Optimizing Small Businesses On The ‘Net

Everyone has a system, don’t they?  Working with small businesses and talking to owners and partners creates an interesting environment of brainstorming and collusion.  Odd words, perhaps, but true enough.  The discovery that what works for the big guys can work for the little guy deserves a bit of attention, because many small (read: Tiny!) companies can’t afford more than even a couple hundred dollars per month in advertising  to promote themselves.  So, how do you grow a company?  Start with optimizing your web presence rather than throwing more money on varied print ads that may or may not bring you results.  Let’s look at this…

I recently posted 2 polls on LinkedIn asking what do you think is the best way to grow a business? I offered the following multiple choice options:

1) More specialized advertising

2) Inject additional capital

3) Bring in new partners

4) Expand into larger location

5) Other (email what works best for you)

The results, while certainly not scientific nor the only possibilities out there, were interesting.  28%  responded with More Specialized Advertising.  0%  (yep, that’s a big ZERO) said to Inject More Capital.  14% opted for Bringing In New Partners, while a huge 42% said to Expand Into Larger Location; the last 14% opted for some other option, but did not offer their ideas via email as suggested.  The numbers for the second poll reflected different respondents, and remarkably, the exact same percentages!  The only one to respond via email response was, “Have professional consultants from every aspect of business along with a strong law firm as mentors to resource and discuss plans of action.” 

Now, this being said, and realizing that posted polls are very limited in their responses, let’s take a moment to look at “more specialized advertising”.   There are a few ways that every business can easily and “freely” optimize their web presence which, with proper follow up, can and will improve their rankings on any search engine.  The question is, what are you willing to do to promote your business?  You’ve already done  the hard stuff, so why not tackle this last project or hire someone to help you with it?

Let’s consider the social networks.  “Everyone is doing it”, in this case means it may not be a bad idea to get into it yourself!  Just be cautious in how you approach it and how you respond to your inquiries.  Business is, after all, business.  If you want to play, create another personal site for that.  Clutter doesn’t belong on the business page.  And the playthings will not improve your SEO rankings, so Keep It Separate, Silly! still applies here.  

How do you choose which SN site will work best for you?  There are several sources to review what is going on in your area.  I suggest going to Quantcast.com to see what sites are getting the most movement in your area by whatever marketing criteria you might want to consider.  Whether it is by age, income, gender, ethnicity and others, a personalized marketing review will allow you to consider what sites might draw hits for you.  Just create your own login, then click on “Media Planner” at the top of your home page and give it a minute to sort.  Create your own specifications and it will automatically update for you.

Once you pick the top vehicles in which to express your business interests, set up a page there.  Start connecting with others in your social arena by inviting others to participate with you, but keep it to your business acquaintances, contacts, potential clients and the like.  Stay in regular touch by dedicating time each week just for this purpose!  You are trying to appeal to others, not just to collect “bodies” to impress people.  Yes, it’s a numbers game, but customers are oftentimes more impressed by the personal approach rather than the extremes.  Or, play the numbers game.  The idea is to get the hits and customers or clients based upon what works for you!

Once your social networking sites are up (and keep a good record of them!  You will need to follow up) start looking at developing a business blog.  Again, there are many ways and sites just for this purpose.  You can use Quantcast or other, more professional or trade-specific services to determine what will work best to draw people into your circle.  My personal favorite is WordPress, but you can blog from so many sources, it may work to have several going at once, where you can post topics and build your personal expertise.  You must be the expert, after all!

One of the most overlooked areas in search engine optimization is “keyword or keyphrase domination”.    If you are using PPC products, you MUST have a strong keyword/keyphrase anchor.  One of the best ways to do this is to comment on ezine articles, keeping up your blogs, and creating YouTube videos.  You can also create a question (or have someone do it for you) and post it on Yahoo, Google, Ask.com or other search engines using your keywords/keyphrases; then go back under another email and answer the question — being sure to ADD your own blogs URL.  Remember — YOU are the expert!  People should be coming to you!

Add and build what’s called a Link Wheel on your site.  From your main site, create an article with your keywords reflected in it a fair number of times — Note: Don’t overuse it!  Research other sites that contain your keywords and keyphrases.  Bookmark the articles and your own, and submit them to your favorite social bookmark feeds.  This adds to the information base and others looking for those phrases are going to run into you and your business much more often.

