First of all I would like to say I had to read many many books, I also read somewhere that rich people have a large libraries and poor people have large televisions, so since my television set was quite large along with my bills I had to start reading to find out how to get my business off the ground. One of the books that I did read and I will suggest reading is start with WHY. It mentions in this book that people do not care what you are selling, they care why you are selling it. Anyhow let me get on with my thought for the day. Our business is laser engraving, we can literally engrave on anything, so our market is really anybody. This can be overwhelming. We were trying to market to everyone, our target market was not clearly defined. One day I told my wife let's try to market to one target market each quarter, so we narrowed it down to only one which was pet memorials. We also decided that because people do not care what you sell the care why you are selling it we will donate back to animal rescue a percentage of what we make. After this quarter we will go ahead and do custom glass work and donate to autism. Car shows, multiple sclerosis, and etc. I think you get the idea. Our thoughts were that by always giving back it would give a reason for someone to go with us. I guess now thinking about it this gave us our businesses WHY, our purpose in life. Also by starting with a smaller target market and adding on it also focused us. You might be asking why give away your marketing strategies, I am a disabled veteran and starting off our business has been very difficult, we did not know anything about marketing, you could say we were Forest Gumping our way through it. I hate to see people reinvent the wheel each time a businesses starts up this is just my way of giving back to all the people that helped me out, i'm passing along my experiences. I will post things that work and things that don't do so well in following blogs. Come visit our website, and if you have any comments I would love to hear them. We might be able to post it on a following blog so you could help out others as well. Never give up on your dreams.
This is my wife and I after winning a national award, The Sargent Shriver Achievement Award for Veterans Serving America. This award was given to us mostly on our charity work. Please check out the YouTube video at the bottom.
www.caplaques.com
