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The Flu… and the Flu again, and Something Else
Eavesdropping on our family would be horridly unexciting. The sounds lately consist mostly of sniffs, coughs, harrumphs, snorts, low pitched nasal voices, and frequent whining. When everybody is sick, everybody has to do their chores anyway!
David did it. He came home from camp with a pretty severe respiratory virus. Erik got it. Then he got something else. Then he got a cold, all in rapid succession. Then David got the cold, Alex got a fever and headache, then Adriene, then Betsy, and about the time that Alex got the cold, Kevin and I came down with the fever and aches. No cough yet. I’m TIRED of everybody being sick. I’m tired of the sounds of mucus being expelled from bodily orifices. I’m tired of running out of Kleenex! Our acetaminophen and ibuprofen budget is out of control!
So Kevin and I, neither one feeling too good, tried to build a small porch today for a trailer house. Both of us moving slowly, worn out. Like a bad carpentry show in slow motion. But being self-employed, you work. You work even when you feel sick, as long as you are able. Nobody will pay us to stay home and wrap up in a blanket and force fluids. If we don’t work, there is no income. And we need income! The result was solid – but it wasn’t much work for a whole day!
We’ve been enjoying life around the illness though. It is good to have David home, with his humor and helpfulness. I took him to pick up his brand-new glasses yesterday. He asked me how fragile the filament was that held the lense in on the bottom. I told him I though it must be pretty sturdy, after all, Kevin has had a pair of glasses with half frames for about 4 years, and it has never broken. On the way home, after getting the glasses, David made an attempt to adjust the frames, and pulled the wrong way. The filament on the left frame snapped before we were even halfway home (it is an hour drive home, but STILL!). He sat there feeling really foolish, with a brand new pair of glasses with just one lens. He contemplated the possibilities of monocles – and abandoned the idea when holding the lens in with just his eyebrow and cheekbone gave him a cramp. The glasses lay in his other hand looking pathetic. After about 10 minutes, he perked up, and said, “Maybe I could just tell the other kids that I got contacts!”
The kids started homeschool yesterday. David is a great help with it, and Erik is now learning to tutor his siblings also. I was proud of them, they got right to their schoolwork without anyone having to tell them to, and they worked diligently to finish their lessons TWO DAYS IN A ROW! I know that the honeymoon is going to be over probably Thursday. After that, there will be the usual “I can’t find my pencil”, and “I didn’t eat breakfast yet!”.
And in all of this, I made two critical business decisions. The two sites I’ve had for sale forever, which are worth every bit I am asking (hey, they make me money… people think I’m gonna GIVE them away?), which I get LOTS of nibbles about, but which everyone runs from when they realize I want an actual amount of money for it, are no longer for sale. I’ve decided to rebuild them in a CMS, so I can expand their features. A monstrous amount of work, no idea HOW I’ll fit it in, but know that I have to so they can keep earning for us. Yes, that was two business decisions… keep one, keep the other. Two choices.
We’ll also be doing a booth at the Casper Events Center for the Idea Expo. This is our target market, and it makes sense. It is pricier than our usual, but should be worth it. This is one of those scary things though – going out on a limb to gather the resources to get everything together for it. Gotta go out on a limb to get the best fruit though.
Our son reports for his mission on the 24th of October. The same day our daughter is scheduled to ship out to Kuwait, for training to go into Iraq. Bit of an irony, really.
The Value of Experience
“There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.”
Will Rogers
I grew up on a farm… And while the particularly painful experience mentioned by Will Rogers was one I was able to avoid (by happy education from the example of someone else!), I know the pain of having to learn certain hard lessons myself.
My comfort is, that even Christ had to learn by experience. He volunteered. Yet in the Garden it was still unexpectedly hard. Not that He was unwilling – just that the reality of experiencing it was so much more agonizing than He could have imagined.
I am now in a position of having a lot of experience with specific things. I’ve set up shopping carts enough to know the common pitfalls. I’ve set up enough websites for enough customers that I have a good idea of what they might do in response to various challenges, and to know that if I leave certain doors open, a good percentage of clients will walk through, not out of an intent to harm, but just because it is easier. So I now close those doors, and I now avoid certain types of cart setups.
Those are things I could only learn by experience. And while I can pass on a good deal of what I have learned, some of it won’t make sense until my students SEE it. They must see the reality to understand the instruction fully. What they envision in their minds prior to the experience won’t be quite like the reality.
