As often happens in my industry, I have become close to many of my clients and look at them as an extended family, more than a paycheck. As a marketer who focuses specifically on growth, I often have to dive deep into people’s lives, both business and personal, to make the best marketing decisions for my clientele. On more than one occasion I have found myself even analyzing someone’s grocery bill to see if there was a way to get the few extra dollars that would be needed for an industry edge. This has created close relationships as I help a family of six save two to three hundred dollars a month and get as good if not better deals for their money.
So it was a typical Tuesday when Sarah came in with her teenage son, Brad. She had owned her interior design business for nearly seven years and was doing well until the economy down swing gained momentum. Now to date, I had not done anything as extensive with Sarah and she wasn’t even aware of my ability to do pure marketing evaluations that included personal finances. She was excited and jumped on the opportunity. I was expecting it to be a few days before she came back to my Sacramento marketing office, but Sarah had her laptop with her in the car and sent her son out to grab it. Within just a few minutes we were going over her finances and seeing the details of every expenditure via scanned receipts.
Whenever you are sharing personal information with a marketer who works on this detailed a level, be sure to have a good rapport with them and a knowledge that everything, down to personal items may end up being shared. The worst thing you can do is go to someone who you don’t know and show them what you spent on sensitive medications or something of the like.
With Sarah I noticed that when she shopped there were several items which would be categorized as impulse. She would also purchase magazines through the stand. This would be fine except that she would purchase the same magazine every other month and would save much more if she just got the subscription. By subscribing to the magazines she would buy and shopping online to minimize impulse spending (many stores offer free delivery if you purchase a certain amount), Sarah was able to save quite a bit each month on just her grocery spending and the gas it took to get back and forth.
We then went over everything from Sarah’s automotive expenses and even down to her electric bill. When all was said and done, we were able to shave over $400 a month. Now this may not seem to be a huge amount; however imagine what kind of marketing damage you could do with an additional $5,000.00 a year.
Scalable marketing, which is all I do, teaches people how to balance time and money in their marketing efforts. This allows for small business owners to take an active roll in their marketing efforts rather than just tossing money to someone who will hire someone to do some of the work the owner could have done in the first place. This doesn’t eliminate the roll of a marketing professional, but rather allows the marketer and the business owner to work together until the client’s time becomes more valuable and more and more of the responsibility is distributed to the marketing service.
This time I was pleasantly surprised at the help. Sarah herself was busy, but Brad stepped in to help where he could. SIA Professional Services printed high end post cards with a die cut and spot UV to truly stand out. Sarah’s son took the printed postcards out and distributed them to higher income neighborhoods, especially paying attention to homes that were either for sale, or recently sold. At my instruction, he would write down a log of each of the homes he left the printed calling cards on and we would then track how many visitors their website would get and how many calls came in. Brad shocked me in his level of involvement. By recruiting a few of his friends they were able to pass out nearly 5,000 post cards a week throughout the Sacramento area. I ended up having my web programming team place a web based database on the back end of their website so Brad could easily track every address and give his mom updates on a regular basis.
Sarah ended up gaining enough business so that she could hire someone to pass out the postcards. Brad, however, said he would instead like to hire more friends and keep track of their progress. Brad was now taking a very active part in his mom’s business and was proud to see the progress. He went from playing video games day in and day out to taking an active marketing responsibility in his mother’s business. Brad was able to see the results as his mom ran around from appointment to appointment.
Last week I got a phone call from Brad who paid for some new vehicle magnets for his mom that matched the adverts his friends were passing around for him. He told me that Sarah had offered to buy him the PS3 he said he wanted. Instead Brad found a faster computer for around the same price so he could keep up on all the work his friends were doing.
It’s good to see families team up to make a business a success in a trying market. Even better when you realize that, at least in this case, Santa isn’t a fat man in a red outfit who bribes his breaking and entry violations with toys, but rather a fifteen year old young man who loves his mom.
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