About a month ago I was scrolling our local Facebook group and someone posted a screenshot of a map, and on that map it said CUDDING SHED TAP ROOM.

On the road I live on. Excuse me???

There’s a tap room half a mile from my house and NOBODY THOUGHT TO TELL ME.

Obviously we went.

Turns out my dad knows the bloke who owns the farm, because of course he does, and the tap room is literally in one of the barns. They make cider on site, they do BBQ food, it opened less than a year ago and every single time we’ve been it’s been absolutely rammed.

Loads of farmers around here have sold land for housing, but this particular farm sits awkwardly between two gas supplies, which makes it a much less attractive prospect for developers because putting all the utilities in would eat most of the upside. So selling the land and watching 700 grey new-builds appear on it wasn’t really an option.

Instead, they started looking at what else they could do with it.

A couple of years ago they started pumpkin picking. Then his wife decided she’d quite like to see if they could make a bar work, so she started making cider on site and they turned one of the barns into a makeshift tap room. This month is their first birthday, it’s packed every weekend, and next they’re looking at putting glamping pods in and creating spaces for camper vans to stay.

I haven’t stopped thinking about this since, because the answer at no point seems to have been “how do we do more farming?”

They had land. They had barns. They had stuff they could make there. And somewhere along the way somebody went, what else can we do with all this?

And apparently the answers were pumpkins, cider, BBQ food, a tap room, glamping pods and camper vans.

Same farm. Completely different ways for it to make money.

I think businesses do the opposite of this all the time. We want another £20k, £50k, £100k and immediately start looking for the new thing that’s going to produce it. More leads, a bigger audience, another offer, a new funnel, another launch, something else to sell.

And sometimes, yes, that genuinely is the answer.

But sometimes there’s a perfectly good barn sitting there.

I worked with someone who had hundreds of people who’d already bought from her. We could’ve looked at that business and decided she needed to go and find another few hundred people, except when I looked at what those existing customers were actually doing, a decent chunk of them were already coming back and buying other things.

They just weren’t moving up. They were buying sideways.

So I wasn’t particularly interested in finding her another load of strangers yet. I wanted to know what the people already there were doing. What were they buying next? Why were they choosing that? What weren’t they buying? Was there actually somewhere obvious for them to go next? Were we even asking them?

That gives you a completely different set of things to work on than “get more leads.”

And I should say, because otherwise this starts sounding like I think nobody should ever grow their audience again 😂, I’ve also looked at a client’s business after she’d squeezed an enormous amount from her existing customers and told her, yep, you’ve rinsed this. You genuinely need new people now.

That’s the point.

I don’t know which one you need until I’ve looked.

And yes, this is basically what I’m doing inside In Control. Not turning your office into a tap room, although I’m open to it, but looking properly at the business you’ve already built before deciding that the answer must be more leads, more reach, another offer, another launch or more fucking everything.

Sometimes we’ll look and find customers who could be buying something else. Sometimes it’s an offer that’s doing far more work than you realised. Sometimes it’s pricing, follow-up, old enquiries or something you’re spending loads of time on that isn’t making enough money to justify it. And sometimes we’ll look at everything and go, nope, you genuinely need more people. Fine. Let’s go get them.

I just don’t want to send you off to spend the next six months building something new because that’s what businesses at your stage are apparently supposed to do.

I’d rather look at what you’ve actually got first and ask the farm question:

What else could this do?

In Control is my 90-day 1:1 strategic partnership for established service businesses. Usually £3,300 + VAT, but join before Wednesday 19th August and it’s £2,800 + VAT, either in one payment or spread across three months.

If you’ve built a good business and you know there’s more money in it somewhere, but you’re not convinced the answer is automatically more hours, more launches, more audience and more everything, book a free intro call here and come and show me what you’ve got.

We’ll see if there’s a barn we’ve forgotten about.

Zx

P.S. The most important outcome of all this is obviously discovering I can walk half a mile from my house and drink cider in a barn. 10/10 local infrastructure. Would recommend 😂