Team Immense Business

One of the most important building blocks of a good marketing plan is your business card. It is far and away the most likely item to find its way into the hands of your most important business contacts. And it is the one thing that is likely to remain when all your other marketing materials are long gone.

In other words, your business card is much more than just a piece of paper with your name, address and phone number printed on it. It is a powerful sales tool. And it should be designed with that purpose in mind.

What can a business card do for your business?

Before asking the inevitable questions about the design of your business card, you should ask what its function in your overall marketing plan is supposed to be. A properly designed business card has at least four important marketing functions. Here they are:

1. It helps you to introduce your company. 2. It provides critical contact information about you or your company. 3. It conveys your most important sales message. 4. It communicates your corporate image.

An introduction to your company

This may seem obvious, but think about it for a minute. Think of your business card as a tool for opening doors. Think of yourself at a meeting, or even at a social event. What better way to introduce yourself to a person than to hand them your card?

I’m not talking about shoving your card on people who don’t want it. I’m talking about using your card as a tool to make useful connections with people who are likely to appreciate the introduction.

This suggests you should think of appropriate introductory “openers” to accompany your card. For instance, say you’re at a business connections meeting. Since the purpose of the meeting is to meet people and do “networking”, you might try a simple card swap strategy: “Hi, I’m Harriet Phillips. I’m swapping business cards with as many people as I can. Here’s my card. May I have one of yours for my contact file?”

Every situation will be a bit different, but the function of the card remains the same: it provides you with an excuse to introduce your business to people who might be able to use your services.

Provide critical contact information on your card

Before you put your card into the hands of prospects, you want to make sure it communicates the most important things about you and your company.

Deciding what information is “critical” will vary from situation to situation. The basics are pretty obvious: your name, your company name, your business address, and the most effective way for people to get hold of you ? probably your telephone number and email address.

Rather than putting your cell or pager number on all your cards, you might make a point of writing it on the card when you think it is appropriate: “Here, I’ll give you my cell number, just in case you can’t reach me at my office number.” That gives the impression you’re giving this person special treatment.

Include Your Most Important Sales Message

Even more important than giving prospects your basic contact information is conveying your Most Important Sales Message. According to Cesar Crespo of Free Card Business Card Opportunities, “Business people often miss a golden opportunity to make their business card a powerful sales tool. Our clients are often surprised at how much more effective we can make their cards.”

If you don’t have a “Most Important Sales Message”, you should create one. It is a brief, succinct statement of what your company is about. It is the answer to the question: “What does your company do?” If you don’t have a “Most Important Sales Message”, you should create one. It is a brief, succinct statement of what your company is about. It is the answer to the question: “What does your company do?”

Sometimes this kind of answer is called an “elevator speech”. You’re on an elevator and somebody asks you “What does your company do?” You have six or seven seconds to give a memorable reply. Good elevator speeches go beyond hackneyed answers like “We do web marketing” or “We make bowling balls.” They are confidence-inspiring marketing statements: “We create websites that sell tons of products for people.” or “We make the world’s most beautiful bowling balls.”

Your MISM (Most Important Sales Message) will often be a “product” (as in the bowling ball example above), but it should always be accompanied by a “pitch” of some kind or another. Often this will be what we usually think of as a slogan.

For your elevator speech you need a seven second slogan. For your business card you will need the same slogan in four or five words at the most. It must be boiled down to an string of words that not only sounds good, but looks good on the card: “Websites that Sell Like Crazy”, “The World’s Most Beautiful Bowling Balls”, “The Discount Real Estate Guy”, “The Source for Cottages and Summer Homes”, “Beautiful Color Vinyl Banners.”

Be Consistent with your Corporate Image

Finally, make your card consistent with your corporate image and the rest of your marketing materials. Usually this boils down to basic things like your choice of colors, typeface, and layout style. And of course you will want to include your company logo.

