@BasilPuglisi

Content & Strategy, Powered by Factics & AI, Since 2009

Long Island Business

Untraditional Ways to Create Buzz for Your Business

by Leave a Comment

Let’s face it, advertising in today’s market is tough. There is a lot of noise out there and a lot of different companies and brands competing for the same consumers. But creative companies are finding untraditional ways to create buzz around their products. See if any of these unusual strategies might work for your business.

Make It a Stunt

Create an unusual event or contest for your business. If you own a restaurant, have an eating contest and award the winner with a year of free meals. If you own a TV repair company, hold a “World’s Strongest Man” competition and see who from your community can complete various strength tests involving old televisions. Award the winner with a free TV set.

The benefit of these types of stunts is two-fold. First, you are attracting new potential customers to your business. Obtain contact information for all contest entrants, and provide losing entrants with coupons that entice them to return to your establishment. Second, you are creating the opportunity for free media coverage. Invite local television, news and blog outlets to your event. You can save thousands of dollars in advertising through just one stunt event.

Attract a Celebrity

It’s no secret that celebrities grab headlines. Get a local celebrity to come to your business and watch the customers roll in. The key is to not only attract a celebrity client, but to get the client photographed or televised in your place of business.

Luckily, the popularity of reality shows has made it a bit easier to get celebrity coverage. Pick up the phone book and call any reality shows that might fit with your product. Be creative; remember that reality shows have very low budgets, so any service that you are willing to provide for free might get you a bit of on-screen time.

Make it Funny

You need look no further than Old Spice’s highly successful “I’m On a Horse” commercials to see the power of humor in advertising. Whether you are posting in-store signage, creating a newspaper ad or shooting a television spot, infuse humor in your marketing to attract customers. If your advertisement makes people laugh, they are more likely to remember the advertisement and your company.

While some types of businesses lend themselves better to unusual marketing than others, it never hurts to take a moment to think outside the box and reconsider your existing advertising strategies.

Obtaining Funding: The Basics

by Leave a Comment

Funding can make or break your business. Start-up funding can get your business off the ground, and ongoing funding can keep your business afloat during tough economic times. Before you reach out to investors or banks to ask for cash, follow the steps below to make sure that your business is prepared to face potential investors.

First, incorporate as an S-Corp, C-Corp or LLC. Unlike sole proprietorships or partnerships, these forms of organization allow equity to be shared among multiple investors. Hire an experienced business lawyer to help you determine the proper structure for your company and obtain proper documentation and registration.

Second, register your intellectual property. Obtain trademarks and patents for any intellectual property that your company has developed, including proprietary trade names and inventions. Again, seek the aid of a qualified lawyer to help navigate the trademark process.

Third, clean up your financials. Prepare an easy-to-read set of historical financials that includes all relevant detail and backup data. Make sure that your company’s financial data is well-organized and easy to sort through in case investors ask questions. Prepare a set of financial projections that are reasonable and grounded in fact. Make sure that you can back up the financial projections with market data or company history.

Fourth, get the right people on board. Hire employees that have relevant backgrounds for your company’s industry and product. This is especially important in very young companies; when investors look at early stage companies that have little operating history, they are often investing on the strength of the management team, not on the historical performance of the business.

Fifth, create a professional website and online presence. Potential investors will turn to the internet to research your company, and you want to make sure that your web page puts your company’s best foot forward. Add the company’s products and management team. Highlight any key customers or recent accomplishments. Keep the website up-to-date and professional at all times.

Sixth, keep an updated business plan. Business plans change over time based on business performance and market dynamics. Update your business plan to reflect these changes so that you are ready to discuss your company’s operations with investors at any time.

While the six tips above are a must for any business seeking funding, nothing “wows” investors like a highly-successful and well-regarded business. Be sure to continue to build your business as you incorporate these funding tips into your company’s goals.

How to Make your Small Business Grow?

by Leave a Comment

Sometimes it’s good to look at other small businesses and see how the owners made them grow.

Samy Liechi is a young entrepreneur out of Switzerland. At the age of 30, he had an idea for a business – he is going to sell exclusive man’s socks.

Today, 11 years later, he has sold over one million pairs of socks all over the world. How did he make it happen? Here is some of his advice for the budding entrepreneur.

Don’t wait too long – if you think you have a great idea, act on it quickly. Don’t overthink the business and don’t wait until everything falls into place. Do the design of the site the best you can, but not everything has to be perfect. 80% is good enough. You will learn the rest as you improve. It’s never really finished, is it?

Start Selling as soon as you can. A few small orders a day, even as few as 2 from family and friends, will start the business going and will put you in the mode of selling.

Make a plan – have company meetings every week and meet with your sales people for at least half an hour a week. Set those schedules ahead of time then you won’t have to waste time by trying to schedule a meeting. Everyone will have his weekly plan that will not change from week to week. Make a plan when you look at your finances. Looking at it every day might make you too anxious.

