For this week’s blog, we are delighted to share with you some incredible business tips and inspiration from one of our very own members.

Rick Agraval and his wife Lisa own NZ’s best online butcher, The Meat Box. Together they have cut out the middleman to deliver the best quality, freshest meat direct to consumers, and they’ve done what few would’ve have thought possible: they’ve made raw meat look sexy!

Don’t believe me? Check out The Meat Box website and come back and tell me you’re not salivating.

But how did this all come to be? Rick gave us exclusive access to his tried and true lessons that everyone NZ entrepreneur can benefit from.

Mind the Gap

Our idea for The Meat Box was a classic tale of finding a gap in the market. I was already in the meat and food service industry, selling into restaurants and hotel chains and the quality and freshness of our product was so much higher than what most consumers were able to access themselves. Having identified this opportunity to offer top quality meat direct to consumers, it then became a case of working out the best vehicle for delivery.

 Humble Beginnings

The Meat Box started out very small. Lisa and I weren’t in the financial position to go large from the get-go and, in hindsight, this was a blessing. Having done so would have created a bunch of teething problems for us. Instead, we started modestly and ironed out any wrinkles as they came up. We did everything in bite-sized chunks, as and when we could afford to. In doing so, we learnt where every dollar was going and what return it was making, which set solid financial foundations for us and is allowing us to fuel all our growth from our profits.

We started out modestly in 2015, supplying small businesses around Auckland. This experience reconfirmed that people loved our product, packaging and concept and from here we scaled up to the next level.

Meat in the mail!

Our research told us the suburban butcher model was decaying and wasn’t going to give us the scale we needed. The only way for us to reach the number of people we wanted to, was to go online and create a digital distribution model.  Once we committed to that decision, things snowballed organically. We brainstormed over and over and pulled together enough funds to access the external support we needed to get an eCommerce website up and running.

Make the customer the hero

Vitally important to our success, and the success of most businesses these days, is keeping the customer journey in the front of the mind and really celebrating them. For us, the selling really happens when we get our customer through the door for the first time. Yes, you get a feel for who we are and what our product is like prior to purchasing, but we put most of our energy towards over-delivering once someone becomes a customer. Once you order from us you become part of something, you’re special. The box arrives, you unbox it, there’s some ceremonial theatre to that. That’s how we turn a one-off customer into a repeat customer.

Interestingly, the order confirmation email is statistically the most opened of all emails in anyone’s inbox, so we use this to our advantage. As well as confirming the order, we send customers enough information to feel really good, valued and reassured of their purchase decision. We play to the emotional aspect of selling and help the customer’s head justify the purchase their heart made. Following that, customers on our mail list get offers that those who aren’t on our list won’t have the privilege of accessing. We use our marketing to nurture the customer relationship and build credibility – nothing too sales-y or pressured, just genuine added value.

Find a lead magnet and sweat it

We have a marketing strategy to position and grow The Meat Box, but if I had to single out one tool that has been most effective in getting our brand out and there delivering us customers, it would be the use of a lead magnet. *

Now, more than ever, you need a lead magnet to get people excited and create a pull. There are so many businesses out there advertising and posting and social media is typically the easiest place to be seen first online, so you need a lead magnet, or capturing tool, that gets people interested enough to visit your landing page. Once they’re on your landing page, that’s when you can focus on getting them into your funnel. There is no point in having customers just within the social media realm, you need to get them to your website so you ‘own’ them and can re-market to them.

In addition to this, user-generated content, such as feedback or photos, can be a very influential marketing tool as it adds instant credibility to our brand and pulls customers into our sales funnel.

*A lead magnet is an incentive that marketers offer to potential customers in exchange for their email address or other contact information.

Look everywhere for inspiration

I think if we only looked at the meat industry for inspiration on how to market and grow The Meat Box, we’d be out of ideas in a week. In fact, the meat industry is probably one of the last industries I would look to for creative inspiration. What’s important, I believe, is to look at who is disrupting their industry or pioneering new ways of doing things, regardless of what they’re selling. Look at how others are marketing themselves, how they sequence their email flow, how they convert sales etc. There’s so much to learn.

Your net worth is your network

It’s important to realise that you won’t grow simply by quietly observing the success of others. Huge value can be found in getting out there and connecting with others who are, or were, in the same boat as you. Grab as many nuggets of wisdom you can. Most people who’ve started a business will be happy to share their journey, successes and mistakes with you, so long as you’re not a direct competitor.

Feel the fear and do it anyway

Don’t let what could happen stop you from starting. Yes there are a lot of things that can go wrong, or that mightn’t work, but if you’re scared of making mistakes, business ownership possibly isn’t for you! What most business owners do well is embrace failure, learn from their mistakes and use these as opportunities for innovation.

So, start somewhere. Take an idea and work on it. When you’re invested and it’s your own business and you’re excited about it, it’s not hard. Yes, it involves a lot of time, sacrifice and late nights, but that’s easy to do when it’s your own baby. And it’s worth it for the wins.

Those first wins are so exciting. When our first order came through we were over the moon. Then they started coming through more and more and you can’t put into words the feeling you get when that happens.

So get out of your comfort zone and find a way to make it happen yourself!