As a new business owner you will know the first phase of any ‘new kid on the block’ is the Invisible phase of business. During this time you are putting in serious hours at the helm and having to contend with new contracts, huge financial outlay, new staff, suppliers and hardly any customers. This is how we all start. This invisible phase is just that, a phase it will pass as you grow and it will become different. Note I said different not easier.

One of the ways to fast track your business through this invisible phase is to attract customers. The more people who know about you the less invisible you become. If you are blessed with a huge budget then you can do the big launch thing and get it going in a day or two. If however you are a small enterprise and have no marketing budget you need to forge your way through all this and gain access to market. Using give-aways has become the best way to gain customer loyalty. Free products – buy one get one free. Free cash back – spend R100 and get 20% off your next purchase. Free membership – bring a friend and get in for free. Or just small gifts for the first 1000 customers. All these will attract people to your door or site.

If you are still struggling to get known in the market, try a promotion and give a little. It goes a long way to gain the trust and loyalty of your customers.

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I got to meet Robert Bernatzeder yesterday at the Ad Dymano workshop. Robert is from Cape Intern a site that puts foreign Interns in contact with businesses who want skills.

It works like this: You identify a skill and post your intern or volunteer requirements on the website. Interns wanting to come to Cape Town find you and apply for the position. They fly here at their expense, find their own accommodation and transport and then arrive to work at your office with their own laptop for up to 6 months. And what does it cost you? Oh Nothing! They work, gain experience and then you write a report, easy as that.

Brilliant way to subsidize a shortfall in your business when growing or playing in an experimental project that may not require full time staff. A sort of win-win thing that seems unfair on both sides but is wonderful. How does Cape Intern make their money? By referring services such as accommodation, car hire and tourist activities for Interns whilst they are here (if you give them any time off) Diletto one of our members gets their logistics intern next week. Will keep you informed.

After deciding to increase my offerings on our website to include some advertising and some affiliate programmes, I signed up with Amazon.com as an affiliate to promote a list of books I recommend for entrepreneurs. In response I got this message:

Greetings from Amazon.com Associates.
Thank you for taking the time to submit your application. Unfortunately, we will not be able to accept your application. Upon review, I noticed you supplied the popular site http://www.ei.co.za as your registered URL. We need a complete and valid URL for the website where you intend to display links to Amazon.com before we can process an application. If you do have your own URL, please resubmit your application and remember to include the URL of your website. Thanks for your interest in the Associates Program.

My reply:

You seem to have cancelled me off your system and not granted me my associate account because you some how think my domain is invalid.
I assure you I am a real persona and my domain is valid and has been functioning for some time.
Please reinstate me and lets do business.

And at last the realisation of truth from Amazon.

I apologize that your application to Associates was accidentally rejected. I had reviewed your site http://www.ei.co.za/, and saw that the site does indeed belong to you and is not a typical popular site. I have reopened your Amazon.com Associates Account.

Now we can do business. Check out the list of recommended books on the right of this screen. Each one read and selected by myself. Enjoy.

Last week I agreed to meet with a women who had attended one of my talks a few weeks ago on social media and blogging. She emailed me telling of her huge plan that she had thought up in her head to make money using a series of blogs and related products. This interested me and I agreed to meet with her to help flesh out her plan and listen to the detail.

The first question of hers was, “How do I find the name of the blog that I have just created?” It just went down hill from there. We ended up chatting for an hour as she explained her world domination plan to re-circulate the almost 500 daily emails she receives through her barrage of free subscriptions and then begin to ask people to pay her through affiliate and subscription programmes. She was convinced in her own mind that what she had found on the web for free was just not accessible to the many others in the world who were also had email. It took me a full half hour to get it into her head that she was not going to get rich distributing free and already available material to others expecting them to pay for it.

Entrepreneurs are originals with original thoughts that add value to others. If you are just standing in the way of money with the hope of skimming some off the top you are doomed to be out of business in a very short time. Customers out there are getting wise to middle man techniques and are using technology to get to the source or the person who cares and adds value through their product and service.

I see the immanent death of many businesses like rental agents who do not have their own direct portfolios, hotel booking agents who do not own the hotels, travel agents who do not know the industry, so called experts who sell concepts online that are not backed up by clinical research and many coaches who merely regurgitate chapters of books to their clients. You can fool some people for some time, but unless you add real value you do not deserve to be in business.

As a follow on from the Customer Complaints article we have seen host of videos coming out on You Tube that have used the guitar video as a platform to launch their own marketing campaigns. This is an extract from the full report. Clever opportunistic marketing, very clever.

