| Certified as a women's business enterprise through the Women's Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC), the nation's largest third party certifier of businesses owned and operated by women in the US. |
In the meantime, DJ interviewed a programmer last week here at home. They talked a lot about building an engine to help us convert the data we get from our suppliers more easily. This sounds like a fabulous idea and I hope the quote comes out within reason. We have so many new websites we want to create to help our customers find promotional products and corporate gifts easier.
Today I am working on adding new products to the web shoppes. It is very easy to find new vendors and I have about 10 whose products would compliment what we have already in our shoppes. I decided to go to odesk.com to see if I can find an experienced person that I will not have to spend time interviewing and can just jump right in and get the job done. I heard about them in one of the hundreds of business magazines I subscribe to and we have been talking about getting help to increase products and to convert the databases we received from our vendors. So here goes!
It is a very daunting task. There are literally hundreds of people from all over the world that have many technical talents. Now my job is to sift through these and find someone to add the first vendor and see how we go from there. I will keep you posted.
Over the weekend my boys went swimming in our backyard pool. I never really looked at all of the towels we have accumulated over the years until now. Last week we began training our staff about the differences in beach towels because so many of our customers are purchasing promotional towels for their events and they were asking a lot of questions.
Beach towels are great for swim teams, school fundraisers, company picnics, beach outings and any other summer event you can think of. We get a lot of questions from those that are tasked to purchase the beach towels for their event. Many have no idea why some towels cost more than others and some can’t figure out why it cost so much to put more than 1 or 2 colors on a towel.
To solve this, we have put together a sort of cheat sheet. This page explains the towel types, terry loop vs velour, screen printed vs. fiber reactive towels in a clean cut, user friendly form that everyone can understand. If you are in charge or know of someone in your company that will be tasked to order your summer promotional items and they want to know more about beach towels visit our FAQ on towel decoration or call one of our trained staff.
We had a very good weekend as far as work goes. When you are busy during the week, sometimes it is hard to catch up with all the things that need to be done to maintain multiple websites. I had the chance to read three Inc. magazines over the weekend. The latest, the May issue was full of useful information and a terrific article on Tony Hsieh, the Zappos.com CEO. His philosophy is to be happy and from that you can get your employees and your customers to buy in to that happiness. Sounds good in theory, but he has actually made it work for his company. Everyone who works there does so, not because of the huge wages he pays (because he doesn’t), or the free cafeteria food (lunch meat) but because they truly buy in to his whole happiness theory. It really was a very inspiring article.
There were a few other items in this month’s Inc. magazine that I could relate to as well. “Balancing Acts” by Meg Cadoux Hirshberg is an article that hits home. But, instead of my husband being the Entrepreneur, I am and brought him in to help with the business. Her story is the story of thousands of small business owners that struggle to keep their dreams alive while paying the bills and enjoying the finer things in life. I will continue to look forward to reading her monthly updates about the impact of entrepreneurial businesses on families.
If you get a minute to visit our facebook page, we would love it if you signed up as a fan. Or you can follow me on Twitter, and while you are there you can also follow Tony Hsieh. I do.
My son is doing a report on a famous person. That person is Will Smith. I somehow got involved in helping him on his project and last night read “King of Cool- Will Smith” By Brian J. Robb. It was a very interesting biography of Will Smith’s life. By the time Smith was 18 he was a millionaire, a year later he was broke, and by 21 he added another career to his Rap singing, and became famous for “The Fresh Prince of Bellaire”. He did more in a 3 year span, than most people do in a lifetime.
I have always believed that if you work hard, and truly love what you do, you can be and do anything you want. Smith took this much farther than I could ever imagine. He truly believed in being the very best at whatever he set his mind to doing. He had a strong work ethic and it shows in everything he does.
I still believe that loving what you do, and being the best at it, allows you to live the life you believe in. This business is a lifelong dream. We are very lucky to be able to come to a place every day where we love to be. Yes, sometimes it is stressful, the hours can be long and sometimes it can be downright scary, but I can’t think of any place I would rather be than owning my own company.
It is amazing how such a small act can create distaste in the eyes of some of your most loyal customers. There is a little wine shop in the town where I live. The economy has not been good to the folks who own the shop and they are struggling to keep open. Many people have tried to give them ideas, and I for one have hired them to cater an event and even planned my monthly women’s networking group meeting there on the first Wednesday of every month.
