Yesterday we went to a kangaroo and wallaby farm. And I'll be honest, I had no idea what we were walking into. There's no real booking system, no polished process. You basically call, book it, and show up. That's it.
So we get there, and it starts with about a 40 minute educational piece. And usually when you hear that you're like… alright, here we go. But it was actually really good. Super informative, light, easy to follow. Kids were paying attention, adults were paying attention, nobody was drifting off. Which honestly is rare.
Then we move into the interaction part. And at this point I still don't even know if we're just looking at animals or if we're actually getting in there with them. We walk in and within like 10 seconds one of the guys with us gets hugged by a wallaby. Not like "oh that's cute from a distance." I mean this thing walks up and wraps him up like a dog that missed you all day.
From there it just turns into chaos in the best way. Feeding them, petting them, scratching their bellies, seeing the babies in their pouches… the whole thing felt way less like an "experience" and more like you were just there with them.
My daughter said it was her favorite thing we've done. We're 15,600 miles in, 40 states, a lot of stops, so that's not nothing.
Now here's where it took a turn I didn't expect. Someone asked the owner if he was cool with them posting a TikTok, and he immediately goes into how TikTok hurt his business. Which caught me off guard.
He said someone posted a video, it went viral, and everything blew up. Website traffic spiked, but his site is rough. Like really rough. No SSL, security issues, some browsers won't even load it right. So people aren't getting answers there, which means they call. And they call a lot.
He said he was getting hundreds of calls a day. And instead of trying to handle that or build around it, he shut the whole thing down for 3 months just to let it die off.
Now I'm standing there thinking… this is such an easy fix. Not even in a sales way, just logically. You clean up the site. You answer the obvious questions up front. You add a booking system. But more importantly, you build in qualifiers.
Because one of the things he cares about is that first 40 minute education piece. Like a 2 year old isn't sitting through that. So you could literally just put a gate in front of booking that says, "Hey, this starts with a 40 minute educational portion, not ideal for very young kids. Do you understand that?" Yes or no.
Then when they book, you collect ages. If something doesn't line up, now you decide: do I approve this, do I call them, do I decline it. You still have control, you just don't have your phone ringing 300 times a day with the same questions. You could even push overflow calls to a VA and only take the ones that actually matter.
Like none of this is complicated.
I mentioned a version of that, very lightly. And he shut it down almost immediately. Didn't want it.
He wants the phone calls. He wants to talk to people. He wants to know who's coming in. And honestly the more I stood there thinking about it, the more I realized this wasn't a gap in understanding. He knows what's happening. He experienced the upside already. He just didn't like what came with it.
And yeah, from where I sit, I still think this could be a better system. Cleaner, easier, less chaotic on his end. Probably even a better experience for the people coming in.
But that's not really the point for him.
He's not trying to run this thing like a machine. He's not trying to stack tours all day and maximize throughput. He's doing something he enjoys, the way he wants to do it. And part of that includes talking to people, controlling the flow, and honestly probably keeping it a little smaller than it could be.
Which is a weird thing to sit with when your brain is wired to fix and optimize everything. Because you're standing there like, "I can solve this." But at the same time, there's nothing to solve. Or at least nothing he wants solved.
And I don't know, that just stuck with me more than I expected. Because it's really easy to assume everyone wants the same outcome. More traffic. More bookings. More growth.
But that's not always true.
Sometimes people hit a point where they go, "This is good. I like this. I'm staying right here."
And they mean it.