Experience teaches us the nuances of working with people in our specific area or culture. It teaches us the particulars of a changing world that is slightly different than the world we were taught about – as will always be the case since life IS change. Experience teaches us not only what to watch out for, but how to be prepared for future potentials.
If you have never built a government website, you may not know that there are particular legal requirements, at all levels, and specific sustainability issues which apply to government sites. I know this because I have learned the hard way. It wasn’t something someone else COULD have taught me, because the specialty that I occupy did not exist when I was learning it. Had I been able to rely on the experience of others while I was learning that, it would have saved me, and someone else, some heartache. Nothing catastrophic, but it would have been better if I had not had to learn the hard way.
Experience is what makes you a true expert. But it won’t make you an expert in everything – only in the things you are experienced with, that you have learned from.
Green apples do give one the runs.
Tongues do stick to mailboxes.
Siblings do become your best friends once you are grown.
Mom and Dad do get smarter as you get older.
Dumping white gas on a fire is not a smart idea.
These are the truths that we learn by experience – or by watching our little brother try to prove everyone wrong. So who are you… the observer, or the little brother?
Pretty Sad
I met with them one morning, in their elegant hotel. It was tastefully decorated – terrific accent colors, deep wood tones, lovely soft-hued wallpaper. It would be so easy to create a website that echoed that easy elegance, that took elements right from the hotel to craft a site that felt like you were taking a virtual visit in the hotel.
I did not impress them. I am just a country web designer to them. They went with a city firm instead. They paid much more than I would have charged. I saw the result last night. It made me want to cry. It has been on my mind ever since.
It is a completely professional design. And that is all. It fails to reflect the elegance and character of the hotel. It looks rather sterile, except for a single texture in one small part of the design where an attempt was made to incorporate a pattern similar to the wallpaper, but the wrong color. It looks like a man tried to design something a woman would like.
The site has flash where it does no good. It has an entrance splash screen, which does nothing for the site other than waste time getting where people really want to go. It has no SEO AT ALL. The copy was written by someone who is not natively from the US, and uses phrases that are not offensive in their native country, but which are offensive and crass in the US. The text is not formatted at all (not even any spaces between paragraphs), there are no legal statements anywhere on the site. There are personal photos where there need to be hotel photos, and one personal photo says, “click to enlarge”. The room photos do not have an enlargement option. Some photos are obviously stock photos (nothing like the land around the hotel). The site organization is cumbersome and awkward – you have to go three or four clicks deep to get at some info that should be at the top, while some of the info at the top is secondary information.
How does one deal with that? When you do something different, which nobody understands well enough to know what they need. When you do it right, and everyone else whom they’d get the service from does only one facet, but the client does not know that there ARE multiple parts to the job. When the client feels they know all they need in one area, but where cultural or web differences mean they don’t know what they think they know.
I suppose they got what they paid for. They paid for high end features, but they did so at the expense of minimal function. Sad.
This is not the first time we’ve encountered small and micro businesses who got snookered, because they did not understand what they needed, or what the industry would provide or leave off. I am at a loss as to how to promote in a way that helps people understand this. That there is more to web design than an expensive design. That the other services which are needed WON’T be explained to them, nor will they be included from most firms. They’ll expect the business owner to KNOW that, and to hire someone else for everything else, or they’ll hope they don’t notice what is missing (sadly, this is true).
So now I am building a site for their competitors. There will be no question as to which site performs better. The little country motel that I’ll be working with will have a site that outperforms the expensive site that represents the hotel. And it will do it for half the price.
Business is Like a Vegetable Garden
We planted a garden again for the first time in about 8 years. Living at
high altitude, gardening is doubly difficult. Some of my kids have never
gardened before, so they are learning fresh.
First, you plan the garden. Where will you put it so it has the best
chance of succeeding? Which crops will you grow? If you choose the wrong
ones for your area, or for your soil, they’ll either die, or be twice as
hard to grow. And you make sure that the entire plan is actually doable
– not so big you can’t keep up with it, big enough to make it worth your
while, and designed and laid out so that it will be as easy to maintain
as possible. You might think about mulch, or pest management, or other
long term maintenance items, and how to implement wise timesavers to
keep it all as efficient as possible.
Then, you prepare the ground. You have to dig a lot, and then you have
to take some crap and use it for good rather than just wallowing in it.
You may need some help, or to borrow a tool or two.
