Things that make you say, "Hmmmm."

“What the heck do we do with these cards that have been in my drawer for two years?” I asked myself that question this morning. We have 1,000 of these suckers. Maybe 1,500. Let’s just say it’s a lot of them and they have been collecting dust and doing us no good since I brought them home from the annual National Restaurant Association trade show in Chicago in May, 2009.

We had a ton of these printed for that show because, well, because there are something like 15,000 people that attend that show. So maybe we had 1,500 printed because I hoped we could hand them out to 10% of the attendees. I believe that’s right, now that I think about it. So I bet we have 1,200 left.

Yep, my guess is over the course of three or four days of standing on our feet for hours upon hours at the back of an enormous exhibit hall, we were able to offload no more than a few hundred of these. That show was a waste of time and money for us (more on that in a future blog post), and these cards function as a recurring reminder of a lesson learned.

But I still like the cards. They show pictures of our smiling, happy customers. They focus on how we make life easier for people. They are simple. Clear. Concise.

The only part I don’t like is the reference to ROI (Return On Investment) on the back of the cards. Big companies make buying decisions on complex softwares based on ROI. Independent restaurants that use Schedulefly don’t. We know because we surveyed our customers recently. A customer then commented on that blog post about why he uses Schedulefly, and his comment sums it up nicely:

“It would not be that hard to create schedules the old fashioned way, but managing time off requests, shift trades, etc. is not what I want to be doing. I want to be baking, thinking up new products, and talking to customers.ROI is nice, but that isn’t why I use Schedulefly. Plus my employees love it. They see me as a cool with-it employer. I post a schedule and forget it. I love it.”

O.k., so other than the ROI stuff we shouldn’t have mentioned, these cards are great. Happy. Smiles. Fun. Simple.

So I’m sitting here trying to figure out a creative and inexpensive way to get them into the hands of other restaurant people who like smiling. People who have a relatively young staff that all own cell phones and smart phones. People who like to give their staff cool benefits. People who would like their lives to be a little bit easier.

Got any ideas? I’m at wbrawley [at] schedulefly [dot] com.

Wil