Check out high pagerank article directories, like helium.com, AssociatedContent, upublish.info and many others.  These are just 3 of thousands of article directories, so look for listings all over.  A lot of these are populated by freelance writers, semi-ambitious SAH’s (stay-at-homes) and actual paid professional writers.  If you have trouble wording things, consider hiring a “ghost” or even a tech writer for your own purposes.

More later on Affiliate marketing, cross-linking and ezine articles.  Enjoy, and hook up with me on Facebook, Twitter or, heck, just go looking,  I’m out there!

Does Capitalism Still Exist In America?

On the one hand, I know the question itself is rather trite.  But we have to look at what is going on in wonderment and dismay, because if the precepts of capitalism (as I understand them) still exist, then the very thought of our government (and thereby every working citizen of this country) paying for the bailouts of companies like AIG or our Big 3 Automakers should seriously and completely just piss the crap out of everyone.

And yet, we sit here and barely protest the idea that these companies should die their natural deaths?

Let’s look at this realistically, folks.

AIG has received not one, but 2 bailouts now.  Serious freaking money.  It’s coming out of my pocket and yours.  OK, so it supposedly won’t hurt us for awhile, but wait!  We have a new feted president-elect coming our way, and guess who’s gonna take the heat for this in the long term?  I can hear it now: That damn Democrat got voted in, everyone thinks he’s going to fix everything overnight and all he’s done is stick us with these TAX policies.  And, um, those “stimulus checks” we’ve been getting?  Yeah, we pay for those too; from where?  The taxes we were supposed to get back next year!  Or maybe the year after that — when Mr. Obama takes over…

Um, I believe this one belongs to “W” again, m’kay?

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a Dem in my heart.  I’m a Libertarian in principle, and very shortly a card-carrying member.  I’m not liberal, although most of my friends who have no idea what a libertarian is all about think that I must be…  I’m not a conservative though either, by any stretch of the imagination.  I would say that I’m moderate, but primarily I’m a wife, a human being and a business person who is trying real hard to believe that our government has better things to do with MY money — with your money, and yours and yours too – than to throw it after bad companies that REFUSE to progress; or companies that REFUSE to do right by their clients and customers and shareholders and their own country!  I think our government has absolutely no business taking any of my hard-earned cash to make these companies attempt to become re-solvent when all they have done is ignore the writing on the wall out of their own corporate narcissim.

If I hear one more story about AIG abusing bailout cash, I’m going to scream.  And if Speaker Nancy Pelosi gets Congress behind the Big 3 bailout, I’m going to scream again!  Trust me, you’re going to hear it in Tallahassee and in Cleveland, not to mention DC.

This is supposed to be free trade.  Capitalism is not about getting governmental perks and ass-saving!  If you can’t make the bills you should ”die”, just like us penny-ante small business folk, OK?  I want to know who is going to bail my sorry butt if I can’t make my bills?  Joe Nobody, that’s who.  And what would be the reason for my failure?  Poor budgeting?  Stealing from my company?  Yeah, right.

What does it really prove, to have the US government bail these companies out of the danger zone?  I think it proves that monopolies are alive and well, living in America and abusing its’ people, buying their politicians; and these deregulated, wasteful, obsolete monsters are sanctioned by the government – not by the people of this great land.  The CEO’s and upper management of these mega-corps that plunder and switch and then move on to another sucker-company should also be held accountable for the losses and have their hands slapped (and perhaps a goodly chunk of those large severance packages put back into circulation if it can be proven that they were corporate pirates!)  Ruthless bastards exist, but come on, we’ve had enough, and we’re saying so!

There are new crimes in America. 

Do YOU really want to pay for the cleanup?  I think Honda and Toyota could do a pretty good job of keeping us in viable, as-green-as-it-gets-for-now automobiles, until something new comes along.

Burn the trolls, for crying out loud!

OK, I apologize.  I know, probably better than many of you, just how many jobs that stand to be eliminated if the bailouts fail.  Both my husband and my former husband worked for GM and it’s subsidiaries and both have had those jobs eliminated in less than 2 years.  But if small businesses like mine go under because I can’t make my bills — in part because my taxes have escalated to some ungodly point, or my gasoline bill goes through the roof, or I have to live with my elderly parents because I can’t pay a mortgage – then Mom and Pop America is going to have just as many effective job losses in the long run and we’ll be back to square-one. 