Usually your marketing consultant or graphic designer will want to plaster your logo on all your marketing materials, using the logo as a substitute for real marketing design. “We must convey a consistent corporate image” is the usual mantra. What ever you do, don’t ask “Why?” That question opens the way for tedious theorizing about “the long term importance of developing a corporate image.”

You would be better to agree. “Yes, by all means, we want to present a consistent corporate image.” And then add, “But I want this card to do some selling for me, so I would like to give the sales message a bit more prominence than usual.”

In other words, use the usual corporate colors, typeface and layout style. Include the logo too. But give prominence to the sales message. Show a picture of your product. Or if you think you are the product (as most real estate agents seem to think), then include your own picture. But don’t forget to enhance the photo with that slogan we talked about in the previous section.

And now that you have a killer card, get out there and start handing them out.

“Small businesses” is an economically term which generally related to the business scope and extent. The taxing authorities categorize “small business” according to their finance turnover in a defined time duration, in most cases: a year. Another aspect of specifying a business as a “small” one is its field of activity: a single barber shop, or a single “Pizza” parlor, or a single stand in a marketplace, are “small businesses”. When one of those becomes “a chain of…” it’s another story.

 

The behavioral sciences, especially Sociology, regard “small business” as a small organization. From the sociology point of view a business is a type of social organization. The sociology discipline classifies organizations by their internal human relations and interaction. No matter how many people are involved, what’s count is the quality of the inter-relationships among them. If everybody knows everybody, face to face, by each name, and the instrumental communication is informal as the social communication, then it’s a “small organization”. 

Such informal relationships can function when we are talking about 2 to 100 workers, managers and subordinates all together. Probably when it’s a 100 people organization we’ll find formal division of labor, duties definitions and documented regulations. On the other hand – a 4 personnel store: the informality is extreme and there is no room for documentation and definitions, everyone is doing everything and if the boss, the store owner, will keep distance – he’ll lose the great advantage of potential warm instrumental relationships with his three salespersons.

Between the 4 and 100 personnel the most common are the 30-40 personnel small businesses. Even if the business owner will try to establish formal regulations he wouldn’t succeed. In such a small organization people will behave according to the informal habits which dominate the everyday activities. There is no way that a new employee will sit down and read a documented guidance book. What will probably happen is that he’ll be told orally what to do by a senior foreman and will complete his integration by imitating others in his close working environment. If he’ll insist to read written instructions he wouldn’t find it because it doesn’t exist  in such small businesses and if he will – it wouldn’t be updated. This is the great fault of small organizations and yet their great advantage: it makes them much more flexible and adaptable to market real time changes.

The sociologist Max Weber claimed that the ideal desirable theoretical model of the most efficient organization is the ‘bureaucratic” model. Weber argued that this type of model will be the only social organization that will overcome human faults and weaknesses. His organization will leave much longer than the individuals who are working for it. People will have to adapt themselves to the organizational needs and demands and not the other way round. He wanted to fulfill the old cliché saying “The graveyards are packed with people who thought they were irreplaceable”.

Just for the sake of argumentation, I’ll point only two of the criticism on Weber’s model:

One – Bureaucratic organizations suffer of stagnation. When a “big business” wants to react to changes in its businesslike environment its got to be someone whose job is to detect such changes and to call a meeting of the right forum which is nominated in advance to take care of such cases and according to the firm regulations to make decisions which will be accomplished by those who will be appointed to the task. Such a procedure is taking a lot of time while small business are reacting immediately and move forward leaving the big businesses behind.

Two -  The biggest enemy of the bureaucratic organization is the informal organization within the formal one. A lot of money, time and energy are wasted trying to overcome the influence of the informal organization. In small businesses, which are informal by nature, there is no such problem.