Next, you get in and sow some seeds – you don’t know which ones will
sprout and which ones will die, so you throw a few extra into each hole.
Then you water. And water. And water. For three weeks you wait to see
signs of anything coming of what you already spent so much time doing.
Just about the time the sprouts start to show, some weeds crop up. They
can just suck the life out of the garden if you don’t nip them quick. So
you KEEP watering, and you start weeding. It can get discouraging at
this point, but that is the requirement of gardening, so you do it.
Eventually you have nice plants that look just great. Your garden, if
tended right, begins to show signs that it is going to give you a
reward. Because you still just have potentials, no vegetables. At this
point though, it is easy to keep going because you can see that it is
likely to pay off – as long as you don’t get complacent and slow down.
Eventually, the crops start to appear – small at first. Some can be
harvested early, but not too many. If you take too much too soon, you
miss out on the bumper crop!
And then the plants start to bear so much that you find yourself giving
away your hard earned results to anyone whom you think might enjoy them.
In the season of bounty, generosity feels just great, especially when
you realize that no matter how much zucchini you give away, there will
still be enough for you, even if you store as much as you have room for!
Business can be like that – but without winter coming to wipe it all out
at the end of the season. But where you put in months of work for a
garden, you put in years with a business.
I think as we have distanced ourselves from the soil, we’ve lost a few
of the inborn understandings that we once had – kids used to know from
raising animals and growing crops, that you had to give it a lot before
it would pay you back. How much feed and care and training do you give a
colt before you ever get to ride him?
So where is your garden? Have you sown enough seed? Have you watered it
after you sowed it? Did you weed it and tend it even when it wasn’t
certain that there would be a crop to reward you? And if your business
is producing a bumper crop, are you showering the needy with zucchini?
LDS Keys to Prosperity
I’ve learned a lot about prosperity in the last few years. As
Latter-Day Saints, we have a number of tools at our disposal, which we
can use to achieve a more prosperous state. Here are some of the
things I’ve learned to do that help:
1. Pay Tithing. This really is number one. You cannot expect the Lord
to bless you if you are not willing to give back the minimum that you
owe Him for His generosity. Tithing is the key to “enough”. It gets us
through those times when we think we’ll never be able to survive
financially.
2. Pay a generous fast offering. Fast offerings have special blessings
regarding our spirituality attached, but also prosperity. We are
promised that we can gain material wealth, if we desire it to do good.
Pay a generous fast offering, and you are demonstrating to the Lord
your good faith effort to use what He blesses you with in good ways. A
generous fast offering helps us have an abundance.
3. Attend the Temple. In a talk given to us by the Temple President of
the Denver Temple, we were told that prosperity is one of the
blessings that comes from Temple Attendance. We tested it. I noticed
that I have more willpower to resist temptations when I attend the
temple regularly – think there might be a connection? It sure reduces
impulse spending! It also increases inspiration to help us earn and
spend more wisely.
4. Read the Book of Mormon. Nowhere does it promise us prosperity from
reading it, BUT… The power of discernment is a blessing that is
attached to study of the Book of Mormon. Believe me, this is a REAL
blessing. I have felt it. And discernment helps you spot
contradictions in business dealings, marketing training, and business
opportunity ads – in other words, it helps you to not gamble, and to
avoid scams. That goes a LONG way in increasing our prosperity!
5. Prayer is an obvious one. I cannot count the number of times that
prayer has helped us through a difficult business decision, or when
prayer has provided the answer to solving a client problem that I
simply could not solve on my own. The Lord understands technical
issues, He knows the answers when we do not. Amazing what prayer can
give us!
6. Service. Again, we can gain prosperity when we want to use it for
good. We have to demonstrate that desire in action BEFORE we get the
blessing.
7. Serve the Lord in your business. Make sure that what you are doing is something that helps people to have a better life, by encouraging strong families, kindness, service, hard work, integrity, or other good principles. What you do should make a difference in the world, for the better. I have found that when this goal is realized, I get WAY more help in succeeding.
These are just a few principles that I have noticed and have tracked
that are tied directly to prosperity. We should be starving. We are
not. We have no predictable income, yet our kids are fed, our bills
are paid, and we are actually less troubled by financial issues than
we were a year ago.
There are tests. Hard ones. Sometimes it feels like there simply is no
way to compensate for the disaster that just occurred. But miracles
follow faith – sometimes the faith that gets us the miracle is the
faith to pay our tithing anyway, or to go to the temple even though we
think we cannot afford to, or to be generous to others when we think
we do not have the time.