Perhaps we should look at ways to ease the burdens of the deaths of these big companies while still allowing them to die.  The workforce is what needs protection – not the company itself!   There has to be some alternative than these ill-conceived bailouts.  I would rather our government remove segments of workers and pay to retrain them and to help them get jobs elsewhere than to continue to throw good money after bad.  Why continue to reward the management and shareholders for their lack of forsight and their general greed?  They have to be held accountable in some manner.  Forcing them to go lean and mean might actually cause them to W-O-R-K to resolve their own crises. 

People take jobs not just to work, but to support families, to have pride in themselves and to, hopefully, work for a company that stands for something good and positive.  We want loyalty from them, but corporations feel no loyalty toward us!  We want to enter our old age knowing we’ve done right by our children, and maybe, just maybe we can even take some kind of retirement.  Today, however, all we feel is burned; burned by corporate America, and now by the government that is supposed provide us with a level of protection: just as Honest Abe said — government OF the people, BY the people and FOR the people…  Are WE perishing?

And the question remains: Does capitalism still exist in America?  Ross Perot, where the hell are you?

Greenspan’s Folly

I’ve read the following article written by Martin Crutsinger and Marcy Gordon regarding the questioning of former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan by Congress’ House Oversight Committee.  Here is one link to the article: http://www.baynews9.com/content/9/2008/10/23/395306.html?title=Greenspan%20denies%20blame%20for%20crisis,%20admits%20’flaw’ there are several other news organizations similarly quoted.

“”Greenspan, 82, acknowledged under questioning that he had made a “mistake” in believing that banks, operating in their own self-interest, would do what was necessary to protect their shareholders and institutions. Greenspan called that “a flaw in the model … that defines how the world works.”"

To think that anyone, let alone a bank (or a banking system) would protect their shareholders when they personally stand to “earn” (read: strip) their own institution is a huge part of Greenspan’s entire philosophy and shows just how naive and out of touch he was — and just how messed up — our system is.  I am not just discussing our politics or our economy.  This is such a base metaphor for the growth of moral decay as I have ever seen or imagined, and yet it exists.

I believe that it boils down to is this: Mr. Greenspan had 18-1/2 years in a growing free market culture where greed and lack of ethics has become more than just an occasional lapse by poorly-raised individuals, it has become the norm.  When he took over this highly charged position, he was fixed in his belief in the decency of everyman.  He didn’t take into account the decay of morality that has taken place in our society.  In fact, social narcissism is the norm, rather than the exception, and I see it every day in my tiny little shop.  It’s rampant in people who would pass a bad check or a counterfeit bill;in those who would keep money they are not due; in those who would stand idly by and watch someone dying and do nothing to help.  It’s prevalent in those who would take another person’s identity to use their credit or medical information fraudulently for themselves. 

Mr. Greenspan apparently didn’t take into account that a few people in charge of huge sums of money, given rein to run with the bit in their mouths, would take such advantage that a new breed of legalized thievery has arisen.  This is no longer a capitalist society.  We have a new caste system in America that has gone well beyond just the Haves and the Have-nots.

Most of us are well aware of the 80/20 rule: 80 percent of the country’s wealth is in the hands of 20 percent of the population.  A few of those 20 percent are involved in the “growth and sustaining” of our banking and mortgage industries, and I’m sure many of those in positions of power over the past 18-1/2 years have been enjoying the vast opportunities that existed within the industry.  Who better to know how to make money work for them than someone with the education and position?  Now, I’m not saying that every CEO or COO of all of the banks, savings and mortgage companies in our country are bold-faced thieves, just that many of them have the skills to work it all to their advantage.

And why not?  The policies in place were not there to protect the banks, the shareholders, and certainly not John Q. Public, are they?  Really?  JQP has had to stand by, wringing his hands and wondering why — every time he (or she) turns around, they were paying a new fee for every service the banks came up with.  They wondered why the nickles and dimes they are continuously told to save are conveniently being scraped out of their pockets and into the banks’ own cavernous vaults.  Why can’t JQP retire?  He’s had 40 years of working to put back the money!  Why, he must not be very good with his cash!  (Heaven forbid if he has to work for nearly minimum wage!  And, shouldn’t he be grateful for that?)

