Words from the Wise

I'm pleased to welcome the first live guest to our blog - Bill Strand. As a young man with an innovative product, Bill started a building materials manufacturing company in 1969, and acted as CEO until he sold the company in 2006. During his years in business, Bill learned a thing or two about marketing, especially marketing on a limited budget.

My next couple of posts will feature my Q & A with Bill.

Let's get to it...

Q. What were your revenues your first year in business?
A. $37,000 - we did seventeen jobs that year, had four employees and lost $11,000!

Q. What were your revenues when you sold your business?
A. In excess of $40Million. At that time, we did hundreds of projects yearly, employed over 100 people and were turning good profits. Time flies when you're having fun!

Q. Many of our readers are in business for themselves and just starting out. Thinking back to when it all began for you, what marketing advice can you offer?
A. Two things - Know your market, and get the attention of the purchaser. Sounds simple, and it is. You must target market the people who will have the interest in your product. You can't be all things to all people; a targeted approach is absolutely necessary.

Q. What did you do to market your business when you had no money to spend?
A. We photographed our first project and took that photo with us to similar operations to show them what we could do. We discovered that most people, when they saw the finished product, were more interested in what theirs could look like rather than what it took to put the product together. Their first inclination was to envision what their place could look like. This became the general rule we would always follow in our marketing during the next 38 years - provide visuals to cut through the clutter and grab the customers' attention.

Today the Internet is a great tool for marketers with limited funds. It would be easy to apply the same concept as we did simply by creating a blog (with photos) about your business, using tools like Squidoo and facebook, and then publicizing them to your entire network via email. This, coupled with pounding the pavement as we did, could give somebody a great start.

Also, you wrote a previous post about asking for referrals. Hopefully your readers took note of that because they were our single biggest marketing tool during our years in business.

Q. During your 38 years in business, you obviously withstood recessionary markets. What was your secret?
A. In terms of the business in general, we always recognized that for every up cycle, a down cycle would be right behind it. We ensured that we had good professional advisors - accountants and lawyers, as well as an active relationship with our bankers. By active, I mean that there was frequent communication between both parties, with an intention for a mutually beneficial relationship.

In terms of marketing, during good times we would invest in our business to innovate and improve our products, and would market heavily to try to avoid, or at least minimize our down times.

One thing that we never did during a recession was cut our marketing. In fact, we did the opposite - we hired more sales people and sent out more direct mail to let the market know that we were surviving and thriving. In those days direct mail was a very inexpensive way to market. Again, we did not have the money to spend on flashy literature, but would send a photographic piece to create the vision for our prospects.

Q. As a final question for this part of the interview, what is a general piece of advice you can give?
A. Always presume success. No matter what I did in my years in business, from buying new equipment, to launching a new product, to negotiating the sale of the company, I always envisioned a positive outcome. I firmly believe that, because of that attitude, we saw more than our fair share of successes.

This concludes part one. Part two will focus on building goodwill. Bill's business had an excellent reputation and he'll tell us a bit about how it was earned.

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