Have a marketing campaign – new business owners often make the mistake of thinking they can do it all by themselves. Outsource your work to experts but don’t think that with this your responsibility ends. Marketing companies need your leadership and your input to make things right.

And don’t stay behind the curve. Innovate your products and your website. If something is not working, think of ways to fix it. Consult with experts whose  job is to stay updated. Is there another way to do what you have been doing? Other venues that you didn’t think about?

If you are an entrepreneur, or just started up your own small business, you should contact the consulting firm Puglisi Consulting Group (http://puglisiconsulting.com/#), which through their visibility Acceleration arm (http://www.visibilityacceleration.com/) are doing what every business should be doing; checking what works and what doesn’t, adjusting, finding out better ways of achieving the goal and having the tools to measure the results.

Unusual Ways of Defining Success

by Leave a Comment

Is your business successful? You might think your are successful because you have a certain number of customers or have made a certain amount of money. But studies show that money does not buy happiness. In fact, a complicated set of factors contribute to each individual’s sense of success and happiness. Here are two unique ways to determine if your business is truly successful or not.

Does Your Business Line Up With Your Core Values?

In order to answer this question, you need to define what your core values are. Your core values should include what is important to you, not what is important to your business. Having a business that contradicts your core values is one way to ensure frustration, burnout and an unclear plan.

Core values can be anything that you believe is truly important. Some examples are integrity, education, self-reliance and health. Choose what resonates with you, not what you think others want to hear, what is trendy or what sounds right.

Once you have chosen one or more core values, assess how well your business lines up with these values at least once per year. Is your business furthering these values? If not, how can you change the business so that it aligns with your core values? Creating a business that is a reflection of your core values is a true sign of success.

What is Your Ideal Day?

Write down a realistic description of your ideal day. What are you doing from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep? Compare this list to what you actually do in a typical day. How well does it match up? If your ideal day closely corresponds to your actual day, you have a successful business on your hands. If not, take a look at which areas of your day don’t match. What changes can you make to change your actual day into an ideal day? Consider outsourcing unpleasant tasks or taking a chance on an initiative that could propel your business to the next level. Remember that a successful business brings personal happiness in addition to financial success.

So how does your business stack up? If you find that you are monetarily successful but not happy with the direction of your business, it’s time to stop and plan. Think of what truly defines your core values and happiness, and make small and steady changes to ensure that your business is a bona fide success.

The Benefits of Virtual Assistants

by Leave a Comment

Have you considered hiring a virtual assistant? Virtual assistants are widely used to help with simple, repetitive tasks that are easily processed via email. Hiring a virtual assistant is a great way for your business to free up valuable time that can be better spent on other, more important tasks. Here are some of the key benefits of virtual assistants.

Low Cost Labor

Virtual assistants often provide labor at rates well below the salary that you would have to pay an in-person assistant. This is because virtual assistants are often located in developing countries such as India or the Philippines, where wage rates are below minimum wage in the United States. Even if you end up with a virtual assistant that is located in the United States, you will avoid the cost of benefits and office supplies that accompany a full-time employee.

The rate that you secure will vary by website and by provider. Some websites allow you to negotiate rates, and it is possible to find virtual assistants for as little as $2 per hour. Keep in mind, however, that the cheapest virtual assistants are often not of the highest quality. One of the most reputable websites, AskSunday.com, provides rates that range from $13.50-$14.00 per hour.

Off-Peak Hours

Virtual assistants can provide around-the-clock service. When you leave the office, you can email a task to your assistant and have it in your inbox the next morning. Of course, the time that your assistant is available to work depends on the assistant’s physical location. If you want your assistant to work primarily during your workday, look for someone in your same geographic region. If you want someone to work while you are off the clock, look for someone on the opposite side of the globe. You can even find teams of assistants that will provide service twenty-four hours per day.

Streamlined Hiring

Hiring a full-time employee takes a lot of time and resources. You must post a job ad, interview, hire the correct person, and spend weeks or months training them. Hiring a virtual assistant is a much quicker and less painful process. There are a variety of websites that simply the process, such as AskSunday.com, oDesk.com and eLance.com. These websites allow you to search for a virtual assistant, interview candidates and process payment. The hiring process can be done in a few hours or a few days, depending on how specific your hiring needs are.

For many business owners, a virtual assistant is an excellent way to free up time spent on repetitive tasks and to focus on the more important issues. If you are spending a lot of time on small tasks, try out a virtual assistant to see if you can increase your businesses productivity.

Who needs Consulting? I can do it by myself

by Leave a Comment

When you embark on this new adventure called internet visibility, or internet presence, and you are a thorough individual you immediately come across offers upon offers of e-books, lectures, webimanrs, clubs and everything else, to help you understand how to use the internet to advertise your business.

