The Other Two Lessons of "Field of Dreams"

In every neighborhood, there's a location that's seen a half-dozen businesses in the last twenty years. A half-dozen people have reached the conclusion "Build it and they will come" but obviously, they were wrong. Perhaps they should have listened to the other two lessons from Shoeless Joe and the "Field of Dreams"

According to statistics, only about 10% of all businesses have the same name, are in the same place, and have the same ownership after five years. That doesn't mean 90% of them fail, but many of them do.

Many new businesses fail because they're retail operations. Retailing requires a rather large investment in inventory, yet the retailer is competing against many others that offer exactly the same product. Unless other stores pay substantially more at wholesale, or are a great distance away, it's hard to maintain satisfactory margins.

Manufacturing doesn't necessarily mean building a steel mill. The most popular new business to start is a restaurant. That's a manufacturing business, but it generally involves large staffs and are open long hours. Start a successful new restaurant, and before five years are over, you may be ready to sell out and cut back your work week to a mere 80 hours.

If a new business succeeds, it may need to expand to a larger location a block away. It may show so much promise that the owners invite in a new investor, who has plenty of capital to invest. The owner may have died, or the business sold due to a divorce. The company may have acquired weaker competitors and adopted their better-known brand, or may have merged, and adopted a name different than either one had been using.

Often enough a new business fails because it was a poor idea, or it was poorly executed. That certainly has happened often enough online. In the early days of the internet, virtually every word in the dictionary was claimed as a dot-com domain name. It turns out, though, that generic domain names were a big loser. Books.com went down the tubes, while amazon.com thrived. Auction.com went south, while ebay did well. Even x.com was parked, with paypal.com used as the primary site name.

This shouldn't have surprised anyone. In the 1980s, generics were a flash in the pan in the supermarket. Mom says she needs to buy toilet paper, but she tosses up a package of Northern in the shopping cart. Dad says he needs to buy beer, but he grabs a 12-pack of Corona. Why do they choose name brands over no-name commodities? Because they know the name brand will meet their expectations.

Ease his pain was what Ray Kinsella heard in the corn field, and it puzzled him. Ease whose pain? Ease his pain how? These are the same questions we need to ask. if we expect our products or services to sell.

Years ago, people left their film at little kiosks in parking lots, and picked up their pictures a day or two later. There were 4,000 Fotomat kiosks across the US in 1980, and other kiosks of other brands. Before film cameras were obsoleted, the kiosks made it easy to get film processed.

There are surely other pains a kiosk could ease. Find the right one, and you might do well for yourself. The only big drive-thru uses are banking and restaurants. The lightweight construction of a kiosk isn't particularly desirable if you're handling large amounts of cash, and preparing food in a small kiosk is impractical.

So why prepare the food in the kiosk? Instead, you could locate the kiosks on major routes into the central business district. People order a brown-bag lunch online by midnight, and pick up their lunch on the way to work, between 6 AM and 10 AM. Require the customer to pay online as well, and it would speed up delivery.

The brown bag lunch could include fresh greens, unlike a frozen meal, could be a nice meal, unlike the salty, greasy sandwich-shop offerings, could be much less expensive than eating at a nice restaurant, and would be much less hassle than packing your own lunch.

Would brown-bag kiosks attract enough business to be an attractive business? I don't know; I don't know of anyone that has tried this idea. It certainly has interesting potential, though.

You'd prepare the food in a central commissary in the middle of the night. Most restaurants don't use their kitchen between midnight and 4 AM, and you could get a bargain there. You would haul the meals to the kiosks between 4 AM and 6 AM, then go home to sleep. Each kiosk's operator would arrive at 6 AM, work until 10 AM, and have the rest of the day free.

Go the distance was the other lesson for Ray Kinsella. Setting up a business like this would require one to solve some problems.

One would be the proper menu. That's always a problem for food service businesses. If you offer the same foods as a Burger King or Wendy's offers, your cold food won't compete with their hot foods. If you offer the same simple foods as a convenience store, they might as well fill up the tank and grab a newspaper while they are at it. With other foods, you might find people are less interested in your offerings. You may even need to vary the menu from day to day, in order to sustain interest.

Another problem will be keeping things square with the user. If customer orders are tracked by name, there are privacy concerns. If orders are tracked by number, there will be customers where husband and wife present the same receipt, minutes apart, instead of each presenting different receipts. The first will get a meal, the second will not, and there will be a meal left over at the end of the day. Oops!

That's not to say that the problems are without solution. That's not even to suggest that the problems are particularly difficult to deal with. It's no more difficult than dry cleaners or shoe repair shops keeping track of customer orders, for instance. But you will have to go the distance and not give up at the first sign of difficulty.

It's pretty obvious, given the assaults on Social Security, that we can't count on it existing until we're 100. It's also pretty obvious that the days of working for the big corporation until we reach 65, and then retiring on a good pension, are over. We need to prepare for our future - and unless we're self-employed, we're at the whim of every breeze that comes along.

You need to ease their pain. You need to go the distance. But you also need to build it, for while there's no assurance that they will come if you do, it's pretty obvious that if you don't build it, there's no place for them to come.