SURAHMIN BUSINESS

Many mistakenly believe that branding only applies to consumer goods because not only does it get the lion’s share of marketing budgets but most of the modern day business literature is dedicated to the successful branding of the Coke’s, Nike’s, Procter and Gamble’s and Google’s of the world. But what about those unrecognizable brands that have launched many consumer brands into mainstream consciousness. Far son, the 19 year-old Coatesville, Pa. based manufacturer of packaging machinery that is used for Procter and Gamble’s successful line of Ferber household odor eliminator. Why should they worry about what purchasing manager’s think about their brand of robotic cell and custom automation systems? It just doesn’t sound all that sexy.

Branding has come along way from the days when the ancient Egyptians tagged their livestock to identify their ownership. It is much more than a logo, a tag line, a brochure or an experience. It represents the perceptions formed by the target audience of a product, service or company. More importantly, it transmits the brand promise, which is the vision of what the brand must accomplish. Some feel that branding unnecessarily adds to the total cost of a product. And although that may be true, considering all the resources that it takes to manufacture a product, can you really afford to not brand? How are customers going to know why they should buy your product and not your competitor’s?

Both types of branding might be essentially different in approach but benefit in the same way. Most business-to-business brands follow a monolithic branding strategy, where all the sub-brands fall under the umbrella of the company brand. It would be too expensive and impractical to build each sub-brand independently. Some benefits that both share include:

• Charging higher prices for your product. You won’t have to sell at low prices or offer discounts.

• You’ll be the talk of the town. Customers will actively seek out a brand that they really want, a marketer’s dream.

• Your brand will crush it (the competitor’s brand that is). A strong brand acts as a barrier to competition, making it harder for people to switch to the competitions.

• Your message strategy will have a snowball effect. People will be more likely to believe your product claims because they already have that warm and fuzzy feeling about your brand.

I’ve been an interested observer of the Kansas City advertising industry for 15 years, both while working in it, and merely an observer of it. I’ve come up with four hard and fast truths about the Kansas City web design industry since getting back into the business recently.

New agencies have to sell their services.
Agencies have to be good at self-promotion. It is imperative that they have staff available to go in front of business owners and sell their services.

People in the Midwest are do-it-yourself creatures. They don’t like to spend a lot of money on something that they’re not sure will show return on investment. They’re perfectly OK with having their nephew throw up a site to promote their company.

The problem is that they don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t understand how search engines work. They don’t do analytics. They don’t know what we know about keywords. They sure don’t understand how to build a site from scratch and how much more effective and flexible it is than throwing up a Word Press site.

The face of the company has to be available to talk up the service. Business owners can’t be expected to just open a phone book or do a Google search, and then sign a contract. Marketing the business itself is vital to the creation a client list.

Most small design companies know what they’re doing.
There are exceptions, of course, but the area seems to be a breeding ground for solid work in advertising. For one thing, two of the best journalism schools in the country are within a quick road trip distance from the city; the University of Missouri and the University of Kansas. There are also fine design programs at schools nearby – Johnson County Community College, UMKC and of course, The Art Institute – come to mind. This makes the area fertile ground for new talent.

There is enough business to go around.
Unlike surrounding midsize cities, Kansas City’s job market is not primarily dependent upon one particular industry, compared to Omaha, Wichita, St. Louis, etc. Small business is a commodity in the metropolis, giving a lot of business to go after.

That’s not to say, however, that there aren’t a lot of corporate entities in Kansas City. Sprint, H & R Block, and Hallmark, just to name a few, all call Kansas City home.

Whether you are using your home office to keep track of the family’s finances or running a small business from home, you need to keep track of your papers and other items in a manner that makes sense, or you will never be able to find things when you need them. Bills may not get paid on time, incurring late charges and other penalties simply because they were buried under other items. There are a number of systems that you can use to make your home office that much more efficient but there are a number of drawbacks to consider with them.