You spend time and money downloading, reading, participating in group discussions, and you learn a whole lot of new things, but when you look back at your business, you think “Gosh, I’ve spent so much time learning how to do advertise it, I don’t have time to take care of my business”.

There is a lot to learn, and if your objective is to make money by opening websites with information only and have links and link backs to sites that do sell something, you are being used as a recruiting agent. And you get finder’s fee. But to be visible with information only site, you have to learn some more and you have to add content, all the time.

It is amazing, the amount of information you need to absorb to be knowledgeable about the internet, and there are so many people advertising the “how to” classes that you know they have turned it into their full time profession. They are not doing, they are teaching.

Of course there are the scams, that give you very little for your money or those who enlist you in a pyramid type business where the objective is to bring more participants, not sell a product or a service. In these tough economic times, people are looking to reinvent themselves in a new area, and the internet filled up with useless, one page sites.

Visibility on the internet is very important to your business, but so is doing what you do best, providing a product or a service.

You will hear about press releases, social networks, articles, blogging, email newsletters, videos, expert question sites and viral marketing, but to do what those people are writing about and recommending will take all of your waking hours.

When you have a small business, with a store front, you spend a little money on keeping the front clean, re painting, re carpeting, and you spend a little more to reach new customers to enrich the circle of repeat customers. Same goes for the internet and internet commerce. You have to put some money into the upkeep of your business to make it grow. And the competition is not only local anymore, it’s global.

But so is the reward.

Your best bet is to save time on research into an unfamiliar subject and hand it over to the experts. You will have the information without having to learn how to get it, you’ll have people that make a living by staying updated on the latest trends and markets and you can see your business take off.

One of those companies is the Puglisi Consulting Group (http://puglisiconsulting.com/), and it has the experience in website solutions, linguistics, public policy, Business solutions higher education and life couching. Through their specialty arm Visibility Acceleration (http://www.visibilityacceleration.com/) can tailor a campaign for your needs.

You either spend that time and money on learning something you don’t want to know, or you pay the experts to do it for you right, the first time.

Additional Ways to Increase Your visibility On Line

by Leave a Comment

We all know the importance of being visible online. Whether we sell a product, perform a service or provide information, the way of the clients to find us is through the internet.

We’ve all heard about the simple ways of getting there; have a website, advertise on line, create e mail blasts, etc etc. This is the beginner’s stuff.

More advanced way to reach untapped new markets has to do with the language barrier. English is the most common language on the internet, but there is a vast crowd out there, that does not feel completely comfortable with the language.

Take Russia for example. Even though Russia is making huge strides toward a capitalistic economic system, and more Russians speak English, not all of them are comfortable reading and writing the language. This is an additional market of 170,000,000 people.

Or let’s look at languages, not countries. Spanish, for example. That’s another 332,000,000 people around the world. Chinese is spoken by 937,132,000 people. Of course not all of those billions have access to the internet, but those are potentially huge markets.

There are search engines in different languages, website that have a different ending, like co.il or com.au, which are the local listings for that country that you should be aware off and listed in.

That is not very complicated to do, since you have the layout of your site. Making the information and forms easily accessible and in the country’s language will increase your visibility all over the world.

It is not just a saying that the Web is World Wide.

To help you embark on this new adventure, you should consult with experts that have done that before, and have people that read, write and speak both languages. The Puglisi Consulting Group (http://puglisiconsulting.com)  is such a company that has explanations on its website in different languages. Through their company Visibility Acceleration (http://www.visibilityacceleration.com/) they are the experts in operating in different languages and will advise you what you should do.

Digital Visibility – What is it all About?

by Leave a Comment

The world is changing very fast, and new trends appear, some to disappear even before they are launched. Businesses had to adjust to the new fast paced world or disappear. It is sometimes hard to believe this or that kind of trend will catch to find out you are completely wrong. And if you are not watching it closely, you might be left in the dust.

Look at what happened with newspapers. For a long time they fought tooth and nail with the internet, waiting for the news part of it to crash and burn. It didn’t happen, and slowly, too slowly for some, the written print started migrating to the electronic news gathering. These days every respectable newspaper has a website with all the news of the day on it, updating much faster than ever before. What used to be the domain of CNN, is now the field of many. New York Times will start charging for its website next year, and everybody is holding their breath to see if it’ll work. If this business model will, the written press might cease to exist all together. If not, they will be looking at other business models.

The music industry went through a major change is purchasing habits. Mega stores went out of business because suddenly there was no need for them. Everybody was downloading their music illegally from the internet.  The popular music was still very much in demand, but the internet offered quicker, more diverse and free music. The way the music industry fought it was to reign in the illegal downloads and enable the fans legal downloads for less than a dollar.

