Celebrity Voice-Overs Are Here!

Watt Media has just launched Celebrity Voice-Overs!  Available now, you can have some celebrity messages interspersed throughout your telephone on-hold recording.  Your regular script will still remain, and these will play 3 times throughout.  Characters such as Arnold, Sly Stallone, Regis Philbin, Austin Powers, Hillary Clinton, and others will entertain your callers and are guaranteed to make them laugh!  These are available in stock messages or can be customized to promote your product or service.  For more information, go to http://watt-media.com/celebrity_voices.html. They have already been a big hit in the one week since we launched this service!

The Power of Networking

One of the most effective marketing methods often overlooked by many business owners is personal networking.  Your local chamber or referral group (such as BNI) can be a huge source of new business.  Here are some tips to help you network effectively:

Don’t just pass out as many business cards as possible.  What do you think of someone who just puts his business card in your face and quickly moves onto the next person?  Don’t be that guy.  Two or three meaningful conversations are worth more than hundreds of cards passed out.

Join both your local chamber and a referral group.  These two organizations are beneficial in different ways.   The chamber offers some great “schmoozing”– type of networking events, often attended by 100 people or more, and a referral group offers quality over quantity.  There’s usually only one person representing each industry, and you get to build relationships with a solid group of 20 – 50 people.  Both types of organizations offer great opportunities.

Join a committee.  Make the most of a chamber or referral group by joining a committee.  This enables you to get to know people and build trust and rapport, and we all know that people do business or refer others to people they know, trust, and like.

Don’t go just once.  If you think you can show up to one event and get your phone to ring, think again.  Networking takes patience, and offers delayed gratification.  People need to get to know you, so that means that you need to keep coming back to these groups.  It can be months before you start getting business, but when you do, it’s guaranteed to be quality.

Networking is always a great source of business, but especially in an economy like the one we’re in now, it can keep your business afloat and is crucial to your business’ success.

Running a Business In a Recession

It’s hard to believe that I wrote my last article on this topic about a year ago, but I guess recession fears were brewing even last March.  Now we already know that we’ve been experiencing a real recession for several months.  I have never owned a business in this type of economy, and I’m sure many business owners would say the same thing; so it’s a bit hard to know how to navigate through it.  I believe that, as always, careful planning and sensibility will get you through it, so here are some ideas:

Proper planning is crucial.  We’ve all heard about the importance of writing a business plan, and while many businesses thrive without one, now more than ever, planning is crucial.  I normally create a budget for my business each year, but this year I created three.  The first one is for a regular, non-recession year.  The second is identical to last year’s, in case it’s a flat year, and the third is a contingency budget, in case sales are down by as much as 30 percent.

I always want to make sure that I get paid first, so my goal with each budget is to ensure that I’d have enough to take home in all three cases, especially in the worst case.  Even with sales down 30%, my contingency budget allows for me to make almost as much as I did in a good year.  (This is accomplished by cutting other expenses of course.)

This is the time to slim down and run a lean ship.  Review all of your expenses and cut anything that isn’t needed.  Reevaluate your marketing plan. For the past few years, we’ve been doing trade shows – up to ten per year, but they have started becoming less effective.  Based on an educated “hunch” that sales would continue to decrease due to a continued drop in attendance, I decided to cut tradeshows from the budget completely – that’s over $15,000 in expenses which I will use towards hiring a sales person. 

We have a classified ad in a trade magazine that hasn’t been getting results – it’s not likely to do better this year – so I’ve decided to cut it.  I had to hire a new production person, who previously worked 25 hours a week.  I found that 20 hours was sufficient, so I placed an ad for 20 hours and cut some extra spending there as well.  Last year, I ate lunch out 3 or 4 times per week, now I bring lunch from home and eat out once a week.  All of these things add up.

Be careful not to cut too much, and make sure you cut in the right areas.  Marketing and advertising are needed now more than ever, so try to look for different, more creative forms of marketing.  Our search engine marketing efforts over the past two years have begun to pay off; now we get about 2 calls a day from prospects that have found us online, and we’ve already generated sales from those calls.  We’re launching some new side services and going back to our current clients – these are our best source for more business!

I’m also looking into buying a small book of business.  Since sales may be down, why not acquire another business?  It’s an automatic way of increasing your customer base, and as mentioned above, customers are your biggest asset!  They have already purchased from you, so why not go back to them and offer them other services?  You’re also more likely to get a good deal now, since many small business owners are hurting and looking to cash out.

With proper planning, you can hold on and make it through this tough time.  Rather than making deep cuts in every department, make them where appropriate, but keep on finding ways to generate business.  It will be tough, and slow, but if you can hold on, you’ll still be in the game to reap the rewards when the economy bounces back up.

Google is Amazing!

Google never ceases to amaze me. Google is THE search engine, of course, but what about Google maps and Google Earth, where you can view satellite images of virtually any place on earth? Then there's Blogger, owned by Google, Google Video (YouTube), Google Chat for instant messaging, and a whole host of Google applications. Wait, how could I forget Gmail?!!

Google has changed the world, and will continue to do so. With Google calendar and word processor applications, you no longer need Word, Excel, Outlook, etc. It seems to be the future of computing - since Google lets you have virtually unlimited space, you no longer need a pc with a hard drive! Use all their apps and THEIR servers! I can see a day where we don't have pc's with hard drives, but instead just a connection to the internet, and everything will be online on their servers. And it seems like they have new applications daily. They are amazing!