When a business loses its customer focus, does it even know what it's getting wrong?

I’ve come across two businesses recently that made me stop and think. I’m not going to name them – that’s not the point. The point is the pattern. And it’s a pattern I see more often than I’d like.

Both organisations had something genuinely valuable to offer. Both had people who clearly cared about what they did. And both were operating in a way that seemed almost designed to frustrate the very customers they were trying to serve.

Business One: A Sad But Preventable Closure

The first was a small food business in a suburban strip. Takeaway, with a handful of tables. About six months old when a sign appeared on the door: due to economic pressures, they were closing.

That’s always sad. But here’s what struck me. Within fifty metres of this business, there were five other similar food outlets — all of them busy. Two had overflowing alfresco dining. The others were full whenever they were open.

My wife Denise and I had visited this place when it first opened. The service was perfectly fine. The food just wasn’t to our liking — a very specific style of European cuisine that simply didn’t suit local tastes. We weren’t alone. Several people we spoke to had the same experience and hadn’t gone back.

Here’s my thinking: when five competitors within a stone’s throw are thriving, there are only four reasons people won’t return to a food business. The food. The quantity. The service. The price. Three of those four boxes were ticked for this business. They only needed to look at one. A modest tweak to the menu — something more familiar alongside their specialty — and I genuinely believe they’d have had people queuing. Instead, they closed. They asked the wrong questions, or perhaps no questions at all.

Business Two: A Location That Should Have Been a Goldmine

The second story is even more striking. A café in regional Western Australia, the only food option for roughly fifty kilometres in any direction, sitting alongside a major tourist attraction. Coaches pulling up regularly. Hundreds of visitors every day.

And yet this business had apparently decided that customers were an inconvenience.

The carpark had more “no parking” signs than parking spaces. Coaches — carrying predominantly older passengers — couldn’t pull close to the entrance. A sign on the door warned against entering with muddy shoes or boots. This is farming country. Inside, toilets required a queue and a key — available only to paying customers. A sign on the bin, worded in a particularly aggressive tone, announced it was not for general rubbish. The menu was restricted at various times and on various days.

I spoke with locals. They all said the same thing: no-one goes there. The owners had a reputation for not liking tourists. Even the coach drivers — who at most country cafés receive a complimentary cup of tea as a matter of course, ensuring they keep routing their passengers there — were not extended that basic professional courtesy. Many were now stopping at the next place, fifty kilometres on.

The Common Thread

Both businesses optimised for themselves — their preferences, their comfort, their internal logic — rather than for the people they existed to serve.

It’s a mistake that’s easier to make than it looks. Processes that made sense once gradually calcify. What starts as a reasonable boundary becomes an unwelcoming wall. The customer’s perspective is the last thing consulted and the first thing forgotten.

What the Fix Actually Looks Like

The solution in both cases was simple — not easy, perhaps, but simple. Sit in the customer’s chair. Not as a box-ticking exercise, but genuinely. Walk in as if you’ve never been there before. Read your own signs. Navigate your own systems. Ask yourself honestly: what is it actually like to deal with us?

That question, answered truthfully, is worth more than any marketing strategy. And it costs nothing but a little honest reflection.