Systems that Require Scanners or Labelers

Some document management systems require that all your paper files be scanned and then formatted to a disk drive for “filing.” There are often many things that cannot be scanned and there are issues with the scanner itself. If you don’t have a scanner, this type filing system would suggest that you buy one. What would happen if your computer system crashes? This document management system may not be ideal if you have scanned everything and you do not have paper documents for back up?

With a scanning document management system, labeling everything does not always work either, especially since it does nothing to get everything organized. Sure, you know that those are all the home bills sitting there in the nicely labeled file folder, but they get moved from place to place because they have no real designated spot and they end up buried once again.

A Hybrid, Better Solution

There is a filing system for offices with a hybrid of traditional filing and computer search ingenuity that has the ability to help you streamline you’re filing system and find your items without having to run out and buy expensive equipment. You don’t scan your items so you can use the same filing system software to organize books and other items that you would not be able to scan. Your hanging files are set up in advance with index numbered labels that you print from the software. These file numbers never change, but the information that is stored in them can. After item names and keywords relating to the items being indexed are entered into the software’s database, and your files are in, the information is now searchable. All you need to do is access your computer and search the database to find exactly what you are looking for in a manner of seconds.

Using a list of family offices as a tool to raise capital is a smart idea, by doing so you can contact more professionals per hour and develop more investor relationships than otherwise possible.

Our team has completed the research and done the math and unless you are making less than $3 an hour then typically using a directory of contact details of HNW or UHNW wealth management firms can save you a lot of time and money.

You could do all of the research yourself and not use a list prepared by someone else but that would be as they say, “penny wise, pound foolish” as you are basically doing administrative work while searching on Google for leads and contact details instead of making phone calls and having in-person meetings. Developing relationships is all about working efficiently and leveraging the limited time you have available to make your firm or fund stand out from your competitors. If you invest the time to really communicate your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) in the right context you can stay ahead of your competitors.

To leverage the power of a FO directory most try to meet face-to-face as often as possible, respect everyone’s time, always send out personalized one-to-one messages via email and never spam, target firms you can easily meet with often, make sure you get a high quality resource in the first place that was built by a team of family office professionals, make sure the list has be en updated within the past 6 months, and follow up with packages in the mail to increase the impact of your marketing.

Let me introduce myself. I’m a young businessman situated in the UK. I started my life writing and producing music at an early age. As with any freelance job the hours you work are long and the money little, even when you hit some considerable success. I decided to take what id made and with the help of other people invest into the restaurant industry.

My partner, a qualified barrister, had previous experience in catering. She was also disillusioned with the legal industry so we decided together to do everything we could to take the plunge.

Two years and a lot of very hard work later, it looks like we’re going to have to close down.

So, why, you might ask, would essentially a failed restaurateur have anything to tell me? Oh boy, I could provide more valuable information than any book you can buy off the shelf right now. In the last two years we have tweaked our businesses so much I could tell you angles of attack that work and some that would be a complete waste of your time that would be invaluable.

We opened a sushi restaurant in a reasonably small but affluent city in the North West of England. Unlike the states, sushi is not on every single corner or Side Street. In the UK sushi is very much only popular in the big cities. For this reason we decided to take on a reasonably small unit and attack the gap in the market.

We were right; the City was perfect for sushi. We were a huge hit. We were busy when other places were not but we generally followed the trend. If everyone was busy so we were. If the biggest restaurant in town were quiet…so were we.

There is no way to convince people to eat if they don’t want to – humans are funny creatures like that. NEVER think you’re going to buck the trend and fill your restaurant at quiet times, you will not. Never think you can put offers on to get people in, you might increase trade a little but you’d be surprised at how hard (virtually impossible) it is to get people in at off peak times. Even if your restaurant is unbearably busy at peak times people will still want to eat at that time. Personally I hold off, I hate the crowds, I hate queues, and this doesn’t apply to the general masses though.