This is awesome. This guy is named John Neese and he has some serious passion about what he sells and what he does for a living.
The video is about 13 minutes long, but it’s well worth watching. I had no idea that there were so many different brands and types of “flavored water with a lot of bubbles.”
There are several important business lessons in this video. The most important, in my opinion, is to be passionate about what you do. You also need to be knowledgeable about your market and have a personality. This guy is the personification of “do what you love and you’ll never work another day in your life.”
Here are some of the other business gems in the video:
- Give people choices. Everyone likes different things, so give people a variety of things to choose from.
- Know your space. Not just your store, but know where you fit in the niche market that you’re playing in.
- Decide who you want to do business with. He decided he wanted to do business with other small businesses, and that’s who he caters to.
- Differentiate yourself. His store specializes in hard to find, boutique sodas, what do you specialize in?
- The best isn’t necessarily the biggest and most popular brand.
- Instead of drinking a diet soda, drink half of a regular soda. Diet sodas taste horrible (I totally agree with him on this point).
- Moxie, is the only brand of soda in the dictionary. I didn’t know that Moxie was a brand of soda.
His website is at sodapopstop.com, which is ugly as sin and has an annoying midi track playing, but this is a story about him and his retail store, not his website.
Here’s some food for thought, are you passionate about what you do? Can you create your own Soda Pop Stop?
