Grassroots Marketing

ROCKING FROM THE INSIDE OUT

HOW COVID-19 TAUGHT US TO LOVE OUR PARKING LOT

By Mike and Miriam Risko

Our parking lot: Pre-pandemic, it was a great place for our students and store customers to park. It’s pretty big, it’s flat, it has lots of parking spots and it’s easy to get in out of. That may not sound like much, but in a town where it’s hard to find parking, it’s actually been a pretty valuable commodity for our store. When we bought our building in 2010, we thought of it as a mere convenience. We had no idea what an important role it would play in our professional lives during a global pandemic, something we never thought we would experience.

When the pandemic first hit, our parking lot just looked like an endless sea of blacktop. There were no cars in it during the 90 days we were closed. It had never before seemed more empty or like a bigger waste of space.

As New York State flattened the curve and it became safer to venture outside, we were allowed to safely open our doors (with masks and social distancing), and the parking lot started to play a more important role. It became a place where we could drop purchases in customer’s trunks or social distance outside while we discussed a purchase or lesson.

As spring turned into summer, the blacktop in the parking lot was heating up, and it was like a warm welcome when we would step outside our building to conduct business. The parking lot was still void of cars because most of our business continued to be virtual and New York was still fairly quiet, but it became a nice place to sit with a laptop or a cell phone and get some work done.

Then one day, it dawned on us: Our parking lot is the same size as our building. The spaciousness and the flat surface in the open air could help us get back to some type of normalcy, so we could begin doing some in-person business again. We began to develop a plan to temporarily reimagine our business from the inside out. From music lessons and rock bands to musical theater, from camps to concerts, we moved everything into our new “Outdoor Education Space.” We even moved retail displays out to the parking lot during the day.

Wearing masks and creating social-distance circles on the blacktop, we had the space to spread out and rock. People began to come back. Popup tents with no walls helped on

A curbside market featured the Ossining

Booster Club as one its members.

Classes offered outdoors via Mike Risko Music’s Saturday Academy.

rainy days, although no one cared if it was raining; they just wanted to be around other people, even if they were six feet away.

One of our favorite uses of the lot was participating in a Saturday Academy offered by one of our local school districts. This is a program in which the school coordinates activities for families and kids on Saturdays. It invited us to offer music classes, so we offered a rock star guitar class and a piano class. The classes met in our outside classroom once a week. It enabled multiple kids to start playing instruments, which was so welcome after the long season of being locked down at home. It enabled us to make music in a safe environment. These classes were such a great success that we began offering other group classes outside, and even expanded our offerings.

Sometimes, you don’t realize that everything you are looking for is right in front of you. We had no idea what a large part our parking lot would play in our business. We have realized that, in addition to our regular business, we now can have a year-round outdoor business (with the exception of a few months of cold, since we are in New York, after all.)

Realizing we had this space at our disposal was like getting an addition put on our building. It opened up so many doors and gave us new creative ideas. There have been no shortage of programs and classes to offer outside, and this newfound space has basically marketed itself by being a natural attraction for people driving by. We have even seen people stop to take pictures of bands in the lot or other unique programs that are running. We fully expect to keep this concept going, even when the pandemic is behind us, because we have really learned to rock from the inside out.