I Thought I Knew My Customers. One Phone Call Proved Me Wrong.

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.

In a 2026 Small Business Expo Research Desk survey of more than 380 business owners, 86% pointed to service, relationships, quality or expertise as their biggest competitive edge, not price. That edge is what let me catch a signal a larger company would have missed entirely. Nobody wrote in to say they were using a hunting product on rabbits. It just showed up as a quantity that didn’t match the season, and it would have stayed invisible if I’d been checking a dashboard instead of a shipping label.

An entire customer segment, home gardeners, had been buying my product for years before I noticed, because I had never asked why a hunting-season item was moving in spring.

2. Listen when your product is used differently than intended

Novo Nordisk’s experience with Ozempic and Wegovy is the clearest large-scale version of this. Patients weren’t using the diabetes drug Ozempic the way it was designed to be used, and rather than treat that as a problem to correct, Novo Nordisk built a second product, Wegovy, around the behavior instead.

Fox urine ran on the same structure, just at a much smaller scale. The product was built to hide a hunter’s scent from prey. Gardeners found the second use themselves, the one that opened this story. Instead of masking a threat, the identical bottle created the illusion of one.

Neither Novo Nordisk nor I set out to build a second product. In both cases, the customer got there first. The choice was whether to correct that behavior back to what the product was designed for or build the next one around it instead.

3. Diagnose the actual problem before guessing at solutions

A generic fix rarely survives contact with a real problem. Both businesses grew into a wider wildlife deterrent line over the years, covering everything from henhouses to gardens to hawks overhead, and every new animal brought a new problem instead of a bigger version of the old one.

Customers asked us some version of the same question constantly: how to keep foxes out of the henhouse, deer out of the orchard, rabbits out of the beans. Each one required looking at how that specific animal perceives risk before I could offer an answer. Mammals respond to scent. Hawks respond to sight. The cover scent that stopped a fox from raiding a henhouse did nothing for a hawk circling the same yard, so we built a separate visual deterrent because the biology dictated the solution, not our preference for reusing what already worked.

The same logic holds off the farm. A complaint about a confusing sign-up flow and a complaint about a slow support response can land in the same inbox looking identical. Diagnosing which one you’re actually facing, instead of applying the fix that worked last time, is the difference between keeping a customer and losing one.

The gardener who placed that order wasn’t trying to hand me a new business. He wanted his lettuce left alone. Most market signals arrive exactly that quietly, inside an order that doesn’t match your model or a complaint that doesn’t fit your assumptions.

The deer come back if you get complacent, and the rabbits test the perimeter again every spring, which is really just another way of saying that customers and competitors both keep retesting you long after you think the problem is solved. Whether you’re running a multinational company or a fox urine operation out of Maine, the instinct to notice is the same one that keeps you in business.