 

As a metaphor we can compare big and small businesses to a steam ship and a sailing boat. In the big steam liner, even if the crew members know each other personally, they operate a daily routine under strict regulations carried out by formally ranked officers and other commissioned lower ranked staff. If the weather will change and threat the ship safety, no one will react without a strict command issued by the captain. In the small numbered crew of a 40 feet sailboat there are no ranks or strictly defined jobs. Everybody is doing everything which is needed when it is needed to be done. There is a Skipper but in case of a sudden hazard you can carry on each sailor that he’ll do what’s necessary without waiting to be told what to do. In small teams, who are operating in a stressed environment, a small boat in the big blue sea or a small business in the jungle of the wild markets, crew members know that if they wouldn’t operate shoulder to shoulder they will be hanged neck to neck. The friendly commitment to each other is working for the benefit of the organization.

 

A online print shop is a classic example of a small business. It is organized by the following departments:

Management and administration (3)

Sales and marketing (3)

Accountants (2)

Customer service (3)

Graphic artists studio (5)

Printing machines operators (3)

Production and finish (7)

Shipping (2)

Business development and Internet support (2)

 

Those 30 workers are crowded in 100 square meters shop including machines and furniture.

The print shop is operating on line and off line.

On line, through the Internet, they offer the classical advertising and promoting printed materials like: Business cards, magnets, fliers, stamps, account books, envelopes, letterheads, invitations, stickers, bookmarks, and so on.

Off line, when the customer arrives in person and orders his request face to face. This is when the products are “heavy” like: books, catalogs, folders, small paper made packing materials, and such.

 

The small number of employees, operating under the right managers leadership, creates consolidation, unification, integration, and forging “team spirit” based on interpersonal relationship which creates an identification, involvement and empathy with the business goals. The lack of distance between managers, foremen and other employees do not harm discipline and high standards of working moral and ethics. Discussions, which are taking place from time to time, in open forums, enable all workers criticize constructively or suggesting improvements. Workers can express themselves freely in periodical interviews and all channels of communication, including internal E-mailing, are open unlimited. The closeness relationships enable flexible positioning workers in different stations according to various burdens. The outcomes of 30 workers is synergistic by nature and much more than just aggregative.

              

Popping up everywhere now on the internet are new home business opportunities. There seems to be a new product every second day. The need has arisen to review this great number of new home business ideas. Here is a set of secrets to helping the potential home business owner to decide how to make the best decision and not get scammed.

1)The 1 in 12 rule: It is an unfortunate fact, that roughly 1 in 12 of the home business opportunities out there are simply scams, and reviews by experts have shown this to be the case. Often their blueprints just don’t work. This is a quick statistic that should incite you to be careful when selecting the home business model that is right for you, and when you are being offered one of the many home start-up packages out there. Of course, about 10% of the offers are absolutely valid, and they do deliver.

2)The Lure of Wealth: This is often the trick used to completely fool the prospect into buying the offer. Many of the website owners out there will show an extravagant wealth mask, and they will give the impression that they made millions, however this is not to be trusted. Seeing this, many people are blinded and miss the bigger picture. Often it is just an empty promise, without any real workable method of making money.

3)The Quick Money E-Book: An e-book is an easy to make one time document, and often it is seen that home business promoters only offer a one time e-book offer. This is the core of a get-quick-rich scheme. The webmaster will promise big things, and ask for a one time payment, and that is the end of the relationship. If home businesses could succeed by simply buying an e-book, there would be a hell of a lot more successes out there today. However as home business reviews have shown, over 95% of businesses fail. It strongly points toward need for a longer term plan, support network and personal effort.

4)Real Skills Training: In order to achieve success in a home business, it is necessary to attain specialized home business knowledge. Home business reviews on the net have shown that the knowledge that is so often delivered for people’s dollars falls below the level required, and the knowledge is not well managed or well directed. People out there have massive potential to do well in their own business, and it has been proven that they only need some special support as well as individual willingness to make it from idea to success.

5)Honesty and Guarantees: This speaks for itself. The legitimate websites on the internet that provide guarantees are the most trustworthy, and often they will give the prospect a timeframe to give it a try. This is the kind of promise to look out for. This is so because you know then that it is not a scam, and you will be in control of the level of success you can achieve. If it was not for you after the time frame, you will get your money back.

It is hoped that the above pointers will help some of you real home business prospects to choose wisely. ®All Rights Reserved