Otherwise others may profit from your success

Every now and then a story comes along that’s a perfect, real-world case study for the exact thing we teach in our marketing and strategy courses. This week it’s milk.

A small family dairy just outside Sydney has gone viral, and we mean genuinely viral, hundreds of people queuing in freezing temperatures, some for over an hour, just for a bottle of unhomogenised Jersey milk.

The farm normally serves around 300 people a week from a herd of just 40 cows, but demand has exploded so fast off the back of social media that they’re now selling out before 9:30am most Saturdays, sometimes earlier.

They’ve had to introduce strict per-customer purchase limits, and they’re even dealing with “personal shoppers” bulk-buying from their self-service farm door fridge to resell at a markup.

It’s a lovely problem to have. It’s also, from a business strategy point of view, a completely solvable one.

The Real Problem Isn’t Popularity, It’s Packaging

When a business goes from “steady local demand” to “viral overnight” almost overnight, the instinct is to just try to produce more, or serve people faster. But this farm has already said they’re landlocked with a fixed herd size, so they simply can’t scale supply the way a factory could.

That’s exactly the kind of situation where the smarter move isn’t more supply, it’s better structured demand. In other words: change how you sell it, not just how much of it you make.

Here’s a strategy worth considering: instead of pure walk-up retail sales at the market and an honesty-system farm fridge, introduce a two-tier subscription model:

• Singles tier – a smaller weekly or fortnightly bottle allocation at a set price, reserved and guaranteed, no queuing required
• Families tier – a larger regular allocation (milk, maybe yoghurt too) at a slightly better per-litre rate, again reserved in advance

Subscribers get guaranteed supply and skip the queue entirely. Non-subscribers can still try their luck at the market with whatever’s left over, which actually helps keep some of that organic, viral energy going too.

Why This Works (And Why It’s Not Just About the Milk)

This is precisely the kind of thinking covered in our Sales & Marketing Success Strategy course, which is built entirely around helping small and growing businesses package their products and services properly so they attract the right amount of the right kind of customer, not just as many customers as possible.

A few of the exact principles at play here:

• Packaging your offer so it matches what different customer segments actually need (a single person doesn’t need the same volume as a family of five, so why price and sell it the same way?)
• Protecting margins by moving from unpredictable one-off sales to predictable recurring revenue
• Reducing operational chaos (like scalpers emptying a fridge overnight) by controlling who gets access and how much
• Smart reporting and test-and-measure, so you can see exactly how many subscribers you can sustainably serve from a fixed supply, and adjust pricing or tier limits accordingly

A subscription model also solves the scalping problem almost by accident. If access is tied to a named, paid subscription rather than an anonymous honesty-system fridge, it becomes much harder for someone to show up, empty the shelves, and resell the stock.

The Bigger Lesson for Any Small Business

Viral demand feels great, but without the right sales structure behind it, it can actually damage a business, burning out staff, alienating loyal long-term customers who can no longer get served, and creating exactly the kind of scalping and chaos this farm is now dealing with.

Whether you’re running a dairy farm, a bookkeeping practice, or a training course business like ours, the underlying strategy question is the same: how do you package and price what you offer so demand becomes predictable, profitable and manageable, instead of just loud?

If you’re sitting on a product or service that’s suddenly in high demand (or you want a proper strategy in place before that happens), our Sales & Marketing Success Strategy course walks you through exactly this kind of packaging, pricing and business planning work, with editable templates and spreadsheets you can apply directly to your own business.

Got a business that’s grown faster than your systems can handle? That’s a good problem, and a fixable one.