1. CaseExtreme.com — In the tradition of Bill Mays and pitchmen everywhere comes this entertaining infomercial by the inventor of the Clam CaseXtreme, a flight case to protect musical instruments.  In the video the inventor beats the case with a hammer and even jumps on it.  When speaking about the strap to close the case, it features lines like this: “It takes the same licking, keeps on clicking.”  A title superimposed over part of the video says “United should rent these to customers.”  It’s just campy enough to make you smile.  So if the infomercial approach appeals to you, you might check this one out

2.  TakeLessons.com — Someone named Steven at TakeLessons.com, a music lessons company, filmed a video in which he said that in solidarity, his business would cancel flights on United.  And then he offers  to let Dave Carroll use his Taylor guitar any time he is in the San Diego area.  It’s an understated approach from a marketing perspective, but the video has gotten close to 45,000 views so far.  What this one does particularly well is make the URL of their website very very visible next to their video.

3. Taylor Guitars – Taylor Guitars, the manufacturer of the guitar that was broken by United baggage handlers, got a lot of unexpected publicity, too.  I’m not sure I had ever heard of Taylor Guitars before — now it’s the first guitar brand name I think of.  Taylor Guitars invited Dave Carroll to their factory for a tour, and set up media interviews for him while he was there — a practical gesture and “thank you” to help him get even more publicity.  But on top of that, Bob Taylor of Taylor Guitars put out a nice, one-to-one video on YouTube with helpful tips for air travel, with a low-key pitch for their guitar repair services.  Very effective, in my opinion, for any service-based business.

4. Latriciawhiteagain — Latricia is a comedian with her own YouTube channel.  She does a funny, stand-up comedy routine where she plays “Ms. Irlweg,” the United employee mentioned in the original video.  Some notable lines from her routine are “That’s it!  Blame it on Irlweg!” and “Who do you think baggage handlers are?  They’re people from the Olympics – the shotput team.”  For a comedian, this is a good way to advertise your capabilities.  I hope Latricia gets a gig or two out of her video.

5. Cessna154 – Cessna154 is the handle of an aviation enthusiast who filmed asimple verbal response.  It appears as if his revenue model is to make money from Google AdSense ads embedded at the bottom of his video and on elsewhere on his YouTube channel.  For an Internet entrepreneur, this suggests some possibilities for making money online.

6. A motley crew of the remainder – There are several other videos that launched off of the original video.  There’s the improv actor whose handle is jeebee25 with over 95,000 views of his improv routine called “Inside response from United Airlines.”

Then there’s the video pitching the United Breaks Guitars T-shirts (it’s not affiliated with the Sons of Maxwell band).  I won’t link to it or the website it directs you to, because the website looks suspect.  It’s not clear that if you pay your $14.95 a T-shirt will actually be forthcoming (hey, scams are a form of “business” too, I guess).

I am not alone when I share stories of long frustrated phone calls hoping for some sort of service from call centres or customer service departments. We in SA have almost lost the desire to raise a complaint because it often takes more effort to get a resolution than to just deal with the bad situation ourselves.

Well all this could change with the new trend set by Dave Carroll who flew United Airlines and found his guitar broken. After numerous complaints and getting know where they have written and released a song about the sad tale, sung in true country music style. The Youtube video has gotten 3,838,550 views since 6^th July. United responded by donating guitars to charity.

Now I just need to think of words to my song about Mugg and Bean.

As you know, I have had many complaints against the Mugg & Bean with their poor service and lack of staff training. I now have a shot at helping them improve their situation. As a part of our assignments for the Louis Group Academy we have been tasked with assessing the service level of a business that we use on a regular basis. Now I could be known as the all time long serving customer of M&B, so I thought this may be a great opportunity to complete my assignment and give feedback to the management. I plan to use the Constantia Village branch as my subject and will meet with the managers today for some input into what they have to train their staff in customer service.

I hope to publish my findings as well as the feedback I get from them in future posts. Any input you may have will be most welcome.

The only requirement to being able to open a business and earn a living are the following:

1. Add value to someone else
2. Make it affordable to those you want to reach
3. Do it with a service attitude, putting your customer before yourself

Three simple criteria that a lot of people seem to overlook in their endeavor to build their own empires with a financial or personal focus.
Take a minute to reassess your business and what you do against these three criteria.

How do you measure up?               Let us know.

The error a lot of small businesses do is to tell others what they do. Now this may sound like an obvious thing to do, but it often alienates your customers with your information before you have even asked the question about what they need or want.

A lot of websites I visit are like this: they offer lots and lots of dazzling information about a lot of stuff that I do not need or want and I get lost in the first 20 seconds and go elsewhere.

Take a few minutes to visit your business premises, website, business card and logo as an outsider. Look at the branding with fresh eyes and ask the simple questions: Does it say what it should? Does it inform and educate before it sells? Does it work?

The old saying of “I do not care how much you know, until I know how much you care” is so true to building customer loyalty. How much do you care for your customers before you care for your business?