I met today with a small business owner of a successful contractor’s business (type of contractor withheld to protect identity.) She does the admin work and her husband manages the day-day work. Some great learnings:

Small businesses are scrappy survivors

• She didn’t wait for the govt to bail her out. She’s frustrated with the bailout of big companies and wondered what the president is doing for small businesses.
• She and her husband executed on a plan to get through this recession. It was close. Her husband went looking for other jobs and she told him: all the work you’d put into another job, put into this business, go out and get business. After four months she says she sees the light at the end of the tunnel with business picking up.
• So they hunkered down and cut expenses to the bone. She pared back family spending to “franks, beans and rice” and made sure no customer paid past 30 days. She tried to keep as many employees as possible but had to lay “some” off.
  

Small businesses are ruthless about culling what doesn’t work

• She has no time for marketing that doesn’t work. She’s tried the PennySaver but they wanted 26 week commitments at $100/week. And worse, it brought in disinterested “price shoppers.” CUT.
• She currently uses Service Magic. For about a $500/monthly budget she’s bringing in well over 100 leads/mo. with a significant conversion rate. She loves Service Magic and is considering  Diamond Certified as well. Since these filter poor contractors out and have a survey the customer needs to complete, she gets very high quality leads.
• She signed up for an online marketing service, paid $299, and is trying to test it. She hasn’t been able to get through set up despite sitting down several times to try. She said “I have no time for things that don’t work.”

She loves what mobile marketing can do for her business

• Whenever I mention young consumers are flocking to texting, the merchant always goes “yep.” That’s a good learning in itself, suggesting that much of the hurdle to get these merchants to see the benefits of texting over other forms of marketing isn’t that big of a hurdle.
• She was an idea machine, throwing out all kinds of ways her business could best use texting. Given she has a steady clientele, most of the ideas are around service updates, notifications, reminders, and selling add-on services. She believes her customers will be much more likely to read and even respond to a message when it goes to their phone.
• She doesn’t want to be nickel and dimed. She feels too many services have hidden fees and lots of fees she has to “think about. and if I have to think about it, I don’t do it.”

Saved the best for last…

• She thought the FanMinder online service was super easy to use and understand!

Let us mark today 3/22, 9:30am as the moment the first SMS message was sent from FanMinder…

And let’s not forget we stand on the shoulders of other giants who came before us…

133 years ago, almost  to the day, Thomas Edison uttered:

“Mr. Watson, come here I want to see you” upon inventing the telephone, March 10, 1876

and 165 years ago, the just-as-famous Samuel Morse uttered:

“What hath God wraught?” thus ushering in the age of instantaneous communication with the telegraph, May 24, 1844

Ok, I know we didn’t invent SMS, or even mobile marketing. But it sure feels that way to me!

Just found this blog post on the web with some rules to live by for developing an online product. I think it’s as close to a comprehensive list as it comes.

I especially enjoyed #5, 9, and 13. #13 says to make sure your engineers experience first-hand the customer’s experience.