The movie and film industry are facing the same problem at the moment. How to reign in the illegal downloads the studios estimate cost them in the billions. Those who legged behind on the download wave, like Blockbuster, are going under. The company is about to announce bankruptcy will a debt of 1 billion dollars. Netflix and its fast turnover had a lot to do with it too.

The advertising industry went through a quite change that was not as dramatic. The ads still work, the television spot (if they are not zapped by TiVo) still bring costumers, but a whole new world opened up called Internet Marketing, and this world is changing in a neck breaking speed.

Websites have become the properties of many. People figured out ways how to advertise without really selling anything, by linking to other sites that did do the selling. The amount of users of the internet far excessed any known medium, and any new program that becomes popular, like Twitter, is securitized and maximized to generate profit.

What seems easy, because it can be done from a home computer, at all hours of the day or night, is anything but. This is a complex of many programs that can be tied to one another and aimed at creating link backs, visibility, presence and commerce.

It is enough to watch the video presentation on a site like Visibility Acceleration http://www.visibilityacceleration.com/ to understand how intricate it is. If you really want to make an impact in today’s market, a company like that one, who is a subsidiary of Puglisi Consulting Group, can show you the way and tailor your campaign to your budget.

Business Growth: Issue 27 – Know How to Hire

by Leave a Comment

As your business grows, you quickly realize that you can’t do all the work by yourself.  Finding people that you can trust is difficult, and just a few bad hires can send your business into a tailspin.  Take the time to make sure that you adhere to these simple hiring tips.

Interview, Interview, Interview

Your first stop for new hires will likely be your close network of friends, families and former co-workers.  This is an excellent starting point, because these are the people that you know and trust the most.  However, don’t stop there.  Cast a wide net during the interview process.  Post jobs online and through any professional or collegiate networks that you belong to.  You never know where the best candidates might come from, and by interviewing a wide variety of people, you will get a better idea of what  you do and do not want in a new employee.

Be Honest

As you craft job descriptions, be brutally honest in what the job entails and what you expect in new employees.  If the job title is “Warehouse Logistics Executive”, but the employee will mostly be performing m annual labor in a warehouse, consider changing the job title to “Warehouse Personnel” to attract the correct candidates.  If you expect new employees to be available during off hours or on the weekends, state that in the job description.  There is no use sugar coating the details or making the job sound different than what it really is.  Deception might attract some great candidates, but these employees will quickly become disgruntled as they realize the true nature of the job. 

However, do be sure to list the highlights of the position.  If you offer great benefits, flexible hours or extra vacation, be sure to include that in the job description.

Pay Attention to Culture

Before you hire, be sure to consider the culture of your company.  Do you want the work environment to be laid back and collegial, or quiet and professional?  Seek out candidates that fit with the culture that you are trying to create.  Hiring people that fit together culturally is key to creating a healthy work environment and happy and productive employees.

Know When to Say No

Interviewing is a personal and intense process.  It can be difficult to say no to candidates, but it is extremely important to know when to say no.  Remember that just one bad hire can take up time from other productive employees, and just one unhappy employee can bring down an entire company’s morale.  Say no and move on to the most qualified candidates.

 Hiring new employees takes a lot of resources for a small business, but finding the right people is critical to success.

Traditional Networking 101

by Leave a Comment

The term “networking” has evolved over the past few years.  Many networks today exist primarily online, and members of online networks might never meet each other in person.  While online networking in the form of Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media is an important element in today’s digital environment, don’t forget about the power of traditional networking.  Here are a few tips to jumpstart your offline network.

Attend Industry Events

The best way to meet relevant professionals in your industry is at industry-specific events.  Look online for the most important events that are held for your type of business.  Make sure that the key members of your company attend these events.  If possible, reserve a booth for your company or ask if one of your team members can act as a speaker or panelist. 

During these types of events, the goal is to interact with as many people as possible.  Every person you meet adds to your network of peers and potential clients.  If you are looking to hire, keep an eye out for potential employees.  Be sure to grab contact information for everyone you speak to.

Give to Others

As the saying goes, you only get what you give.  Networking is a two-way street, and in order to reap the benefits, you must provide support to the fellow members of your network.  Be willing and able to listen to other’s business concerns and to lend a hand to help answer questions or find resources for those who need them.  Attending to the needs of those in your network takes minimal time, but by helping others, you ensure that others are willing to help you.

Follow Up

During the course of tending to business, attending industry events and going about your daily life, you will come into contact with hundreds of people.  Always get a business card for new people you meet, and keep an organized contact log with everyone’s information.  Follow up with important contacts frequently, even if you do not need to speak with them.  Consider organizing a coffee meeting or lunch date to catch up on business ideas and industry trends.  Keeping up a relationship with people in your network ensures that you have an open line of communication when you need them.

Be sure to use traditional networking in addition to online networking as you build your business.  Although nothing beats the convenience of networking online, building strong in-person relationships is an important component to any successful company.