Your Day Job

February 17, 2010 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off 

The question I get asked most is: “how do I start/grow my business and still make money to pay my bills?”. Unfortunately, its rarely asked in those simple terms. I hear the craziest stuff including cash flow management, leveraging vendors and long-term exit strategies…but that’s another post.

My answer to the question is simple:
1) Ignore everything you read on this topic because everyone’s situation and circumstance are unique.
2) The only thing you must do is refuse to give away your creative authority.

  • You have creative authority in form: your ideas, solutions and content. So get the credit.
  • You have creative authority in action: your autonomy. So self-direct.
  • You have creative authority in intention: your beliefs. So be mindful and aware.

Your refusal must be absolute so be vigilant for doubts or rationalizations.

Your refusal might result in a so-called “day job” wildly different from your business. I’ve done that. It was good.

Filed under: Creativity, Lifestyle Trends, career, encore career, intention, solo psf
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Merchandising Your Professional Service Practice

August 19, 2009 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off 

I read Creating You & Company in 1999 when I was planning to leave my last real job and start my professional service firm as a solopreneur. Picture 38

It was a great influence because it validated my sense that “having a job” was a worn out concept, signally that huge, disruptive shifts would take place in the world of work. It also supported my business model idea which was to offer services as products, which I call programs.

Recently, its occurred to me that professional service “products” need merchandising just like any other product. I know quite a bit about merchandising because I work part-time doing garden center merchandising as the liaison between the grower and the big-box stores.

Three fundamental merchandising concepts in garden center merchandising can be effectively applied to professional services:

Display – One of the first things I do when I take on a new store is to scan what product is out front in the main aisles and benches, and to look at what product is in the lot and in the back of the carts. Typically, there’s old stale product where people are shopping and fresh new product languishing where nobody can see it. Are you displaying your best solutions, ideas and content where your clients are are looking and shopping?

Consolidation – In the garden centers, I’m continually maximizing shelf space while at the same time grouping products for maximum appeal. The more I do it, the greater the capacity I develop for quickly scoping out very large areas, visualizing the end result, and figuring out the most efficient way to get that result. What are your opportunities to continually consolidate and group together your solutions, ideas and content so they “pop” when your clients are looking and shopping?

Culling – I’m surprised how difficult it is for people to get rid of product that’s no good. I think its mainly because they can’t make culling decisions by putting themselves in the customers’ shoes and asking themselves: “will I buy this?” Its a no excuses point of view. Prolific author Stephen King is a great culler and strongly advises that aspiring writers pay strict attention to culling:

..kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings. – Stephen King

Are you hanging on to boring or outdated solutions, ideas and content that are spoiling the overall appeal, and are holding back the growth and momentum of your professional service practice?

If these fundamental merchandising concepts make sense, and the questions hold some truth for you, this may be a good time to put aside the latest and greatest tools and technologies and merchandise your professional services. Inspiration is always available at your local garden center. If you need a good system, I love WordPress.

Filed under: Professional Services, content-marketing, creative habit, design, disruption, going solo, innovation, job shift, self-expression, self-management, simplicity, solo psf, writing
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Apparel

July 2, 2009 by marywy2 · Comments Off 

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Corporate Wear

Corporate Wear has become increasingly important to personal, team and business brand identity. The opportunities for growth in the highly fragmented industry are make it an attractive segment for online retailers. The challenge for them in the corporate wear space is how to:

  • Differentiate themselves in a rapidly growing and highly fragmented market.
  • Provide a compelling and convenient online user experience.
  • Deepen customer knowledge and relationship to identify unmet needs and find opportunities to strengthen a service culture.
  • Implement the required back and front-end systems to automate, track and measure the numerous corporate wear touch-points in the supply, fulfillment and service/support chains.

Why

  • We don’t know or understand enough about our corporate-wear customers to keep up with the influx and the pipeline.
  • We think customers are confused when they land because there’s a disconnect between what they expect and what they get.
  • We make incremental improvements to our web site and online storefront but do not have the in-house resources or system capabilities to compete with the higher-end corporate wear retailers.
  • We need to build up our customer database to meet our marketing objectives but don’t have a process to build the requisite permission assets.

What

Differentiation & Positioning

  • Develop short (3-4 word) tag lines and statements that make an emotional connection between customers and the company, categories, brands and products.
  • Segment the market for new niche opportunities.