Laura
Mom to Eight
Firelight Business Enterprises, Inc
http://www.firelightwebstudio.com
http://www.westernhillsinstitute.com
The American Dream
Imagine this:
You get up in the morning, shower, and have a leisurely breakfast with your family. Your kids settle down to school work (or head off to school), and you and your spouse go to work – in your home office. You each have your own tasks to accomplish, and frequently share information across the room. Sometimes your spouse pauses to flirt with you.
Lunch means stopping long enough to fix whatever you want to eat, and enjoying it with your spouse or your entire family (if you are fortunate enough to homeschool). Then it is back to work until just before dinnertime. The kids help with the family business with age appropriate tasks in the afternoon, and are given payment for their help.
Everyone pitches in to fix dinner, and then to cleanup afterward. The kids settle down to read or watch a movie, and you and your spouse go for an evening walk around town. You stop occasionally to greet neighbors who are outside in the dimming light. It gets dark when you are still several blocks from home, but you don’t worry about your safety. It is just nice being with the love of your life.
Ever had a day like that? Small town America, self-employment, working in harmony with your spouse, working in a family business where the whole family works together, being able to walk around town and know who your neighbors are, and feeling safe walking after dark.
This is my life. Every day is not idyllic.. far from it. We have to drive an hour to get anywhere, the kids squabble and have to be taught not to, just like any kids. But I live a life that most people think they dream of. They do not see the other side of it – the sacrifices we make to keep this life. The house we live in that isn’t all that great, the older cars we drive so we can afford to live where the distances eat cars and spit out the pieces, or the times we bite our tongues to keep the peace in our home.
There is no pool, there is no expensive car. There are no vacations to exotic places – the Platte River or the Guernsey Wagon Ruts are as exotic as it gets. But we don’t need those things to be happy. The real happiness comes from our relationships in our family.
Life is good. And getting better.
Life’s Little Distractions
I can’t hardly tell you what I’ve accomplished this week. It seems like one of those weeks where I’ve been running around trying to catch up, but never seem to get anything DONE!
Had to be out all day Monday, spent Tuesday catching up on those mundane little things that leave you no evidence of anything accomplished. Wednesday I started a file upload, but due to our flaky internet, it did not finish – Kevin was sick that day, so he didn’t get anything much done either. My daughter sliced her thumb open and required 5 stitches and a tetanus shot (so we got the other kids updated on their immunizations while we were at it). Thursday the same daughter had to see the cardiologist, which took half the day, the other half of which was spent trying to finish the download, which involved finding another FTP client. Today, the day is rapidly being eaten up with piddly little things that seem to have no bearing on the work that is behind!
We have days like this. Sometimes we have WEEKS like this. Where the work on the list just sits there, the income that is needed doesn’t come, and we feel like our business is just stalled. And it seems that family needs come into the picture – not as an irritation, but just as a factor that doesn’t seem to make us feel any better.
When someone gets sick, or when things come up that take us way from work, it is hard to get back on track sometimes. And the family stuff that gets in the way is something we rarely give ourselves credit for having accomplished. Maybe because it doesn’t PAY us!
In between this all though, I did get some things done that aren’t going to help much immediately, but which will pay off long term – I created three MicroBusiness Tree in the Rock sculptures (http://westernhillsinstitute.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=32&Itemid=47)
and posted them for sale on our Institute site. I updated several course listings, and completed the instructional writing for 5 booklets. And I created a booklet brochure for the Institute, which we can use to mail out to various businesses. There were various conversations with clients, and completion of a header and several site assessments, as well as no less than FOUR “What do I do?” inquiries (the ones where people want to know how to find a good business for themselves).
All things considered, I had a busy week, and a productive one. But most of this stuff won’t pay me right now – most of it is that kind of stuff that you have to do if you want the business to grow, but which you don’t see results from right away.
Part of the reason I am writing this is to outline what I’ve done in a way that helps ME realize all that I’ve accomplished. Sometimes we don’t realize how much it is until we try to describe it.
So the next time you feel frustrated at not being able to get anything done, write down what you DID do. It just might astonish you!
MicroBusiness Success Strategies
Tiny startups often use frugal tactics to be able to afford to get off the ground. Many of those tactics though, have a nasty backlash – they make you look unprofessional.
Good MicroBusiness Success Strategies are things that save you money, but which either have no backlash, or which have a disadvantage turned into an advantage.
