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Key Takeaways Treat a stray order as market intelligence, not as a fluke to fulfill and move past.
Listen when your product is used differently than intended.
Diagnose the actual problem before guessing at solutions.
Reaching customers and growing sales is the top operational challenge facing small businesses right now, according to the Federal Reserve’s 2026 Report on Employer Firms, based on a survey of more than 6,500 small employer firms across the country. Most owners read that as a marketing problem. I read it as a signal problem.
For years, I sold predator urine to hunters in Maine as a cover scent, something to mask a person’s presence in the woods. One spring, a lawn and garden store placed an order far too large for hunting season. I called to ask why. The answer? Their customers weren’t hunters. They were gardeners using the same bottle to convince rabbits a predator was nearby, so the rabbits would leave the lettuce alone.
That call explained the order and handed me a second business I didn’t know I had. After four decades running both out of the 35 acres my family reclaimed outside Bangor, Maine, three lessons from it have stuck with me the longest.
1. Treat a stray order as market intelligence
Most businesses treat an order that doesn’t fit the pattern as a fluke to fulfill and move past. The gardener order should have been exactly that. Instead, the size of it didn’t square with anything I understood about my own market, and that mismatch was the entire reason it was worth a phone call.
That’s easy to miss in a business where orders route through a fulfillment system instead of a person. I only caught it because I still filled every order myself back then, and that kind of proximity is exactly what small business owners say sets them apart from larger competitors.
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