Indeed, life takes most of us by surprise.  We are, after all, human.  So, those of us who grew up and lived by the Golden Rule are almost always surprised when the theft comes – not with a gun and mask – but over the counter with a coldly smiling face, blank stare and a banking policy explanation.  So, don’t let your water heater break.  Don’t buy a new car.  Don’t move from your home.  God forbid if you should divorce, marry or have children.  What will you do if your child wants to marry or go on to college?  There’s another 5, 10, 15 year payoff that will drain you dry.

It seems to me that the officials who have been in charge of mortgage and banking policies for the past 2 decades should be investigated.  Let’s look under the hoods of their Mercedes and at their vacation homes and off-shore accounts and see just what they did to “earn” their million dollar severances and retirements.  How DID they rape the system that was in place? 

I am sure that the 80 percent of the population who simply survive would stand up clearly and say, “I didn’t do anything,” and be truthful, at least about that.  Many more in our banking industry would say, “I didn’t do anything,” and while being truthful, could possibly also add, “but I know a lot more”.

The rest would probably think quietly to themselves, “I’m in control.  I know what I’m doing.  I like raping and pillaging”.  They are certainly being truthful.  What really pisses me off is that they were given license to do so, and now most of the 80 percent are going to pay for it.

I don’t know about everyone out there; I only know about myself.  My family did not come to this country to be ripped off by banks, by taxes, by government.  We came to live an honest life, to worship as we chose, to love our families and to live safely.  Many of us don’t care that we don’t have millions, we just want to be comfortable and live decently, under the laws and in the lands of this great country.

So, what the hell happened?  When did ethics get thrown out the door?  Isn’t it about time that, at their earliest ages, we start teaching our kids again and anew what honesty and ethics are supposed to be about?  Should we not hold those accountable who have taken so much from so many and quit asking innocents to pay for something they had no party in?

I am not going to say that mortgage and banking consumers had no responsibility.  On the contrary, every consumer has the right – and even the obligation – to go in to a closing on their prospective property; to check out every single piece of paper; to make sure the terms are fully understood and clear.  As with many folks, people want others to be responsible, so, like sheep they follow the shepherd.  When the shepherd is not a true shepherd, but a wolf, and they still trust and follow, they tend to get eaten alive, one after another.  It is much too easy to say, “I don’t have time to read all of this!”  We already know we don’t have the time or even the inclination, right?  It’s even more difficult when you’re in that big, cold room and the closing personnel are there, waiting expectantly for you to sign off on every piece of paper they throw at you.

Of course they give you an explanation.  The 15 second “This-is-what-this-paper-is all-about-sign-here-and-here-and-here” spiel is the easiest way to get through it all.  No one wants to appear ignorant, so we take them at their word.  We blindly allow them herd us from one gate to the other.

So, who are the advocates?  The loan broker didn’t say no.  The underwriters didn’t say no.  The mortgage company didn’t say no, nor did the title company, the lawyer or the consumer.  Slaughter, indeed.

What are we left with now?  Whose responsibility is it?  How is the blame to be distributed?  And we already know those who should be most held accountable will be in Rio or Cabo, enjoying their mojitos and sunshine, don’t we?

Cynicism rules!  As evidence, this very article.  Greed advances.  Power has already corrupted.  Politics is a farce.  America, the once fat and slumbering giant, stands now at Wall Street with a thoroughly confused look on his “Uncle Sam” face.

Is it no surprise, really, that young people camp out there too, waiting for the brokers to leap from the Exchange windows with cameras in hand in the hopes that they are the next Youtube wonder?

I wish I had answers, but all I can advocate is decency, honesty, morality, ethics.  Treat others as you want to be treated!  I’d love to be able to live with my door unlocked again.  Why must we live in fear?  I suppose I am too idealistic and naive. 

I once attended a small business seminar in Dayton, Ohio.  The speaker was a real estate mogul who said, “You can feel for the person on the other side of the door.  That doesn’t mean they get free rent.  You have to evict them if they cannot pay.  Their issues are not your issues.  You are in business for yourself.”  He went on to extol the virtues of “decided inhumanity” (my term); which means, basically, if they can’t pay today you certainly can’t expect them to come up with the money tomorrow, so your only choice is to be rid of them and as quickly as possible so you can get someone else in who CAN pay.  It would seem a great deal of our current problem is that philosophy, and the decision is now backing up into the very choice that our financial market has NO CHOICE BUT to work with the very people they attempted to defraud.

