The Campbell Academy Blog (42)

Selling what’s selling

Callum and I went to Leeds on Sunday really quickly after our boy's football match to see Leeds United play Millwall at Elland Road with Alex and his son William.

We had a brilliant day. Leeds won 2-0 and went top of the league, so although we don't really support Leeds and definitely don't support Millwall, it was amazing to be in the stadium to watch all the joy as your team went to the top of the league after being 17 points behind the league leaders at one point in the season.

Much to play out there, much to see.

Also, it was the home and one of the favourite places of my father-in-law, Mike, who was a massive Leeds supporter and used to go there with his wife, Joyce, all through the 1970s, but that's by the by.

What was interesting, at least in one part, was that we were walking Elland Road after the game, and there was a pub called the Luke Ale Inn.

For some reason, it caught my eye, probably because the pub's name is on a tacked-on banner across the front, not on a real sign, which gives it that ere of lack of permanence, bootstrapping, and entrepreneurship.

But the pub sells itself as a real ale site, a place to go to sample the wonders of that which is craft beer and certainly a market now that has developed into being one, which can be lucrative if you get it right.

But they're also a Thai kitchen, and I'm not entirely convinced that really old pubs and Thai kitchens go hand in hand, but they do at the seemingly temporary Luke Ale Inn.

The point is that what they're obviously doing is selling craft beer, which seems to them to be hot, and a Thai kitchen, which seems to them to be hot (pardon the pun) instead of whatever they were selling before, which they undoubtedly were.

People do this often.

You see it in all industries, where they jump on the bandwagon of what's hot at the moment but then have to pivot quickly when something else becomes hot and the thing they're doing falls away.

There was a wonderful story told to me once, I think, by Chris Barrow about a guy who was selling roses in a square somewhere they were visiting on holiday until it started to pour with rain, where he disappeared and turned back up, selling umbrellas.

Selling what's selling is really agile; it's the bootstrapper way of making money all the time. It's enormously entrepreneurial, but it's often very ethereal and short-lived.

It's unlikely that the Luke Ale Inn will win any sort of best pubs or Michelin awards anytime soon, but of course, that's not their game.

I suppose just important to know exactly what your game is and sell what's selling if you're a sell what's selling type of guy.