Here is an example:
Many frugal businesses reuse boxes because it saves them money over having to buy packing boxes. Sure, many people can use USPS Priority Mail boxes of one kind or another, but they just don’t work for everyone. So they reuse boxes – and not all boxes do well being reused. Some just look tacky.
Create a label. Put your logo on it, and over that, put “This Box Proudly Recycled By”. You just turned a disadvantage into an advantage. Same tacky looking box, but now, it makes you look responsible and successful instead of making you look too cheap to afford a good box.
This is a perfect example of a good MicroBusiness Success Strategy. Another is posting a message on your site “We use PayPal to keep our prices low, and to protect your sensitive financial information.”
Don’t have a lot of customers? Then you are a “friendly business who knows their customers by name”.
How can you turn YOUR frugal tactics into MicroBusiness Success Strategies?
And it Grows Again
I love having him home full time. It really is cool. We are learning to work together in ways we have not before, and our business is showing potentials that it did not have previously.
But to realize those potentials, I’ll have to eventually sacrifice having my husband around as much. I can structure our business to a certain extent to allow for it, but not completely – at least, not without limiting things too much.
Balance has a different meaning. Balancing different things than I had ever considered having to balance. It is funny, I always thought I’d like to have Kevin home, but had never really seriously considered it. I mean, it was such an impracticality and such an impossibility. Now that it is a reality though, I am selfish about it. I like it. I want it to continue.
But to realize awesome potentials, we have to decide what is truly important. And it isn’t always a matter of black and white. Sometimes it is more a matter of finding out how to adapt things so that you can find creative options for hanging onto the best parts of one thing while achieving an acceptable level of something else.
I am speaking in obscurities, but when our next venture launches, it will make more sense.
I figured it had to quit sometime…
Since the first of the year, business has been booming. Beats me why, it isn’t like we are doing a lot that is terribly different than what we’ve always done. But suddenly, stuff that never worked before is working, and patterns that have held true for 6 years are no longer predictable.
My website websites – the ones that I use to promote my services – have NEVER pre-sold a client. They’ve been a great support to active selling on our part, but that is it. That is changing, and we are now getting calls from people who know what they want, and from whom, they just want to know the details of what it will take.
Work we did years ago is suddenly paying off, in big ways. A site we built on commission is paying way better than we could have ever anticipated. There is no way we should be able to get by right now financially, and yet we are. And without stressing over it either.
Opportunities are coming out of the woodwork also – chances to teach web development courses, new contract opportunities that stretch us in new directions, JV opportunities that have the potential to pay very well, and more things that we could not have expected or planned for. But the funny thing is, we ARE prepared. Some of these are things I have been wanting for years, but did not quite know how to go about getting. And now, with no effort on my part, they are dropping in my lap.
We started radio ads this week. This has been a long term goal. We did the math ahead of time, and knew that with radio ads, they build power over time, so it could take 3-4 months to know whether they were really effective or not. We budgeted a certain amount of money for three months. Then we calculated how much work we’d have to get as a direct result of the ads, in order to justify continuing.
The ads started running on Thursday, on a VERY limited schedule (all we could afford). We got a call Friday, from someone who had heard the ad ONCE. He is fairly certain of what he wants, and it should not be difficult to close on the contract. This is statistically unusual. I mean, with our kind of service business, you don’t just start to advertise and have people come flooding in. We expected that it would take a few weeks before we got a call at all. And we only need two small, or one large contract to justify the entire three months of advertising.
I started thinking about the local competition though. Many are home offices (not a problem, so are we!). A few run ads that have a little “oh, and we do web design too” sort of tag line on the end of an ad for other services. There is not a lot of radio advertising being done for web design. And our ads are distinctly different.
They target a particular market. They say what we specialize in. They are friendly and informative. The other local ads mostly aren’t. They just basically say “we do web design”, and that’s it!
Our first ad stated that we specialized in small business and startups. Our next ad will have a slightly different focus, and we’ll keep the original one running too. We didn’t even put a phone number in the ad, we just gave our URL. Next time we might add a phone number, I’m not sure yet. And I’ll record the first two, then Kevin will record a couple, so that we have male and female voices doing the ads.
So here we are, buried in work. Part of the reason we are buried is because we are in a growth phase, and we are adjusting to a higher level of output, while we still have two people who are learning essential skills – they are not at their peak level of productivity yet, and in fact, are nowhere close. But we are getting more efficient by the day. We are also streamlining and systemizing repetitive tasks, so that we are able to do more in less time. Very important since we don’t charge by the hour, but by the job.