Now, here’s the final catch.  We all know that paper financials can be manipulated.  We really aren’t stupid.  Projections are guesses built upon formulas; and it seems our economists have been very lucky in their projections the past 20 years, haven’t they?  They have accomplished what the earliest financiers dreamed!  It’s like the ultimate multi-level marketing scheme, and they never had to recruit!  Oh, my goodness, to have a tiny piece of that beautiful pie…  and now, the pie has been dropped on the floor and found to be rancid.

I’d say the baker was flawed in the ingredients…

It’s time for everyone to get real.

Living Under Fay

Vero has been hard-hit these past two days by the Tropical Storm Fay.  I even closed my store in Sebastian just to make sure I didn’t have to worry about wading in, which is rather difficult for me.  I hate not working!  The schools of Indian River County were closed yesterday, and they were intrepid enough to open today.  I decided I wasn’t going to get enough customers in this rain to warrant my opening.

I took a drive in later this afternoon to check on the security there and all is well.  Unlike many businesses and homes in the area, we are high enough and have decent enough drainage (at least for the time being) to keep the water where it belongs.   I’d worried I would have some flow through the back door, but no problems there, thank goodness.

Most of the difficulties arises from driving from one location to another.  Many areas hardest hit have little to no sewer systems to move the water away from them.  One community, Tradition, is largely underwater, and that is a very new community!  The damages there will be easily in the hundreds of millions alone.  Many of my favorite customers live in Barefoot Bay, which was hit by a tornado last night, destroying nine homes.  I’ll have to wait to see what happened to them.  Port St. Lucie, in St. Lucie County, is devastated.  People are being forced to wade through waste from backed up septics; they are being warned not to do so because of snakes, alligators and fire ants in the waters.  I’ve seen news reports of kids biking, many people boating to their mailboxes.  People are being ferried to and from their homes in dump trucks.  One school district has their entire bus yard literally swamped to the engines with water and muck.

Here in Pointe West, we’ve measured the rain levels each day.  From 5pm the 18th, to 5pm the 19th we received 9-3/4 inches of rain.  From 5 yesterday to 5 today, another 3-1/2 inches and still more to come as Fay turns around and heads to the Florida panhandle… or so the weather gurus tell us.  My dogs are forlorn.  My youngest is living under our bed and hating every time I tell her she has no choice but to go outside.  Such pitiful faces I’ve rarely seen!  We all come in looking (and smelling) like drowned rats, and there just aren’t enough towels in the world to get us dry enough.

I’m sure I’m not the only one to say it, “I’m really sick of the rain now!”  Lake Okeechobee, which has been drought laden these past 2 years, will largely be caught up by this downpour.   Current weather reports seem to show Fay has stalled just outside of Melbourne (north of Sebastian) and the bands stand to drench us for the next few days as she takes her sweet time heading north and west.  I suppose when I live through my first hurricane, I’ll be really uptight, but right now I’m feeling like I did when I was up north and going through a snow squall.  I wonder what this would have translated into snow-wise?

I’m all for ending the drought.  I’d just rather it wasn’t in one day.  Or two.  God?  Are you listening?

Marketing for the Micro Business

Many of us in this economy are trying something we never have before — we are starting our own businesses. It’s the logic of the beast: we work our backsides off for the private sector year after year, and when the economy turns down, our jobs are eliminated, outsourced or just plain terminated. In an effort to pick ourselves back up, we do something completely original: we look to our dreams and try.

Unfortunately, there is no manual that comes with starting your own business, and unless you’ve had 4 years of marketing in college, there isn’t anyone out there who is going to tell you how best to advertise. Even when you do all the booklearning, applying that in real life can be quite the eye-opener. So, after you pay your thousand dollars for the yellow pages ad (which you aren’t certain will do much), and you augment it with listings in the newspaper (a 2×4 which starts at around 45.00 per week with a multi-week commitment — again, with the question, will it ever get seen?) what is your company’s impact and are you being found?

I’ve been working on solutions to these issues while working on my own company’s marketing strategies, and with the budget of a flea, I’ve worked up methods to increase the visibility of my company on the Internet. The price is right: absolutely free — and all the while I’m getting hits. How can you market a company without putting forth any money and actually see results?

It takes a concerted effort and a bit of research but you can create the situation where your company is “first in line” on an Internet search. Google? Yes. Ask.com? Them too! Yahoo? But of course!

