My focus with this newer business is not to get to deep into preparation and set up. I need to set up the basic, bare minimum and get my ass out and sell it and it will evolve. Sometimes it's easy to get caught up in the romance of setting up a new business and the potential than rolling up the sleeves and getting at it.
When I reflect back in my life at times I've been successful it's when I do the important things consistently. When we started Embassy at 24 years old the first thing I did was make sales calls. I didn't have much of a staff in place, I didn't have a brochure, all I had was myself. I got on the phone, started calling and setting up appointments. In that first year we did close to $400,000 in sales from a $0 starting point and we even did it winning ugly. We didn't have top drawer staff, we made lots of mistakes and redid lots of customers jobs.
Same with training. You can spend all the time you want making sure you have the right clothes or equipment or mess around with nutrition or surf the Internet or read magazines learning about triathlons, but at the end of the day your success will be based on getting your ass out the door and training. It's that simple. If you put in the training hours all the rest of the stuff takes care of itself.
I made that mistake with my Triathlon Toons website. I build a Mona Lisa. I spent way to much time sweating the non critical stuff like design and the back end administration and instant messaging system. However, with that said I'm very proud of it, it's damn awesome from a functional side. Unfortunately damn awesome doesn't pay the bills. I spend more time on the non-productive stuff on that site, not to mention I made it to industry specific and not general enough for every occasion. With that said, it has been a wonderful sponsor and has allowed me many write offs. It's definitely paid for itself in other ways.
On the business side it's not yet a winner, it will be though or I'll know shortly anyways. Since getting Poochie and Abbey working on the site it is moving in the right direction. I have them focusing on the basics and doing things that will increase the sales. We are very close to mirroring the triathlon toons site and calling it Caricature Toons and launching it as a general site for anyone to order Caricatures. I also realized how to make the site easier to use and how to add new artists without having to redesign the home page with different styles. It was such an easy solution I can't believe it took me this long to think about it. With this Tritoons site my mind was on playing business and not doing business. Now I'm all business!!! (Thought that last one was a good line). It's true though, the bottom line is it's about making money, not talking about making money.
For the Results Internet Marketing Project I did a little web research tonight looking at others sites. Some are very complex, some are very simple. To me I'm going to try and make the site as simple as possible. Straightforward to read, easy to understand. I'm also not going to try and over explain or answer every possible question someone has, that will be for the face to face meetings. I don't yet have a formal presentation, I'm not going to worry about that, I'll make it up as I go along. I have the basics in my head and I'll put it on the website and a sheet of paper.
Some Internet Marketing companies have awesome presentation materials and 50 page reports that assess a website and blow peoples hair back. I don't have the reporting software and I'm not going to worry about that to begin with. I'm going to just put up a site, order some business cards and start making some sales calls. I've decided to call on more than end user businesses. I'm going to call on Ad Agencies, Employment Agencies, Graphic Designers, Copy writers, Computer Programmers, basically any sort of company that has a client base that trusts them and they can refer me. I'll offer each of the 25% commission on any work I do for someone they refer.
I was also looking on monster.ca and the employment websites, I figure companies that are looking to hire full time people to do SEO would be prime candidates. In addition I'm going to call on some end user clients. I'll deal with whatever objections I get when I get them. For example, if people ask me who I currently do work for I'll have to come up with tritoons and my own sites. However, I may have to find some friends businesses or non profits and offer to do some SEO for them for free in order to have a referal base. Again, I'll deal with it when it comes up.
If I make 50 sales calls, I'll know if this is a winner or not, it should take less than 60 days. If anyone has any ideas on who to call on pass them on. I'm also going to start a referral program, refer a person and get 25% commission for all sales and you don't even have to do anything but connect me with them.
On the training front my body is changing, for the first time in a long time I feel it. It's firming up. I'm starting to time travel back to probably around 2009 around the Clearwater 70.3 world championships. I think it has a lot to do with the swimming and weight training. Especially the weight training. This morning I did weights and it hurt, I pushed it. I'm back on the Creatine and I can tell the difference. I usually never can feel the difference of anything, Creatine I can definitely feel. Even my legs today felt near fully recovered from yesterday's run.
