I Saw the Problem From the Window and Fixed It in Five Minutes.

Busy rural Maine general store and gas station on a summer weekend, cars lined up at both pump islands, customers hurrying to fill up and leave, gelato window and restaurant patio sitting completely empty

My fiancé owned a convenience store in Maine that had a gas station and a restaurant attached. When he passed away, I was teaching web design. I had to give that up to keep the store running day to day until it sold, which took four years.

To make it more marketable, I had just revamped the restaurant from a simple takeout counter into a full sit-down operation and added a gelato window where customers could walk up for fresh gelato. We were running a big weekend promotion to bring people in. The gas company had partnered with us to drop prices 25 cents a gallon. We were launching the new gelato line and giving out free samples. The whole point was to attract a crowd, introduce them to the restaurant, and turn them into regulars.

It worked. The lot was packed.

• • •

But Something Was Wrong

I was watching from the window, and I could see it immediately. People were pulling up, pumping their gas as fast as they could, and leaving. They were not going to the gelato window. They were not coming into the restaurant. The promotion was bringing people in, but the setup was pushing them out.

The problem was obvious to me: people felt rushed at the pump. They did not want to leave their car unattended. They did not want to hold up the line. So they pumped, paid, and left. The gelato window, the patio, the restaurant - they might as well not have existed.

The fix took five minutes

I pulled every available staff member and sent them out to pump gas for the customers. While an employee handled the pump, the customer was free to walk to the gelato window and grab a free sample, or peek into the restaurant.

• • •

Customers gathered at the outdoor gelato and ice cream walk-up window of the rural Maine general store, relaxed and social, holding cones and chatting

We Sold Out of Everything

That weekend, we were slammed. Nothing could have prepared me for it. The people who came in for the gas special came back for the restaurant. They tried the gelato. They stayed. If we hadn't changed course in those first few minutes, this would have been a very different weekend.

You set the system. You watch what happens. You adjust immediately. That gap between the plan and the reality is where everything either works or falls apart.

• • •

The rural Maine general store on a full summer weekend, parking lot packed, patio filled with people dining comfortably at tables, the promotion working exactly as intended

I See Systems Everywhere

It is just how I look at things, who I am.

I walk into a workflow and within days I can see where it slows down, where people are doing manual work that could be handled differently. It is not something I try to do. It is just how I process what I see.

When I was teaching web design, I noticed students were spending the majority of the class taking notes, which resulted in them missing half of what I was teaching. So before each class, I burned that night's lesson onto a CD. I taught it on an overhead projector. They took the CD home. They could pause it, rewind it, watch it again whenever they needed to. They stopped worrying about missing something. It allowed them to just be in the room, have real conversations about what we were learning, and retain it so much better. It changed everything.

The gas station was the same instinct. Just a different problem.

In both my personal and professional life, I build systems. Ways of doing things that make things run smoother, work better, reach further. I have always been like this. The tools have just gotten a lot better. They let me move faster, work smarter, and reach further than I ever could have before.