An in the midst of that, we are stepping up our advertising. But that is what you have to do if you want the work to be there when you need it. Some of the work that is coming in now is work that we started trying to get last summer. And if we don’t advertise now, the work we are doing is likely to dry up, and leave us with nothing in two or three months.
We gotta be doing something right. Sometimes I’m not sure quite what it is that we are doing right, or why it worked now, particularly, but it is an exhilarating wave to ride!
The Second Week is the Worst
I’ve known for a long time that when you are making changes, that the second week is the hardest – right toward the end of it, things get very difficult to maintain. Everyone starts resisting to the fullest. What I never expect, is how much I, myself, contribute to that.
Kevin has been home for just two weeks. And yesterday was pretty hard. We were crabbing at each other instead of working together, and it was pretty terrible. It was not until late in the day that I realized why. We are both making some huge adjustments, and this is just the time frame in which those adjustments are the hardest.
I think during the day yesterday I was ready to just throw in the towel and figure it wasn’t ever going to work if it was going to be like this. And according to everything I know about human behavior, that is precisely what most people think at the end of two weeks of attempting new changes!
Once it finally dawned on me that this was just part of a process, and that we needed to redouble and get through it, I figured I can last another week – end of the third week is when things usually start to finally come together into a new functioning pattern if you persevere. So I am going to watch and see how it all comes out then.
Because having a spouse come home to work the family business together is no small set of changes. It is HUGE, and it means that we have to insure that our relationship develops on new fronts, and that we develop new skills.
Kevin is still in the “it’s your business” mode, instead of the “it’s MY business” mindset, but hopefully that will change over the next couple weeks too.
It will be a busy week though – we have a kitchen remodel to finish in a client rental, some more work to finish in our own rental, a business fair to attend, and a lot of client and personal web work to do. There just is not enough of me to do it all, and Kevin and David cannot help with some of what needs to be done. I’m sure we will muddle through though.
Word of Mouth “Advertising”, isn’t Advertising
Advertising and marketing are things you do to help your business grow. You plan them, execute the plan, then adjust according to results.
Word of Mouth, is not advertising, nor is it marketing. It is not something you do, and it is not something you control. It is something other people do for you – and they do it ONLY after you have done something to earn it.
Word of Mouth is VERY powerful. It is a key feature in building momentum in a business. But it isn’t a means of starting a business, and it isn’t something that happens spontaneously. It must be earned.
How do you earn it?
- By intelligent marketing and promotion. By the messages your marketing materials send. If they are friendly and if people can identify with them, they’ll remember you, and they’ll mention you when someone has a need, as in, “You might try (insert business name)”. Smart marketing generates buzz, and gets people to remember you as a possible answer to their need. This helps you, but it is not where the REAL power of word of mouth is.
- By good business practices. If they like the product, and they like the service, and you actually do what you say you will, then they’ll recommend someone else. These recommendations are based on personal experience and satisfaction. They are not just suggesting you MIGHT be the answer, they are saying you WERE their answer. That is REALLY powerful. But it does not come until you have proven yourself. And that only happens over time, so it won’t help a startup much. Somewhere about a year into things though, Word of Mouth will start to have some noticeable affect on your business if you promoted well, and if you operate your business reliably.
You can create an environment in which Word of Mouth can grow, but you cannot CREATE Word of Mouth as a marketing tactic. If you are launching a business, it will be of no value whatsoever to you until you have devised an effective promotional strategy, and carried it out for some time, and until you have a customer track record that stands behind your claims.
So start working on some effective strategies to get your business name and face out there. Get a table at events, write articles and post them for article marketing, get backlinks for your site, hand out business cards, do networking to get to know people, both online and off.
There are plenty of things that work. If you need free marketing methods (remember, they take time to do, and they are often slow to work, but they also usually have long term results), then go to http://www.effectivefreemarketing.com/ .
Promote your business. Then enjoy the feeling when it begins to work.
Gardening doesn't have to be that hard! No matter where you live, no matter how difficult your circumstances, you CAN grow a successful garden.
Life from the Garden: Grow Your Own Food Anywhere Practical and low cost options for container gardening, sprouting, small yards, edible landscaping, winter gardening, shady yards, and help for people who are getting started too late. Plenty of tips to simplify, save on work and expense.