So how does it work? There are a number ofmethods you can use to promote your business. To verify results, you have to keep doing things over and over, and then compare numbers often. Keeping in mind that “what works today may not work tomorrow”, I put into motion a few ideas that are showing significant promise.

The first best place to start: Google your business. Where did your business appear in those search listings? Go to other search engines like Yahoo, Live.com, MSN.com, Cuil.com and as many others as you can and search there also. You want to build your presence in each of these locations, so you have to research what will work for you there and what resources these search engines pull from. When you have that information, you can move to the next step.

Next, I wanted a web presence; i.e., a website or webpage that I could send people to so they could see what I offer, what I do, and what I expect to be doing soon. There are tons of free websites, so the question becomes what works best in my area?

To find out what is going on in my area, I was referred to a handy site called Quantcast.com. Quantcast is a demographics vault, designed to tell any interested party who and what is getting hits on the Internet. They are quite literally, “cookie counters”. Sign in to Quantcast and enter yourgeographic locationto see what your neighbors are interested in. This is not a spy site; it’s just a counting site, so don’t be afraid — no one is looking through your windows. I found out that people in Sebastian have a much different taste than people in Dayton, Ohio, for example.

I think most of us understand that if more people in Sebastian are using Facebook than MySpace, you might want to target one audience over the other, right? Why take the time to build up a page that is ineffective, after all? MySpace is nice to use, but doesn’t allow me to paste in Javascript into my profile, so Quantcast can’t scan my page to tell me how many people are going to it. Keep in mind, there are several ways around this little issue and almost anyone with some basic experience in setting up a webpage can figure it out. Most of the search engines and ISP’s have free webpages, and you can originate there, then send people, by way of a “forward” on your primary URL, to the actual page you want them to go.

Once I determined what site I wanted to use to create my store’s home page, I checked out other demographics using Quantcast. Are people in my area going to Shutterbug or to Flickr? Where are they blogging? Where are they looking and what are they looking for? Quantcast is quite the font of information — but don’t be too specific: these are base numbers only. You can use it as a resource, but remember, your business has a specific niche, and you want to make sure you get noticed.

When I’ve determined my local demographic strengths, my market study is best completed by just considering who I’m currently doing business with, and understanding that their word of mouth is the most powerful resource I have. The question then becomes, what am I doing to promote myself with the people I actually have contact with every day and what do I need to do to make my business even more appealing to them? How much competition do I have?

My store, for example, has very little competition. We are the only half-price card store left in Indian River County as far as I am aware. We are one of the few companies in the county with the hottest children’s toy (Webkinz ™) and we have it at one of the best –or equal to — the best price in town. We are also the only custom engravers in the area — again, as far as I am aware. There are few companies doing engraving, most of which is for trophies and the like, and it is laser/computer based and therefore bulky and hard to move. Having a portable system allows us to go on site to do work that no one else can do.

When you have established your areas of specialty and you’ve found your free advertisers, you have to set up your free ad accounts and be sure to keep them updated. It really doesn’t do you any good to set up an account or a presence on these sites and then sit on it. Your company won’t grow in its web presence. On the other hand, you don’t have to micromanage them either. It is a responsibility to your new growing company that you’ll have to time-manage, but it can be one of the most rewarding and cost saving things you do to promote your business. In this day of Internet shopping, the time you take to set up on the Web is not just time well-spent, the rewards can be phenomenal.

The Angst of Small Business in America

I’m a simple business owner–nothing fancy here.  I own a small card and gift shop in a small Florida town in a decent sized strip center near the heart of town.  It’s a great location, near the tourist areas, decent anchor stores.  It’s even a half-price card shop, so folks are getting a bargain in this market, which everyone is looking for.  I have cut margin to the barest in an effort (perhaps a misspent effort) to provide my customers a good deal and viable options in todays killer economy while still trying to cover my own expenses.  But I’m thinking about ending it all.

This store has been around awhile.  It has serviced the people of this community well for nearly 20 years and is the only one of its’ kind in the county.  Many of our customers are on a fixed income and live in the more settled area of town.   The demographics are changing though, with more younger people moving in as the older folks move back to whereever it was that they came in order to spend their last time with family.  Many didn’t go north this year due to the gas prices and many more are losing their homes and jobs and just trying to survive.