Inbound Marketing

  • Develop calls to action (sign-ups) throughout the site giving increasingly empowered customers a reason, as well as incentives, to share and provide private data.
  • Develop an integrated social media plan to test the feasibility and ROI of social tools including: blog, micro-blog, and inclusion in major social media sites. Benefits include content-marketing experience, inbound and outbound links, interacting in real-time with customers and monitoring and managing reputation.
  • Provide community management services including brand monitoring, incentive programs and content creation.
  • Design a “Help Us Improve” survey an other invitations to participate throughout the web site.

Outbound Marketing

  • Identify customers who’ve given permission and implement methods to increase that database through invitation.
  • Develop an email campaign: design, content plan and schedule.
  • Analyze the CPC and CPM of a display advertising campaigns.

Process improvement

  • Identify all the the touch-points for the corporate-wear customer. Identify the bottlenecks and estimate their cost.
  • Identify opportunities to address and prevent bottlenecks through the corporate-wear user online shopping experience.

User Experience = Merchandising = Content

  • Add appropriate “white space” between images and content sections giving every page a focal point to orient the customer.
  • Perform a site-wide quality check in all major browsers to find, document and correct errors.
  • Evaluate and recommend product review and customer rating tools.
  • Test site-wide navigation architecture for logic and optimal experience.
  • Improve landing page layout and content to give customers a clear path to getting needs uniquely met.

Content

  • Re-write, style and re-order text content to improve merchandising, user-experience and SEO.
  • Improve typography site-wide through css: font, size, character and line spacing.
  • Through customer interactions, identify unmet needs and new opportunities to serve and delight corporate wear customers.
  • Develop 3 corporate wear customer personas and begin blogging on topics that appeal to each of those..

Measurement

  • Customer database growth from 35k to 100k.
  • Reduce bounce rate to at or below industry benchmark
  • Decrease ratio [new visits : total visits] by increasing loyalty (repeat visits)
  • Increase conversions

ERP

  • Determine existing system(s) constraints on short and long-term growth.
  • Evaluate vendor solutions and ROI.
  • Determine how to facilitate end-user change issues to insure customer service continuity.

Technology Partnership

GENEVA Group Inc. – ERP Systems and Solutions for Corporate Wear
Microsof NAV & Pebblestone Software
Pebblestone Fashion is the premier Microsoft ERP solution for companies that produce or distribute:

  • Apparel
  • Footwear
  • Accessories
  • Sporting Goods

Pebblestone Fashion is designed with powerful functionality for companies that must manage styles, colors, sizes, fabrics, designs, dimensions and more.

Pebblestone Fashion collects and presents key information through the entire product life cycle. The effectiveness if this partnership is a shared belief that a leadership approach to client services is essential to achieving success metrics and a strong ROI. This approach is based on deep understanding of the impact of change on growth objectives, business processes and corporate culture.

QuestionsContact

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WordPress

June 16, 2009 by marywy2 · Comments Off 

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If you’ve landed here you probably have some understanding of WordPress and its capabilities. Its mostly considered a blogging and CMS system. My WordPress strategy is to integrate those with products or services for sale and broad and deep related content, links, merchandising and shopping functionality.

I specialize in helping Solo Professional Service Providers use WordPress as the integral system driving a radically different business model around creativity, credit, cloud.

Solo Professionals And Word Press | A Model That Matters
View more presentations from mwyn.

I’m different from most WordPress web site creators in that I provide only minimal design customization. I want clients’ creative output and their products, services to “be” the design that’s integrated with their differentiation strategy, site structure and UI, SEO, global micro-brand and social business direction.

Some consider this level of breadth and depth a rarity for small business. I think its increasingly becoming the norm and that the best (actually the only) way to develop your system is to “have everything under one roof”. To that end I use only one “premium” theme developer and one hosting company.

What

  • A privately hosted, turnkey, premium theme WordPress system.
  • Branding, domain and marketing tag line integration.
  • Content creation and editing services.
  • WordPress plugin functionality.
  • Social media and SEO marketing plan.
  • Client training for content access and page and post creation.

Why?

  • Although I run a small business I’ve always thought it was better to have separate web sites, blogs, ecommerce, hosting and domain companies. But its confusing to customers, hard to manage and not good for SEO or social media.
  • I want a professional site but don’t have the time or inclination to learn new web technologies.
  • I’m in transition and a need a web site fast – one that looks professional and that can scale for my content and functionality needs within my small business budget.
  • I need help defining what I want and need, reviewing and editing my content, and finding my message, voice, style and tone.

Corresponding RedShift Program: Content

Questions: Contact Me

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