The Greg Parsons Project

The Top 3 Principles of Marketing

• KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE
• BUILD YOUR NETWORK
• ADVERTISE EFFICIENTLY

KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE
For any business to be successful, you must know who your audience is and what their specific needs may be prior to beginning your marketing efforts. Narrow down your key audience and focus on those products and/or services that will capture their attention. This is a good head start for any business strategy. Starting out too broad or starting with a niche that is highly competitive are frequent reasons that small businesses fail. Find your niche and exploit it! And furthermore, don’t try to sell your audience something that they are not interested in. You will come across as being a pushy salesman and you will lose credibility and trust with your audience immediately.

BUILD YOUR NETWORK
In order to build your network, begin with current contacts and expand upon those. Network with old friends and colleagues and build relationships through those with others. There are several ways to do this: attend local and national events, host an event yourself, and utilize internet web sites to build your current network such as facebook.com, myspace.com, etc. These sites are usually free to join and very helpful in building a network of contacts.

ADVERTISE EFFICIENTLY
Advertising is a key factor for any business. Without appropriate advertising, you are limiting your business potential. Depending on what type of business you have, you may want to advertise in local or national newspapers and magazines to target all audiences or travel to local areas and pass out flyers, business cards, etc. for more local prospects. Billboards are another option, but can be quite costly. Another, more economical avenue would be the internet to market your business. There are free web sites such as craigslist.org, backpage.com, local classified websites, etc. that can be a very effective tool. Whatever you choose, know what you want to advertise to get the most bank for your buck!

This comes from a few different places elsewhere, paraphrased and re-worded into what I think is a solid tip for the foundation of any business.

When you are in business, especially for yourself, expect the unexpected. The worst problems are usually the ones that are least expected. This applies to all aspects of your business. If you’re self-employed, you ARE your business. You are customer support, you are technical support, you are billing, you are accounting, you are the single problem solver for your own well being. Be prepared for the unexpected. Things do happen, sometimes more often than you’d hope for.

Once a problem does occur, you can either make or break your business depending on how you handle it. The single most important thing that most self employed business owners forget about is customer service.

Once you have a problem on your hands, the one single thing you can do to lose all your customers is not to inform them about your situation and leave them wondering if you’ve scammed them or if you’re doing anything to fix it.

Let’s face it, today the technology is so advanced that you can almost do anything from anywhere!!

Personally contacting all of your customers to inform them about the issue is probably not feasible. In these situations, leaving your customers in the dark without informing them about your current status would be the worst possible thing that you could do. Not only will you lose the current project you are working on with them, but also the chances of getting any further business from them becomes almost zero.

You might be the best in your industry, but if you are not well organized, don’t expect to build a solid business.

A simple solution that you may overlook is simply posting a message on your website telling your customers what has happened and that you are working towards a resolution. In the event that your website is unavailable, change the voice mail greeting on your main phone number to a message explaining the problem and that you are working to a resolution. Personally, I would do both.

A happy customer is your best friend. One of my favorite sayings is: A good customer relationship takes years to build, but only seconds to destroy. Keep this in mind as you are handling your next problem.

And for those of you who are wondering, yes, something did recently happen to me with a relationship with one of my vendors which left me wondering “What ever happened to customer service????”. Needless to say, I’ve switched vendors and I’ll never do business with that particular company again.

The simplest explanation of this would be one word. Taxes. An C Corporation (C-Corp) is a standard corporation in every sense of the word. Consult Wikipedia or your local library for definition of a corporation. Along with being a “standard” corporation comes all of the benefits of a corporation - including double taxation. An S Corporation (S-Corp) is a special type of corporation with special taxation specifications. I’ll explain both a bit here:

C corporations are taxed at both the corporate and individual level. That is, the corporation itself pays tax on business profits, and shareholders (owners included) pay additional income tax for any money they draw from the corporation, including salary, dividends, or bonuses.

S corporations elect a special tax status with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Rather than being treated as a separate taxable entity, the S corporation’s income is viewed like that of a partnership or sole proprietorship and is “passed-through” to the shareholders, who report the income or loss on their individual tax returns. The S corporation itself pays no income tax.

Another tax advantage of S corporations is that they can distribute money as profits rather than salary to employees who are shareholders. Profits are not subject to the Social Security and Medicare taxes that salaries are. And when you sell an S corporation, the taxable gain on the sale of the business may be less than that of a C corporation.

I’d recommend speaking with a qualified CPA (and if you don’t have a CPA, I’d recommend getting one - when it comes to business ownership, you don’t want Uncle Leo doing your taxes if he isn’t familiar with business tax codes) to assist you in figuring out which type of corporation you should be filing as. You just may be surprised at the money you can save by choosing the right one. I’ve been in business as an LLC since 2001 and this year it was to my benefit (and, oddly enough, to the IRS’s benefit as well) for me to change my filing status for my corporation. Keep up to date and always ask a lot of questions. The answers may surprise you.