I am my only employee, except for my mother and husband who volunteer and help me out during emergencies, but it’s a 6-day-a-week thing for me.  I feel as if I live here, and that everything else in my life is on hold.  I have no insurance but what my spouse’s job provides, and during the summer months when many of my customers have gone north, it can be a real nail-biter if I don’t budget excruciatingly close.

I am far from alone.  Many smaller businesses are hanging on just trying to get through the next few months, keep the lights on, the doors open for business.  After all, many of the economists insist that our country has already turned the corner and hit its low.  Pessimistically, I think not.  Did I mention I’ve also worked in the petroleum, real estate and mortgage markets?  The writing is on the wall and “bear” is a tough term for many of us to imagine.  Bull, you say?

Recovery will be a long process, and I’m sad to think I might not be serving my customers for much longer, even though I’ve planned and budgeted for bad times.  I can make it through but I can’t make extra money for my own everyday expenses.  I didn’t get into the business so I would be poor or to make my own family suffer.  I know there are no easy answers, but few customers in this neck of the woods want to spend on what they perceive is a luxury.  Still, a card is minimalistic.  It’s the gift margins that kill.  And everyone has an opinion on it all.  If I mark something up, I lose one segment of customer.  If I mark something down, I lose another.  The mix is confusing even on the best of days.  Consignment margins are even tighter and although it means no direct overhead until a sale is completed, the product does take room that could be allocated to something with a better margin — if I could afford it.

I concentrated on keeping a specific price point after I took over the store, owing in part to the demographics.  I cut back on buying from some vendors, opting instead to ebay after verifying costs per piece (yes, I figured shipping into the cost) and asking myself: Is it something I would buy NOW for someone I care about for their special occasion?  I also want a quality product – who wants junk that will break in a days’ time?  I have a fairly mainstream attitude, so am not purchasing knee-jerk products, or things that won’t have appeal to my demo’s.  They just flat aren’t buying!  Costs are up, sales are down.  A saving grace for me are credit card purchases, which the previous owner did not have, and which has increased my average sale per customer.  I’ve lost 200 customers comparing last May to this May, and another 200 for this June; again comparing against last June.  It’s a good thing the average sale-per-customer is up!

I’m personable, honest, hard-working.  People say they like me.  Customers tell me how great the store is, how nice it looks, how much BETTER since I’ve taken it over.  I work with my customers to answer their needs.  I don’t give stock away, rarely do I use it for my self or family – and when I do, I’m careful to account for the stock removal and cost factors.

It honestly IS this dreary.

So, it raises many questions in my mind.  Do I try to sell out and save my skin, or do I stick with it because the trend, according to the economists, is that we are turning the corner — and hope to hell it turns fast, before my wallet experiences that huge sucking sound caused by finance charges to prepurchased inventory and further dismal sales?

I am hurt in many ways, not just in my store.  I commute a half an hour each way, which significantly increases my gas expenditures.  We haven’t purchased a home yet and at almost 50 years of age, are living with my parents to help all of us out.  Utilities have gone up for me also in the store.  The landlord punched up the rent when I resigned the lease, although I did negotiate a smaller increase than he wanted (yay me!). 

Customers, in general, are angry.  They’ve gone to the grocer, and overspent.  Same at the gas station and at home on their utilities.  They still want some luxuries like their cell phones and HD/cable tv, but that’s an everyday expense now and it’s figured into the budget.  They aren’t buying a card (printed in China) for their cousins or nieces or nephews or even friends as much as they were.  They don’t want gifts from China, but they don’t want to pay for something “Made In America” or even made in their community.  And on they complain.  “It’s the war.”  “It’s the President’s fault.”  Even, “It’s your OWN fault.”  

Big business is not willing to lower their costs: they might antagonize their shareholders!  And so the little guy dies a little more each day.  Mom and Pop stores will crop up, and then close.  And crop up again, and close again.  A few, very few select, will succeed in bridging the gap without selling their souls.

Frankly, I don’t want to close or sell.  And I certainly don’t want to sell my soul to anyone or anything just to succeed.  I like it just the way it is!  Perhaps there is a business person out there with morals who can give a little guidance to a small chip like me so I can weather this front and see my way to the other side of the current depression.  (There, I’ve said it!)  Advertising?  I’ve done what I can and I work as many of the free-ad angles as I can.  Suggestions are certainly welcome!

In the meantime, I’m putting together the P&L and talking to a broker.