These days we all have to consider our product carefully and how we are going to successfully bring it to market.
I had an interview with a potential client the other day. People think they are interviewing me but I am also listening carefully to them, to what they tell me, and what they reveal about their vision. I want to be sure if I take this person on as a client that I feel I will be able to offer them training and coaching likely to bring results. This person I talked to the other day wants to manufacture an organic product that people already readily use and buy. So far… well and good! But she also wants to sell her product ONLY on the internet through individual sales, doesn’t want to do any mass marketing of her product to stores, doesn’t want to spend very much time doing marketing, has a low budget and says she needs to get some money coming in fairly quickly. She has selected a price point 4x the regular marketing price but thinks her product will sell because of the quality difference and because there is one additional aspect to her product that makes it different from her competitor’s. In the end, I sent her to one of my strategic partners because my partner is very good at search engine optimization for websites and could probably help her more than I could. But in my heart, I don’t think this business is a shoe-in for success.
There are many variables you need to consider beside “I want to do this” when you start your business. Pre-Bush administration, when the economy was better, a small business person might have gotten away with marketing a designer product for which there was a great deal of competition, at a higher cost, without putting in much effort at marketing. Maybe. The key there would have been a budget which would pay for a REALLY good website (one Google and Yahoo LOVED!), internet ads galore, someone to do ongoing website optimization for the business, and the hope of viral marketing. But these days, a good solid business with a focused business and marketing plan, where the economic and demographics factors of who and where people are willing to spend money on this product have been taken into consideration, will be more likely to move a business forward… even in a bad economy.
Now, if ever, it is the time to be flexible. Don’t get too fixated on what you ARE willing or are NOT willing to do for your business. For myself, when I find my business in this situation, I try to rouse my interest in the challenge of doing something I don’t normally like to do. But certainly, the moral of this story is to be really careful these days not to limit your options. Give your business more of a chance to emerge from the other side of the recession intact and thriving… as well as, perhaps, experiencing the delight of finding yourself on the other side of a challenge a more capable, flexible person than you were before!
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