How Can I Be Of Service?

I have some sorta big news. First, a story about service and an anecdote about selling.

A teacher asks God to show him the difference between Heaven and Hell.

God says, “Sure.” He takes the teacher to a small crowded room.

The room is packed with starving people, standing around a cauldron of hot, delicious stew. Each person has a ladle that can dip into the broth. However, the handles are too long for them to turn around and feed themselves.

There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

God says, “This is Hell.”

Then, God takes the teacher to another room, identical to the other. Same people, same stew, but this time the people are happy.

God says, “This is Heaven.”

The teacher turns to God and says, “The rooms are the same. I don’t understand.”

God replies, “In the second room, the people are feeding each other.”

This story struck me because it conveys an under-appreciated facet of our entrepreneurial lives.

Earlier this year I read an amazing book. My Life And My Work, by Henry Ford. By all accounts, Ford was an oddball but it’s obvious he was also a genius.

The top review on Audible gives My Life And My Work five stars and states:

“The man is incapable of fluff. I wasn't expecting a philosophy book. No preamble. No foreplay. No lube. No time for screwing around. Should be called "My Work and Work."

The spoiler alert on Ford’s book is that growing a business is all about service.

Ford spends many of the chapters ranting about unscrupulous business folks. These fake entrepreneurs hustle their way into money.

There is a much simpler, more sustainable way.

If you want to sell, serve - according to Ford.

He realised that by serving their team and their customers well, sales was a natural consequence of their culture.

This is true today as it was 100 years ago. Look around. Yoco. Discovery. FNB. xneelo. PayFast. Xero.

These success stories have service hard-wired into their DNA.

So, here’s the big news:

For our next few events Heavy Chef has decided to do away with our livestreams.

Yup.

I know.

Just as we’ve mastered livestreams, we’re nixing them.

This pivot is in line with Heavy Chef’s own culture of serving our community. My team and I have realised that, although livestreams are useful, they do not facilitate engagement very well.

This is more important than we thought. Our entrepreneur research shows that entrepreneurs need peer-to-peer interactivity. We get stuck in our own heads and ‘getting out there’ is essential to gaining critical perspective.

The clincher for me was a conversation earlier this month. When we were ruminating over this during a meeting, Randall Heavy Chef’s Chief Videographer told us that his church had followed the same process.

Randall explained that, during COVID, they’d moved their congregation of a few thousand people to online-only. When lockdown levels were lowered, everyone was so comfortable on Sundays that hardly anyone returned to the Sunday services.

The thinking was, “Hey, I’ll just watch the recording later.”

After a few months of empty services, the church elders made the decision to stop the livestreams. The very next Sunday, the church was packed.

Over the past few months, we’ve seen our gatherings pick up steam again. Our livestreams have been amazing (thanks to our tech partners Black Maverick and Esizayo), but with little interaction between community members.

Engagement is our most crucial success metric, so in order to serve our customers better, we have to alter course.

This may seem like a strange decision, because there is the potential to reach 1000s more people via our video streams. However, it’s clear that peer-to-peer interaction is where businesses are forged, market channels are opened, partnerships are made.

In case you’re wondering, yes, there is a sales incentive in this for us. We’ve noticed that with each successful event (where people are engaging), we get a significant bump in sign-ups to our Heavy Chef platform.

We’ll still post the event videos afterwards. This is a part of our service offering. Some of Heavy Chef’s event videos receive tens of thousands of views and remain a priority for us.

By serving, we’re also selling - even though ‘selling’ is not our focus in hosting events.

So, come join us out in the wild. We have wine, beverages, fruit smoothies and snacks. There are great prizes and great speakers. All complimentary courtesy of our amazing partners.

Most importantly, there are great people, The crazy, creative entrepreneurs that make up our community - and are the foundation of our economy.

Check out Heavy Chef’s regular entrepreneur sessions on our events page.

And, until we meet in-person, let’s ask ourselves, “How can I be of service?”