We get such great click through rates on our newsletters. They only go out once every month or two and they usually talk about some design advice or covering recent project work. Mostly goes to past clients and people we’ve worked with. The “top of mind” referral value from them is big. One potential client called us the day we sent a newsletter as a friend of theirs who was a past business relationship who gets our newsletter recommend us to them.
Airport shuttle in Punta Cana
My 10c on this, it’s entirely because tourists have been trained on advice to “always haggle” when travelling abroad in lower income countries. A lot of developing/low income countries are full of opportunists who go out of their way to charge tourists 3-5X more than the “true” price simply because they know they’re tourists. So it trains “saavy” tourists to haggle when they know that they’re travelling in a country that has a vastly different income gap.
It’s all a bit silly because yes, ultimately even if the tourist is getting the tourist price… we’re talking paying +$5-10 at most for something that is still much cheaper than what the same service/product would cost in their home country. And not everyone does this kind of bullshit tourist pricing (you clearly don’t), so at most their haggling saves them hardly anything on their budget.
Just wanted to illustrate why you might be running into this a lot. People do ask for discounts here or there with our business but it’s very much once in a blue moon from people who are clearly cheapskate assholes. For you, it’s very likely they’re perfectly fine people who’ve been conditioned to haggle by advice from others or from other experiences travelling to lower income countries.
If you have to ask this question for something like this you will 100% fail - you will not have the skill or accumen to pull it off.
Yes, as a concept, such a thing can work. As a matter of fact, this is literally what a good handful of the best restaurants in the world do. Here in California “farm to table” restaurants can earn some big money, and the best ones are set up pretty closely to what you describe.
But… these places are run by the best chefs in the world, who know how to run a place like this like the back of their hand, who know how to grow food (or hire the right person who can), and who have ridiculous quality standards plus the skill to execute them. After all, imagine the type of client that will go out of their way to visit a farm restaurant inn. It’s people willing to splurge and leave town for a high quality farm to table experience. If you’re not actually one of the best restaurants in your area, nobodys gonna make the special trek for the farm to table experience.
Now, all that said, you dont have to go fine dining. Let’s say you’re a skilled farmer who happens to be located on a heavily trafficed corridor. Setting up a restaurant on your farm can be a next good logical step to expand your business. A lot of well located farms in my home state have done just this. A dairy farm opening up an ice cream store + grill + gift shop, and an apple orchard having a similar theme going on. Both were very popular among locals in my home state, but it’s important to realize they were wholesale farms first, and the restaurant came later. And they both were very well located among a big traffic corridor.
This is why I don’t think you can do this. If you aren’t already a skilled farmer that can stand by a proven product, or aren’t already a top end chef whos looking to up their game by transitioning to farm to table, you are gonna be DOA. This is like asking if you can start a jewelry company that mines their own gemstones and sells to high end customers without having any experience in either. You’re missing too much critical experience, knowledge and skills to combine two highly specialized skills into one business.
Now, the good news is you don’t need to do this all at once. Maybe you start out as a normal restaurant that prides itself with working with local farmers to get their produce. Or you grow your own herbs/tomatoes/peppers/etc (stuff that’s easy to grow anywhere). You still need to be a skilled chef to sell the quality/fresh ingredients in a way thats actually good, but the pressure to be the best chef isn’t there. Maybe after a few years of success doing that, you then upgrade to the full farm to table experience.