Ask Joy Gendusa

Interview with Rieva Lesonsky, small business expert and CEO of GrowBiz Media.

The Crisis Buster DVD Series will provide you with the right
business “weapons” to fight – and win the current and coming
years’ economic war!

To hell with this crisis!

I’d like to start an Entrepreneur Mentoring Program (yes, you can take part!). I’m getting huge satisfaction out of helping my 19–year–old son with his new business. He has the fire in his belly. He works all day for me in my sales admin area — making quite a low hourly wage. All his other time is devoted to his business. I never knew he’d work this hard. He always had the desire to be a businessman since he was teeny.

But now, in the real world, to see him working his tail off and coming up with great ideas and looking at the expenses of it all is just soooo pleasurable for me.

If you’re reading this, and you have the hunger, that itch…if you feel that passion every day, even on the really hard days — I want to hear from you.

My program is still in the works, but I honestly feel like if I could pull off what I pulled off — anyone can. And I want to help. That’s where the Entrepreneurial Mentoring Program comes in.

When I have a fully–established Entrepreneurial Mentoring Program, would you or someone you know be interested in participating? What would you look to achieve in this program? Do you have any ideas on this you want to share?

Based on your responses, I plan to put together the program within the next few months and I’ll keep you posted — but in the meantime, I’d love to hear your ideas!

Are you an entrepreneur? Send me your story — you could inspire thousands!

Please email me at joy.gendusa@postcardmania.com — I am really looking forward to knowing what you think!

Best,
Joy

Joy,

I am sure you have heard of groupon.  This is basically “rape” when it comes to getting a product out because they take so much of the profit…50%.  Here in my city there are now people doing local “groupon like” deals and take only 40%.  Still, why can’t I buy the same list they do and send an email out to people with my deals and keep all of the profit?

Can you help me with this?

Kathleen M. Stegman
Midwest Medical Aesthetics Ctr.

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Dear Kathleen,

 You ask a very good question and I will try to explain.

They don’t buy their list. One has to opt in. Meaning, a friend or acquaintance has to say “hey, do you want to sign up for groupon? it’s really cool…etc…” and then get you to sign up to receive the daily emails.  I think the premise is that the first time they buy you establish them as a customer. You have the opportunity to totally knock their socks off and you acquire the lead so you can market to them in the future. It is up to you to capture their identity when they come into your establishment. Then, you market to them, give a great discount and keep the profit – the idea being that the lifetime value of that customer is worth making barely any profit to acquire them. 

 

Sincerely,

Joy

Are you trying to do everything in your business? Find out how you can make more money by focusing on your strengths.

Say you’re a financial specialist, a boat builder or llama farmer, they probably didn’t teach the basic principles of starting small business promotional campaigns in boat-builders’ school. So what do you need to know, and how do you go about it? continue reading

Is blogging about your business worth your time? Author and online consultant Mikal Belicove outlines the potential benefits of setting up a blog to post company news and events.

Do you know WHO actually buys from you? I’m referring to the socioeconomic make–up of your best customers. Is it women 35-45 years old with an income of $60,000 that spend, on average, $200 on every purchase? Is it businesses with 10 or less employees? If you don’t know, you need to find out. I challenge you to get specific by analyzing your most recent sales.

Where do you start? Yes, it can seem challenging — that’s why we’ve put together this FREE Customer Analysis Checklist to help you get started.

Here’s a “sneak peek” of what it’s all about…

1. Accumulate all the details of your sales for the past 6 months or one year (it’s not necessary to exceed a year).
2. Add up the total gross income (GI) of each sale and divide that number by the total number of sales. This will give you your average ticket price. Example: 200 sales with total GI = $200,000. Your average ticket price is $1,000.
3. Take the top 10% of your invoices (based on sale price) and list all attributes you know about them. If you are targeting consumers, this should include gender, age, income, location and whether or not they have kids or own a home. If you are targeting businesses, this should include: industry, number of employees, annual revenue and the title of the person at the company who worked with you.

Now how do you convert this information into more customers just like them? Get the complete, FREE Customer Analysis Checklist now, call one of my marketing consultants at 1-866-448-0471 and they will email it to you right away.

Best,
Joy

In today’s business world, lack of marketing knowledge can seriously impact business. Marketing is a fluid subject today; it is evolving and innovating at every turn. Staying ahead of the marketing game seems like the last thing many entrepreneurs get around to doing, but it is vital if one plans to expand past the make break point. How does… continue reading

People always ask me how I grew my company from literally nothing to $19 million in revenue a year. I’ve gotten emails asking, “Are you a business genius?” or “Did you raise capital from big investors?” The answer is no to both! So, how did my printing and marketing company grow so fast while thousands of others stayed the same size? Honestly, the truth is, I grew PostcardMania with simple postcard marketing. Really, it’s true.

I started out mailing 2500 postcards per week promoting our services. I did this for a while — and eventually our weekly income hit a plateau. I then said to my assistant, Melissa Bradshaw (who is now my Senior V.P. Production & Quality Control), what if we mailed 5000 postcards a week instead? At that time, this was a LOT of money for me, almost $1,000 in postage! I could barely pay myself at that point and $1,000 was not easy to come by. I bit the bullet and did it, week after week for four weeks before I could see a change.

Four weeks later our weekly income DOUBLED. This is no exaggeration. We doubled our weekly promo and doubled our income. Over the last 10 years, I’ve increased our weekly mailings bit-by-bit and we now mail 120,000 promotion postcards every week. And now I use many, many tools aside from postcards as well.

It may sound too simple to be true, or that I am telling you this just so that you buy my product. Yes, I’d love for you to buy my product, but I really want to get this point across to you: if you market steadily every week, your business will grow.

Yes, you need a good product and you have to deliver it well. But the secret to success is to get the word out…on a LARGE scale…and people will come and buy. Try it for a few months and see what happens. Set aside a weekly marketing budget and spend it each week no matter what. Ours is $50,000 a week. It is an expense that is in addition to marketing team payroll. We NEVER cut it — no matter what.

Best,
Joy