Interview Time: Opportunity Spotlight

I think that aquarium enthusiasts in Gainesville, and even the whole of Alachua County, have an unmet need of a full-service aquarium shop. The current local fish store has a varied stock of fish, but the inconsistency in the customer service, as well as the driving profit motives, create an environment where customers are not happy. Aquarium enthusiasts maintain the options to buy online, but the immediacy of a local fish store, as well as the assurance of live fish, is an important hook that prevents them from making the switch. Because of this, people are hooked into a position they don’t want to be - buying overpriced fish stock from inexperienced salesmen that cannot provide good advice. This hasn’t always been a problem, when the owner of the Fish Store and his wife took a more leading role in the customer experience ticket, these issues did not seem to be as saturated as they are now. I spoke to several customers of this shop to gauge their experiences, and have selected three to present below.

R. Crowley:

Robert is a longtime aquarium enthusiast with a passion for dragonettes, a particularly fickle genus of fish which eats tiny invertebrates known as copepods and isopods. These fish, particularly his favorite, the Mandarin Goby, seem to glide through the water and are kept in stock at the fish store. When Robert wants to stock up on food for them, which he explained is a process involving culturing the isopods in the tank to ensure that the dragonettes are able to eat a healthy amount without intervention, he goes to the store to purchase particular types of these critters. Upon arrival, however, he is often met by inexperienced salesmen who would not even make the cut as amateur enthusiasts for the aquarium hobby. Robert only started practicing this hobby following four years in the army, whereupon his arrival decided that he wanted to create worlds that were immune from the chaos of the real world. When the oceans are a front on the war against climate change, the isolation of his tanks are a valiant effort to create the aquarium trade’s answer to “The Matrix.” Currently, he is extremely unsatisfied with this shop, and if considering purchasing isopods online, not having made the transition yet on the grounds that they are particularly susceptible to death during shipment, requiring the purchase of greater amounts to counteract the loss of life (he says he only wants his precious babies to eat live ones, not dead ones).

My encounter with Robert went as I expected after speaking with him briefly about the opportunity to chat. Where at first glance he seemed like an eccentric, his apartment definitely pulled its weight in cementing that opinion. Posters of fish biology, coral species, and tanks galore seemed to throw light on why someone could get so swept up in this: the beauty of these aquariums could sweep you out like a riptide. I understood where his complaints stemmed from, a lack of quality service is an advantage that the shop exploits considering there are no other fish stores to purchase from.

A. Deutsch:

Ashley is a UF grad student who studies Anthropology and loves to TA. When she’s not on the clock examining the bones of living and extinct species of primates, she’s at home working on her latest aquascape creation. Aquascaping is the practice of creating art in aquariums using natural features to create a near identical natural environment. Some of her setups included fish, others not, but when I asked her about the service of the local fish store she gave me a brutal lecture (she will definitely make for a good professor): not only are the salesmen untrained, but they are not even aware of what to order. Ashley believes there is a clear demand for a greater variety of marine (meaning saltwater, not freshwater, which has a great variety in the store) plants. Currently, the store stocks two species of macroalgae, and no species of microalgae. She has started purchasing most of her stock of ivy from online sellers, but still gets small aquarium equipment supplies from the store, simply to avoid the hassle of shipment and waiting. Her biggest problem with transitioning to online orders for plants int hat she cannot see the plants firsthand before she purchases them. This has been a problem for her for over a year now, but she doesn’t expect it to be a concern of hers when she moves away, which she plans on doing, to secure a coastal position with access to anthropology academia.

Ashley was definitely not at all what I expected. Despite being a small and awfully shy-seeming woman, when she spoke about her passions she exploded like a block of C4. I can understand how someone who is so occupied by the importance of her pleasures may want a strong selection of algae, and be “pluffed” (a word she used to specifically signify annoyance) if the inexperience of the current team at the store denies her access to it.

M. Berlin:

Michel, a man with a child’s enthusiasm for fish, but a middle-aged enthusiasm for luxury sports cars, was one of the most peculiar people I interviewed. He does not frequent the store much, but when he does, he enjoys the general lack of marine education in the store. He says that he enjoys teaching the employees about the fish they stock, even if they only have half a brain for it. He explained that he enjoys maintaining a positive spin on life, and rather than be bummed out by the void of people who cannot share his excitement upon seeing a bamboo catshark (one of a few species of sharks that sleep without moving, as opposed to swimming while sleeping), he has decided to make use of them and “make them earn their money.” He doesn’t tell them this, but he secretly quizzes them. If they pay enough attention from him to be able to answer his questions, he will continue to purchase what he went to the store to buy, but if they do not, he leaves without buying anything. An interesting man, for sure.

Unlike with the other people I interviewed, Michel found a way to simultaneously find a flaw in a business that all the others had, but also found a way to enjoy it. If all consumers were like him, perhaps these problems wouldn’t translate to opportunities, but as from the looks of things, this store is welcome to a healthy serving of competition. When I mentioned the idea to him that another store should open up to compete with quality customer service, he said that they may be able to do that, but paying people well enough to do that may just leave both stores out of business. This was an interesting thought to hear because it made me think about the relationships between problems and opportunities.

Summary:

After an experience unlike any other, I think I’m now qualified for an honorary degree in Marine Biology, and the local fish store Aquatropics should pay for it! I began this adventure with the understanding that poor customer service could present itself as an opportunity for competition, and several interviews reinforced that idea. One person actually put this whole idea on its head, but their quirkiness remained isolated quirkiness after a good amount of thought. Overall, I think that the opportunity is greater than what I believed at the onset of this process, and I have evidence to support these claims now.  I don’t think that the opportunity needs to be adjusted much, other than perhaps expanded. Ideally, an entrepreneur should be open to adapting his idea to whatever the market dictates, but there should also be a concern for things like social and environmental impact, which may not be considered by the market.