Well, last month many of us got to see a side of why the place is struggling so hard. The owners are not as worried about their customers as they are about having it all, before it goes down. My meeting was planned well in advance. It has been on the same date for the last 6 months. On this particular night, a wine maker from California came in to town. So, the proprietors emailed everyone they know to come in for a free wine tasting. All well and good. You can’t begrudge them for trying to make some money. However, the wine maker gets to speak, and my meeting cannot start on time. Then about 45 minutes in to the meeting we ask if we can get some cheese and bread to go with our wine. - We were told that they were closing up so that they could go out to dinner with the wine maker! Now mind you, there are at least 30 people who showed up to the event. The wine maker was late, so each of these people had to at least buy one glass of wine before he arrived. Some purchased a bottle. My meeting was not supposed to end for another hour and we were being herded out as quickly as possible so they could go to some upscale restaurant at the winemaker’s expense.
Those of us that were at the meeting were in disbelief, since we knew how hard they were trying to keep business coming in the door. Inviting customers in, and then shooing them out for your own enjoyment are not the makings of good business. Many people were talking about this for days. Employees of the people that were in that room were talking about it for days. The saying is true, if you do something great, no one knows about it. Do something bad and everyone will know about it and tell their friends. I am not sure if this hurt their business or not. However, it was agreed that our meetings will no longer be held at this establishment, and I am not sure I will recommend them for any more catering jobs. Just think what might happen if they decide to go to dinner again on a night they were committed to a job?
Our business depends on good customer service and loyal customers. Sometimes this means staying late and working on a client project. It can mean putting in orders well after the time we have closed. Emails need to be responded to, and we do that even on the weekends. Treating your customers with respect is at the top of the list of good customer service. Without loyal customers, and respect and sometimes putting your business ahead of things we would rather be doing, we wouldn’t have a chance at the type of life we want to live. We’ve built our business because of the customer service we provide. We love our customers and it shows every day.
We just spent a week at the Wyndham Ocean Walk in Daytona Beach. It was supposed to be spring break, but it was nothing like it was in the 80’s when I lived there for a few brief moments of my life. The beach was not crowded, there were no concerts at the band shell, just a few hundred (literally) college age kids drinking daily at the pool bar.
Maybe they (Daytona Beach) should give incentives for filling up hotel rooms or for the college with the most attendees. I was prepared for the worst: long lines on the elevator, no place to sit on the beach, the pool being filled with hundreds of people, and then nothing of the sort happened.
There are many ways incentives can be handled. Our CEShoppes Select-A-Gift program has 3 or more ways to reward customers and employees alike. There is an on-line program with no cost to the customer, where the recipient logs in and picks their gift and we ship them out. This one comes with point certificates, which are purchased for a nominal charge. This program would be great for hotel staff to hand out certificates to those staff members who get great ratings by the hotel guests. They can save up their certificates and redeem them for name brand gifts worth up to $4,000! The gift booklet program also would work well for hotels. The more the hotel guest or college vacation promotion department spends, the bigger the gift book.
There are just numerous ways to get guests to the city. I felt bad for the merchants up and down the block. The nightly news said it was supposed to be “Black College Week”. But they interviewed a few college kids who should have been there for this event, and they had never heard of Black College Week.
Over all our vacation went well. No incidents and the kids had plenty of room to build their sand castle.
We did contribute to the local economy while we were there, my son purchased a skim board, and we took in the “Race to Witch Mountain” movie, and ate at some of the local restaurants with gift card rewards we received from using our American Express card. You see there are a lot of ways to reward people to use your services and remember who you are at the same time.
Sometimes we forget in these “tighten the purse strings” times that life is still going on around us. There are birthdays and anniversaries to celebrate, safe work practices to reward and employees retiring. Just as in death, life around us still continues and it is more important than ever before to recognize the individuals in our lives, employees, clients, family and friends who help us become who we are, increase our business and keep our heads above water.
Today, I got a “twitter” from a long time business coach. He just returned from a NYC tradeshow speaking engagement for our industry. Here is his “Tweet”: - Just got back from New York City & saw no signs of a recession. Restaurants were packed. People spending money and having fun. Where’s CNN?
The point is that too many of us are caught up in the bad press. We need to celebrate the moments that matter most to us. - Over the next couple of posts, I am going to talk about the different ways you can celebrate the moments with those that mean the most to you- whether it be your employees, your clients or your family.
It doesn’t take a lot of money to say “Happy Birthday!” - In our office we celebrate birthdays with lunch brought in from a local restaurant or pizza. I am not talking about a catered lunch, I am talking about passing around a menu and asking what each person would like and having our receptionist go out and pick it up. We take the next 45 minutes to an hour celebrating the birthday. The company usually gives a $25 gift card to a local restaurant, the movies or from our own Select-A-Gift program (Over 80 choices of brand name gifts per dollar category) and my favorite Lindt truffles in a gift bag filled with tissue. Everyone in the office gets to participate in the birthday celebration, and the person whose birthday it is, is made to feel special.
