opened the doors with a pretty clear idea of what the place was supposed to be, then people arrived and started rewriting parts of it for us. We decided not to brand the place as a Surf coffee shop, so we don’t have any boards inside the coffee, because I wanted to let this ecosystem to the right people :) The one that know the topic 10x more than me. But at the end, we had more surfers that we thought, people asking for wax everyday, and why we don’t sell surfboards…
Right now, everyone who worked through the season still remembers what really happened. From the strange requests of this woman, the table nobody wanted, the juice you kept running out of, the exact hour everything went to shit, the customers who came back every week and the ideas that sounded incredibly important in May but nobody cared about once the doors opened.
That memory disappears fast.
By November it becomes a story. By January it becomes strategy. Somewhere in between, we usually start rewriting history.
So this week I want to talk about what the season actually told you, how to understand whether people genuinely chose your place, what your customers quietly changed inside your concept, and what you should probably remove before next year.
Let’s get into it. BELOW my friends :)
