Helping a Small Business Focus on a Joyful Mission
Tools to Deliver Joy (and Pie)
A small pie shop in Minneapolis had a large problem: So many people were entering their weekly online “pie lottery” they were spending too much time managing lists and not enough time baking pies. The owners of Pie & Mighty reached out to TEN7 for assistance. They found a partner who shared their values and who also had ideas to help them spread more joy, and pie, to the world.
The Challenge
Pie & Mighty uses fresh ingredients and a rolling pin to bring pie and joy to their customers. However, the demand for their pies far exceeds their ability to create these handmade masterpieces. Enter the Pie Loop lottery.
Each week thousands of people enter their name into this virtual lottery, hoping they will be rewarded with a chance to buy a pie. The volume of entries, combined with the time it takes to make the pies, created chaos for Rachel and Ratchet as they managed the database. It also often brought disappointment for customers who would repeatedly miss out on pie.
Rachel and Ratchet needed help figuring out a new way to manage the pie lottery, so they could spend less time filling out Google Sheets and more time baking pies.
Our Solution
TEN7 met with Rachel and Ratchet, the owners of Pie & Mighty, to understand their business, the details of the Pie Lottery, and the pain points that were taking up more of their time than they wanted. We determined the simplest solution would be to develop a series of Google Sheet tools to automate the tasks related to selecting lottery winners while improving communications with their rapidly growing customer base.
Simplify the Pie Lottery Process
The pie lottery is more than just a random drawing. Rachel and Ratchet need to be able to sort the entries to prioritize key investors, to accommodate food allergies, and to read the stories that people post to try to spread joy to those who may need it the most. All of this prompted TEN7 to develop a system to automate the entries that come in each week, to cross reference the names with past winners to try to “spread the joy,” and to make it easy for Rachel and Ratchet to scan the names and stories of the people hoping for pie.
The automated tools allow Rachel and Ratchet to spend less time in front of the computer and more time in the kitchen, doing what they love.
Improve Customer Communication
One of the dangers of the pie lottery is that it can lead to customer disappointment when someone enters over and over and never wins a pie. TEN7 built tools to minimize the risk of one name constantly falling through the cracks.
The system also makes it easier for Rachel and Ratchet to communicate with all customers to more clearly explain their mission and their hope to spread pie and joy to as many people as possible.
