National Learning Institute

Wink wink... nudge nudge... say no more... Do you recognise some of these sayings?  Perhaps you've used one or more recently - as recently as the last five minutes! 

That's music to my ears
She ran like the Wind
I'm Heartbroken
It's raining cats and dogs
He's bouncing off the walls
A heated debate
Chill out!
Cool!
You light up my life
My memory is a little cloudy on that
It's like beating a dead horse
Let sleeping dogs lie
Blind as a bat 

Yes, they are metaphors.  And we use them in every conversation we have.  They are a fabulous way of getting complicated messages across or merely speeding up the communication by saying in a few words what might otherwise take paragraphs.

But there may be more to metaphors than we think.

A colleague recently lamented to me "I was so annoyed that the XYZ coffee shop in the ABC Centre took sooooo long to give me a second coffee one morning, even though I was close to the machine and kept looking expectantly, I decided to ‘punish' them by going elsewhere for a year. 

At an average of three coffees a day @ $3.20 each = $9.60 a day for about 220 working days a year, that could cost them $2,112 a year.  (That's why my new office now has a cappuccino machine!!)  Given that I was traveling a fair bit, I figured their poor service cost them at least $800 to $900 for the year that I gave them a miss."

Do you know how much business each individual customer brings you?  More importantly, do your front line staff know?  I wonder what impact it would have on the staff at this coffee shop if they knew that every regular customer had the potential to bring them at least $2,000 gross revenue each year.  Do the staff know how many "regular" customers they have per day?  And, what does it take to turn a "drop in" or "first timer" into a regular customer?