In my next post, we will talk more about Select-A-Gift and how it can help you increase moral, build a safer team or say thank you.
Enough is enough. I am so tired of opening my morning paper (and I love to read the paper) only to see day after day more and more discouraging news about our economy, or how the stimulus bill is not going to work. Why is everyone so hung up on being negative? Can’t we all just get along? We voted for change, but it seems that no one wants to change.
Is there a reason why we all can’t just give the President and the stimulus package the benefit of the doubt and wait and see?
Didn’t these naysayers’ mothers ever tell them that if you think bad things are going to happen they will? It so easy to be negative. It takes no energy at all to be cranky and crabby and to have a bad attitude and sling mud. -
It does however take energy to hold your tongue, and think pleasant thoughts. I was always taught that you have to have a positive attitude and believe in what you are doing if you want to get somewhere. Where is the positive energy? If the news media would just spend a bit more time reporting on good things, instead of concentrating on all the bad things, we might come out of this crisis faster. It’s hard to stay upbeat and positive when every headline reads of doom and gloom. It makes you just want to go back to bed - why get up, if life is going to “stink” anyway??
Anybody can destroy things - no talent or brains needed; it does take special people to build things. Let’s all be “Special” and concentrate on the rebuilding. Spend each and every day with the aim to do one random act of kindness -even if that means just smiling at a stranger on the street. Or hold your tongue when you want to say something bad about the economy or the President, or put a new spin on things and look at your business and your world from 30,000 feet, instead of at ground level, and maybe, just maybe we will all start to feel good again. Then, tomorrow when we open the paper it won’t be filled with anything other than stories we want to read about, about hope for the future.
I can hope can't I?
Recently, my brother told me that my mother and my aunt had been “taken” by a “travel Agent” in a “You’ve won a Free Vacation” scam. I couldn’t believe that in this day and age, anyone could be taken if they had access to the internet. I buy my cars on-line, and we review all business dealings before we make any buying decisions. I don’t even pass on emails forwarded to me by hundreds of my friends, unless I check www.snopes.com first.
About a month ago, I received a postcard in the mail from the National Association of Professional Women (NAPW). It said that I was being offered a membership in an exclusive club of women business owners and there was no charge to sign up. I went to their website, which by the way looks very legit. I signed up on line - basic information ei: name, address, phone numbers, profession and job title. This was all they asked you to fill out. Basically, the same information you would provide when signing up for any social networking website.
This past week, I received a phone call from a person who claimed to work for them. She said that she was verifying my information and wanted to find out a bit more about my business. The funny thing was that the entire time we were talking she seemed to be in a rush. (You know, the kind of rush telemarketers are in when they are new and don’t like their job?) Anyway, she hurried me through what we did, and how we did it and then she went in to this spiel about all the things that NAPW can offer me and my company. Things like discounts and networking, webcasts and podcasts etc. I finally asked her, “Why does your company offers all of these things for free?” AND this is where it came to: “Oh, the listing is free, however these things I mentioned are not, now we have …….. The Elite Plan for $689, and then the something else plan for around $400”, (at this point I had stopped listening - so I am sure the pricing of the other plans were not grounded in my head).
I asked her to send me information on each of the plans so I could look them over and make a decision. You know, any informed business professional, woman or not would ask to review the paperwork. But oh, no, she said that this was a one-time deal, “just as if I was ordering from a website” and I needed to provide her with a credit card number now to be become a member. When I explained to her again that I would need her to email me information she hung up the phone. At first I thought we might have been disconnected, but no, I was hung up on - since I did not get a return call. I am sure she was on to the next number on her list, hoping that the next person was dumber than I and would provide that credit card number.
So, that night as I sat thinking about this phone call, I decided to read up on this company to see if they really were legitimate. And, none to my surprise, did I find that there were several complaints against this company with not only the better business bureau but several other companies.
Then, over the weekend I was watching our local area news with a story about a new diet pill that has been endorsed by a many celebrities. I was actually thinking of ordering this item, as they had a “Free Trial” and you “only pay the shipping”. The news report went on to say that the company was being investigated by the state of Arizona, where they are located, and that the state of Florida too was looking into fraudulent activity too. It seems that even though the shipping was only $4.95, they either added other items to your mailing and then charged you for those or they went ahead and charged you upfront for your next purchase before you had agreed to purchase. There were hundreds of people who were out a lot of money.
I don’t know when working smart and hard went out of the window. But this is insane that so many companies are coming out of the woodwork to scam others, consumers and businesses alike. My advice: before you sign up or make a purchase with a company with whom you are not familiar, do a look up on the internet: Type in the word complaints (name of company), and reviews (name of company or product) to be sure that you too will not be taken by someone waiting to pounce.
