Recently I stayed at a nice hotel that had a beautiful bar. It boasted a marble bar top, had a solid selection of beer on tap, a well-stocked selection of liquor, and bartenders who knew what they were doing when it came to mixology. Every afternoon starting at two o’clock, they started serving cocktails and it was relaxing to sit with a delicious beverage.

Every morning, this same bar was set up as a coffee station for the breakfast buffet. Carafes containing creamers like oat milk and half & half, stacks of cups, and piping hot regular and decaf coffee were available to get your day started.

The problem? These two options were kept rigidly separated. Let me explain.

During cocktail hour, guests would walk up and ask if they could get a coffee. The answer? No. In the morning, someone would inevitably ask if they could get a shot of Irish whiskey or Hazelnut liqueur in their coffee, a great way to get a day on vacation started! Answer? Also no. Every single day I heard people ask these questions and get rebuffed by staff who said they couldn’t do that. Only coffee in the morning, only cocktails after 2PM. The ingredients for both were clearly available, they shared the same counter! The hotel bar just didn’t have the willingness to bridge the gap between the two options, though they are so often offered together in other restaurants and bars.

I just couldn’t stop thinking about it from a business perspective. How many sales were walking away every day because no one had asked the question: “What are our customers asking for that we aren’t giving them?”

Is There a Gap Between What You Offer and What Your Customers Need?

That hotel bar situation is a small example of a very common business problem. You build a business that works well. You define what you do and then you do it expertly. Somewhere along the way, customers start asking for things that are clearly adjacent to what you offer. These are things that would make sense coming from your business, but you keep saying no because it isn’t part of your original plan.

To be fair, sometimes that’s the right answer. You can’t complete every request, and trying to go in too many directions at once creates its own problems. But sometimes the requests are telling you something important: there’s a gap between what you’re offering and what your customers actually want or need to get full value from working with you. That gap is worth looking at, both from a financial and customer satisfaction perspective.

What Wild Iris Learned From Our Own Clients

For a long time, Wild Iris Marketing focused on social media management, website design and maintenance, and the kind of content that goes along with those services: social media blurbs, minor edits on website pages, and stuff like that. We were good at it and our clients valued our expert work.

But over time, we kept hearing something we finally just had to pay attention to. Clients needed blog posts. They needed newsletters that could engage their customers. They needed copywriting that went beyond captions and short updates to existing content. They were coming to us for their digital marketing and then going somewhere else (or just skipping) the kind of writing that could really enhance our work.

When we really questioned this pattern, an opportunity became obvious to us. We found the people and added the capability to offer serious content writing as a real service. Not as an afterthought or option on the side, but as something we could genuinely fold into our services and deliver with aplomb. And when we did, it made everything else we offered more valuable because we had a completed digital marketing puzzle with no missing pieces.

The need had been requested and was sitting right in front of us. We just had to decide to see and listen to it.

The Realtor Who Thought Outside the Box

One of the more creative examples of this we’ve come across involves a local real estate agent who noticed something her clients kept struggling with, often long before they ever even got to the point of listing their home for sale.

This was the struggle of downsizing. That overwhelming process of figuring out what to do with a lifetime’s worth of accumulated belongings before you can even start thinking about putting a house on the market.

She wasn’t a professional organizer. This wasn’t a thing she had set out to do. But she watched lots of clients stall or even abandon the selling of their home entirely because they just couldn’t face the monumental task of clearing out their home. So she made a smart move. She built a downsizing and organization service to offer as a supplement to her real estate business!

It wasn’t just a nice add-on. It removed one of the single biggest barriers standing between some of her clients and their decision to list or not. By seeing and solving a problem nobody had specifically asked her to solve, she made her core offering far more accessible and more valuable.

What Are Your Customers Asking For?

You don’t have to add services just for the sake of adding them. But it is worth sitting down every so often, reflecting, and honestly asking, “What are my customers asking for that I keep saying no to? What do they need that they’re going elsewhere to find? What gaps exists between what I offer and what it would take for them to get everything they need from my business alone?”

Sometimes the answer will be that the gap just isn’t yours to fill. But sometimes you’ll find, just like Wild Iris did, that the thing your customers keep asking for is something you can pivot and provide. Something that will make your existing services better, more complete, more valuable, and worth hiring you for.

The ingredients might already be sitting right there on the bar top. It’s just a matter of deciding to offer them as your customers request or need.