Taking the customer's temperature

Just wrote a post over on BlogforBusiness about the importance of customer surveys, and it occurs to me that Cleveland has been "taking the people's temperature" for decades, by forming all those many pro-entrepreneurial groups and organizations and non-profits to study the region and so on--several of which had lots of meetings and fanfare but yielded notoriously less-than-productive results.

Anyway, if we consider Cleveland business owners the customers, Capitalist Cleveland is doing just what the marketing guru orders--listening to the people. Don Larson and his gang interview real-life, in-the-trenches entrepreneurs every week about what's really going on for them. They're asking the folks who fight the battles what's important to them and sharing it with the rest of us out there on the battlefront.

It's a profoundly useful service to tell real-life stories. Thanks, guys, for a good idea, repeated and well executed. Visit the Capitalist Cleveland site; listen to the podcasts. And if you want to meet some fascinating entrepreneurs each month, get on the Gorilla Group mailing list.