Running Your Business: Listen To Your Instincts

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Ted and Flori Pate, owners of Dig Local in Asheville, say when running a business, you have to listen to your instincts. Take that risk, fight for your passion, and if you're going to go down, go down swinging for your business.

I think I would agree with definitely listening to your instincts. That being said, I think you need to listen to people in case they've gone through something similar and they can tell you their story. I think that's really valuable to do a lot of listening when you're making hard decisions and then come to that decision.
If you just like, you just feel it in your bones that you want to plow ahead with this and that you're not gonna live with yourself if you don't do it, then you should probably take that risk even if it's something that's not traditional or, you know, against how things are done. We had an experience early on where we had a large company that approached us because they said that we were using their name. This was before Dig Local and before we were called Dig Local, and they really were fighting us. There was a huge company, they were fighting at us telling us that they were going to sue us and we needed to give up our name that we'd already spent so much time selling within the community and getting the brand out. And we had people say, you do not fight big business, that's not what you do. You don't do that. And I'm thinking to Ted, I said, you know, the whole premise of our idea is to support local businesses and support the little guy against the big guys. And if we go down, we're not going to go down without a fight. And so we did, we stood up to to this mammoth of a company when they wanted to have the name that we were using. And we ended up actually winning our first round of what we call that it was our seed money from fighting that company and saying you can have the name, but rather than suing us for the name, you can pay us for the name which I think kind of made their head spin a little bit because you don't fight big business.You don't do that. And we're like, well, we do. And we did. And so, we got enough money in that settlement that we were able to rebrand to Dig Local.

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