Other than weights I didn't do any riding or running. It got to late and cold outside. I didn't realize it's now getting dark at 7:05 pm. Looks like I'll have to start doing all my riding during the day. I can't bare to put myself on the trainer.
Food wise today was a fail. Not a huge fail, just a fail. Reid's been bugging me that he doesn't understand why I don't get it. That all the training I do is wasted when I eat poorly. Like I didn't know that. Every time I'm eating something unhealthy he'll say to me, "how's the diet going dad?" We decided to start another bet tonight, this time we each going to put a dollar in the jar after a day of healthy eating, the jar will hopefully build up and the first person to get off the wagon and eat poorly gets the money in the jar. I like it much better than the all or nothing $100 bet.
I'm also a little lighter in the pocket book, my brother introduced me to Quibids.com an auction website. At first I thought those action websites were a scam, now I realize they actually work. I got a $25 gift card to future shop for $5. But I also lost about $40 bidding on a iPad 2 that ended up going for $116 at 2 am. It's an awesome scam they have going. Each bid you put in costs you 60 cents and when you make a bid the price goes up by 1 cent. So on the iPad 2 they ended up collecting $6900 in bids for an item that is worth $700 and the winner probably got it for $116 plus the amount of bids he made, lets say $200 total. As Reid said, it's a win / win. What a brilliant idea.
We finally posted Jamie's steering wheel and aero bars on Ebay today. Reid's been bugging me to help him get it up. It's now done. I told Reid that he should start a business called "I sell your stuff" or "I sell your stuff in Millcroft" and print some flyers and deliver them and do a 60/40 split with the seller and himself. Then he takes a photo and sells it on Kijiji or Ebay. I'm going to push him on this to at least try it for a few streets around the house. We could put a website up in an hour or two. My only concern is making sure he doesn't get called by pedophiles.
Work wise things are going well. The other day Rino emailed me for sales projections. I rarely get emails from him. I've had them done for months. I think he was just trying to poke me a bit. Within 5 minutes of getting his email I replied with an attached copy of the projections from 2010 - 2014 by account, by products, by everything. I did it more for myself, I'm very used to doing budgets over the years. He emails back "that he wished all his reps broke out their sales projections this way". Now I'm sure I won't hear from him for a while. I think he was a little surprised I had everything in order, that I'm on top of the game. Which I am, it's just that I only have about 35 accounts world wide that I can go after and I already have about 6 or 7 of them. You can't call the others everyday. I can only call them every month or two without being a pest.
On the new helmet front, I went for the white one over the black one. Alice and Reid thought I'm a white helmet guy. Today Alyssa went to a seminar about becoming an exchange student. She's going to apply for Sweden as her first choice for next years and her second choice is going to be Singapore. Even though Sweden is technically sub-artic, the weather is much warmer than Winnipeg. The coldest it gets is typically - 10 C. Winnipeg it's not uncommon to get to -30 to -40 C.
Also, one last thing. I got a great video that Ian @pedalmanTO put together for me about how to become a better climber. He as a Cat 1 cyclist. Lots of wisdom. Thanks again Ian.
Weights - 45 minutes.
4282 Calories
3 comments:
Hi B,
Glad to hear that life is feeling really good for you right now. That's an awesome feeling.
Regarding "I sell your stuff", I believe that it has potential to do very well. I always have stuff in my house that I'd like to sell it but I don't have time to do it. I also don't want to just throw it away because it's in good condition. Like we're getting a new microwave while the old one is still working and it just doesn't feel right to throw it in the garbage. And I'm sure that Millcroft has quite a few busy rich people who want to get rid of their stuff and don't have time for it.
If you want to help Reid, maybe you can have Poochie and Abbey build a basic website for him. It will make Reid look more professional and help him win more clients.
I told you in America they have these shops everywhere. Curb Canada and get Reid started early. Make sure he is VERY organized with inventorying everything and shipping costs, etc.
D, that's what I tell him, I'm going to keep pushing.
M, ditto to comment to D.
B
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