Halfway There

          This week we covered materials focusing on the customer and the customer experience. Jet Blue, for example, stopped serving food to people because they couldn't win in the customer satisfaction department. Zappos focuses heavily on the culture of the company. In fact, they offer their trainees full pay plus $2000 if they quit. Their logic for doing this is that they only want the people who value their work and actually want to be there, instead of those who are just there for a paycheck. They said that it really helped empower the employees which then resulted in better customer service ratings. They want those same customer service ratings on the whole company, so everybody from the warehouse to the CEO takes the same training's as the customer service employees.

         The $100 Challenge - I call my business Local Retail Inc. We do small-scale media promotions; everything from the photo shoot to the launch and what we call media blasts. (Don't know if I've explained that before). This week I've contacted the photographer and she is really excited about helping me out. My first target store is going to be a place called Youngster's, which sells toddler's clothing. I've got a few ideas for kids as models which I will be contacting as soon as I go meet with the owner and talk about my company and what we can do for them. Right now there are transitioning to a new location.

        This is usually the part where nerves take over - but I'm determined to make it happen.

End of Week #5

         There isn't a lot to report on for the $100 Challenge this week. I still have the media audience access available that I wanted and I was supposed to contact the businesses this week; but things got really swamped.

          One part of the lesson this week was on suggestive selling. Having been in retail for about four years, reading about it was like reading about personal habits. The way we phrase sentences and how we present product makes all the difference in the world to our customers. Plus, it's everywhere - restaurants, retail, online bundling purchases, carpet cleaning, grocery stores, home decor - they all present their projects to maximize purchases. I had an experience one time when I was working at a major department store and I told my manager, "I don't want to push things on them if they are just going to bring it back." Her response to me was enlightening; she said, "Don't worry about the store losing sales by having customers return items. Our job is to help them take it home. That's more than half the battle." Not only did it show better numbers for the sales day, but even if the customer returns the item - it's another opportunity because they are already back in the store.

         We also practiced our elevator speeches and discussed improvements on them with our classmates. At first I thought the directness of the speech would come naturally, but it took me several tries to get one that I liked and felt like I could present well.

Lesson 4 Funding the Business

      This week I was able to reach key people in the community that gave me permission to use their social media platforms for my campaigns. This was a big step for the business for two reasons. The first is that I needed these people in order to get the targeted viewership that I wanted. Second, if I didn't get them, I would have to revamp my media blast. The next step will be to contact the retail businesses, meet with them, and see if I can get any to jump on board with me. One minor set-back happened; one of the businesses that I was targeting is going out of business. That happens somewhat frequently in our little valley. 

            In our module this week we talked about financing our new ventures. For the $100 challenge our max to invest was $20, so I just decided to invest it myself and then pay myself back at the end. This made me wonder about getting a larger amount though; would I have the courage to ask for what I really needed? Thankfully, most venture capitalists, angel investors, or business loan places make you work for their money by presenting a well-prepared business plan and whatnot. The class was posed a question about how to start a business on virtually nothing. We were given some great examples of how some companies did it by surviving on the bare minimums until they had the cash to get started and grow.