Why Take Risks: Ravenna Third Place
The Stranger from a few weeks ago had a nice piece about a bookstore called Third Place Books in Ravenna neighborhood of Seattle. It is a very thoughtful, well written piece on a real life small business marketing story.
THRIVING INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE? ARE YOU KIDDING?
Why is this remarkable? Well, it’s about an independent book store not only surviving, but thriving. I don’t know about you, but if I owned a book store today, surrounded by Amazon and Barns & Noble, Kindle and Google, and faced with a down economy, I might be thinking: escape pod!
Taking the risk of investing in it—renovating, opening a new section, changing the layout—that’s out of the question. Right?
Turns out, not only I’d be dead wrong, but taking the risk and changing is also the only way to success in any business, whether in a declining industry or not.
Ravenna Third Place seems to have accomplished the unlikely. What was their secret?
WHAT WORKED
The main change of that took place at Ravenna Third Place is that they decided to partner with a greek restaurant Vios Cafe (another successful local business) to replace its own cafe operation.
Robert Sindelar, the managing partner of Ravenna Third Place, was quoted in the article saying this:
“The whole thing hadn’t quite jelled. We realized that [the cafe] wasn’t quite a full-service restaurant. It wasn’t quite a great coffee shop. It was doing five things, and it wasn’t doing any of them really well.”
They also changed the layout of the store, streamlining the gift section (“There are so many small quality gift shops in Seattle,” Sindelar said. “We’d have to dedicate too much space to do it really well.”) and tightening the traffic flow.
In other words, they asked themselves, “what are we doing well? what can be narrowed?” and took bold steps to sharpen their focus. Let the restaurant be excellent at serving food. Let the bookstore do its book-selling (e.g., make it a comfortable space to browse, organize the shelves for the customers’ needs in mind). And take advantage of each others’ strengths, and build around those qualities.
WHAT YOU CAN DO
There’s a few lessons here for every business.
First, just because everyone else is saying “fire” doesn’t mean you take cover. Don’t buy into the doomsday talk of the economy. Your situation is unique. And the bad times for the rest of them means you have the advantage.
Second, focus. Narrow things down to what you are best at, and then do other things that help that. I think the key word for this bookstore was “community”—so they built a good locally-minded book selection and a following. Now, the community has other reasons (a great restaurant, pub downstairs) to frequent the place. It’s a win-win, but not without thinking about what’s the most important, first.
And last but not least: take risks. It might be counter-intuitive to be taking risks in a hard time. But there’s a golden opportunity for risk-taking in a risk-averse climate. Besides, the biggest risk you could be taking is the one of not doing anything.
Because, if you aren’t growing, you are dying.
