Paint The Loading Dock

Walk around the back of almost any business and you’ll find a door nobody photographs. No real sign. A dumpster, a buzzer that half works, a square of concrete stained by a decade of weather. This is the door everything you sell comes through before a customer ever lays eyes on it. The product. The talent. The cash. The suppliers who decide whether you get the good berries or the bruised ones.

The front door gets the money. Warm lighting, a greeter, a thousand tiny experiments on the word “Welcome.” The loading dock gets a padlock and a prayer. (My back door at Garth’s Brew Bar auto-locks which is it’s own sense of symbolism I’ve gotta unpack now…)

The quiet part is that you are already marketing to that loading dock. You just never wrote it down, so you’re doing it on instinct, which usually means doing it poorly.

Every business serves two audiences. There’s the one you sell to, and there’s the one you buy from, hire from, borrow from, or build on top of. Demand and supply. You can leave the second one out of the plan, but you cannot leave it out of reality. A restaurant with a dazzling dining room and a kitchen nobody wants to cook in is a restaurant with a countdown timer hanging over the host stand. A marketplace swimming in buyers with no sellers is a very expensive empty mall.

Plans love to treat supply as a procurement problem. Find it, sign it, move on. But supply has ears. The best chef in town hears how you treat your line cooks. The maker with a waitlist hears how you paid the last vendor. Capital hears everything. Treat your supply side like a vending machine and you get vending-machine supply: whatever’s cheapest, sitting closest to the glass.

So you’re in a tug-of-war. One rope, an audience on each end. Pull too hard for customers and you can squeeze suppliers until the quality you sold them on walks out the back. Pamper supply and forget to actually sell, and you’ve built a beautiful thing nobody buys. The move is not to win the rope. The move is to stop treating it like a fight and start treating both ends like guests you’re courting at the same dinner. (Being able to effectively do this when I worked at marketing for Schneider is what I attribute to Schneider’s ability to rise to an IPO.)

Here are a few others who figured this out, none of them the usual suspects.

Michelin. A tire company in 1900, back when there were fewer than 3,000 cars in all of France, decided the fastest way to sell more tires was to give people reasons to wear them out. So the Michelin brothers printed a free guide telling drivers where to eat and sleep across the country. The customer bought tires. The “supply” was the open road itself, and the restaurants worth driving toward. They grew demand by lavishing attention on the thing that created it. A century later the Michelin Guide is more famous than the tires, which is either the greatest marketing accident in history or the least accidental one.

A24. On paper they sell you a movie ticket. In practice the real recruiting happens at the loading dock, where a director decides who gets to hand out their strange little film. A24 built the brand on the filmmakers, not on itself, handing over creative control and trusting the work to find its people. The audience fell for the logo precisely because the filmmakers fell first. Court the supply of talent, and demand shows up already wearing your merch.

Gymshark. In 2012 it was a teenager sewing gym vests in his mum’s garage with no ad budget and no customers. So he mailed free clothing to fitness YouTubers sitting at 30, 40, 50 thousand subscribers, the ones the big brands ignored. Those creators weren’t customers. They were the supply of attention and credibility. He marketed to that side first, for the cost of shipping, and the customers arrived pre-convinced.

Faire. A wholesale marketplace pairing small makers with the boutiques that stock them. The smart part was noticing each side was terrified of a different thing. So Faire gave retailers net-60 terms and free returns so a shop owner could try a new product without betting the rent, and made listing free for makers, charging only when a genuinely new buyer turned up. One company, two completely different pitches, each aimed at a completely different fear.

Notice what none of them did. None of them split into two brands with two voices. They found the one true thing the business stood for and let it read differently depending on which door you walked through. That’s the whole craft. Positioning that’s strong enough to mean one thing to the person buying and another thing, just as true, to the person you’re buying from.

Which leaves you one piece of homework, and it’s smaller than it sounds. Name your second audience out loud. Not “procurement,” not “vendors.”

The actual humans whose yes you quietly depend on and currently take for granted. Maybe it’s the senior engineers you need to hire before you can promise customers anything real. Maybe it’s the indie suppliers who could sell to your competitor by Friday. Maybe it’s the creators, the landlords, the regulators, the bank. Write down who they are, what they’re afraid of, and what story would make them pick you. You’ll probably find you have a polished answer for the front door and close to nothing for the back…yet.

Stay Positive & How Do You Answer If Someone Asks “Mind If I Leave Through The Back?”