Rebar Business Builders helps strengthen businesses from the inside out by installing small business marketing systems that systematically attract and retain ideal customers.

Their Managed Marketing programs provide everything a business needs to create, implement, and maintain their marketing plan. It’s like getting an entire marketing department in a box.

The man behind Rebar Business Builders is Bill Brelsford, a CPA turned marketing coach. According to Bill:

Accounting and marketing are seen as opposite ends of a spectrum. Left brain vs. right brain, analytical vs. creative, tie vs. turtleneck.

The question seems to imply that I escaped my accounting box and have to work to blend in, lest I am caught and sent back and forced to wear the green visor.

Technology is an important part of small business marketing. The internet and social media have opened up wonderful and affordable opportunities that in the past may have only been accessible to companies with large budgets. While technology provides great opportunities, it can also present challenges. I see a big part of our job at Rebar is using our experience to help remove, or at least minimize, the road blocks in using techology to market your business.

My goal is to help you create and implement a marketing system that allows you to spend less time chasing business and more time serving profitable customers.

Congratulations to the Rebar team! Check back next week for the next #IamBplans winner!

Earlier this month Bplans.com ran the #IamBplans Twitter contest as part of an effort to get to know the more than 100,000 Bplans members who have joined Bplans.com since the site launched a membership feature three months ago. One of the winners was Mike the Gardener Enterprises.

Business Name: Mike the Gardener Enterprises, LLC
Year Founded: 2009
Number of Employees: <10
Most Popular Product: Seeds of the Month Club
Status: Up and Running 

Mike the Gardener Enterprises was founded by Michael Podlesny, a 3rd generational home vegetable gardener and published author of the book Vegetable Gardening for the Average Person, who has been vegetable gardening himself for nearly 30 years. Mike`s vegetable gardening tips and tricks have been featured in newspapers, magazines and blogs around the world. He has also appeared on ABC and NBC talking about vegetable gardening and the Seeds of the Month Club.

Mike the Gardener has also done an exceptional job of growing a social media following through his businesses’ Facebook page: Vegetable Gardening, which has more than 30,000 followers. Mike took some time out to record a podcast for Bplans sharing his experience and some helpful tips on social media for a business. 

“Bplans.com is the top destination for small-business owners, entrepreneurs, and big-thinkers looking to find the tools to plan, start, and grow a business,” said Bplans founder Tim Berry, who started the site in 1995. “With the new membership component and greater integration with social media platforms, Bplans.com is now connecting small-business owners and entrepreneurs so that they may ask questions, share their experiences and ideas, and grow together as a community.”

According to a combined analysis of poll data and Google Analytics, Bplans.com members span the globe with members in more than 175 countries, or 90 percent of the world, total. The average Bplans member age was 36-50 (34%), and 73% of respondents were male. The most prevalent categorization of business was “start-up” and the average number of workers employed (or planned to be employed) was 1-5. The #IamBplans Twitter contest invited members to tweet their business name or idea for a chance to receive a free lifetime subscription to the business planning service, LivePlan.

Winners selected in a drawing earlier this week were:

Mike the Gardener, New Jersey, USA

Rebar Business Builders, Kansas, USA

It’s All Good Catering, California, USA

Food Vixenista (formerly PansPotsandFriends), California, USA

Photography by Yours Truly, Derbyshire, England

This article is part of our “Business Startup Guide” – a curated list of our articles that will get you up and running in no time!

Market research is a very important step for all startups as, amongst other things, it helps you understand whether your offering is likely to generate demand. Once you have a clear sense of who your customers are, the following represent some additional things to think about:

• Where are these customers?
• How many customers are there?
• What do they require from your product or service?
• How you intend to reach them?

In looking to answer these questions focus on these overall understanding you are trying to develop with relation to your clientele and market:

• Understand where your customers are. If you are planning on opening a coffee shop in Dublin, it is important to recognize that the primary market you’ll serve will largely be a function of the footfall in that area. Given the intense competition, for what is essentially a commodity offering, people do not travel far, so your addressable market will largely be a local one. Hence, in this instance the proposed physical location will be a significant determinant of success. While coffee is a high margin product, the importance of locating in high footfall areas means rental rates per square foot tend to also be very high, so you need to factor this into your plans. Finally, you need to be very clear on your basis for competing as it is likely there will be many other coffee shops where you plan on opening. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Opening in an area with no coffee shops could be a signal that there is insufficient footfall in the area. Looking at a different example; in the context of software development (or simply Internet websites), product managers will often create detailed personas of typical customers which then help inform subsequent decisions made when developing the application. For Irish developers it is important to have a global outlook from day 1. The domestic market is small and does not offer the scale software companies need. Hence you’ll see examples with Irish startups targeting non Irish customers from the start i.e. the social recruitment software player, Zartis.com prices in $’s (despite being based in Cork) so as to market effectively to their largest customer base.
• Estimate the size of the market you can serve. Once you obtain an assessment of the size of the market that you can realistically target, you can then ensure that you have commensurate resources in place. Similarly, if you do intend to seek external investment, the size of the market will be of significant interest to prospective investors and the level of investment they will consider. With a coffee shop, the market size will be a combination of people residing within say a square KM of the premises, married to the footfall or passing traffic. One easy way to get some plausible estimates for the market size is to do some primary market research. For example, you can call in to an existing coffee shop, order a coffee and count the numbers of customers passing through in an hour. You can come back at different times to account for the cyclicality of the business (customer numbers typically peak around rush hour commutes). This data can then extrapolated out to help you assess a range for the likely customer demand on a particular street. With software developers, the market size will clearly depend on the actual product and feature set. Given customers do not need to be locally based, the reach can be far wider (and largely a function of the inherent demand for the offering, the language on the site and the placement in Google’s’ search engine). Again there are a number of tools that can be used to assess likely demand ranges i.e. analysis of keyword competition, number of competitors etc
• Be clear on what your customers require. It is important to recognise the different requirements of different customer groups. Customers of coffee shops at a busy train station may simply want a fast service as a key element of the offering. They will probably consume ‘on the go’ so a simple kiosk may offer the best return. Customers in a coffee shop in the suburbs may want somewhere to spend some time. Some will place a high value on wifi access, others on the ability to fit a buggy in the door. While the core product is the same, the service offering can vary greatly. Having a clear sense of your different customer groups and their requirements will help you meet the needs of the different niches profitably. For software developers, it is best to meet the requirements of the largest niche with a main offering. Once the application is available the key will be to solicit feedback from all early users and to then decide if their varying requirements can be merged into new features which may take the shape of a different product versions. So ‘power users’ may opt for a premium offering with an enhanced feature set over the main version.
• Create a marketing plan to target them effectively. Location is everything for coffee shops, so this will be a key element of your business plan. Once that has been decided, external branding and signage will help you
  communicate the offering to the market. The internal set up of the store will also signal the markets catered for. Listing in local business directories, handing out flyers and placing local newspaper adverts will also help create brand awareness. Social media will also increasingly play a role as the adoption of smart phones continues apace, and users increasingly rely on geo-targeting applications to find services they need while on the move. For software developers it is important to identify the 5-10 keywords that are likely to generate traffic and to optimise the site for those. PPC advertising will also represent a cost effective means to market to prospects. After that, a whole mix of marketing activities can be considered for your marketing plan ranging from print advertising to trade show attendance to social media marketing (blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook activity).

In summary, having a clear sense of who your customers are from day 1 will help ensure you can define your market accurately. You can then market to these customers effectively while also helping you ensure that your cost base is not out of kilter with the likely demand levels. The more you know about your customers the easier it is to meet their needs and to target them with appropriate messaging. Finally, it will also help you understand the wider landscape i.e. who you do not intend to target and also who the main substitute and competitive offerings are.

Bplans is inviting participants to take a brief, five-question poll, then head over to Twitter.com to tweet their business name or idea to @Bplans with the hashtag: #IamBplans for a chance to win a free subscription to business-planning product, LivePlan.

Results of the poll, and winners will be announced early next week.

The newest addition to the Bplans.com site will feature the premier academic program “How to Start a Business” by industry-expert Tim Berry, along with several other specialized courses covering all key elements of starting and running a successful business.

“Whether you are looking to start a business, or build-up an existing business, the courses offered through the Bplans.com School of Business will provide you with the tools and the know-how to succeed,” said

Bplans.com spokesperson Sabrina Parsons. “Bplans.com strives to provide the best, and most comprehensive collection of resources for entrepreneurs and small business owners.”The Bplans.com School of Business will showcase a “course of the week” and allow individuals to select courses that best suit their needs.

The premier course, “How to Start a Business,” is hosted by business planning expert Tim Berry, who walks participants through course topics including: Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Business Financials, Taxes, Business Planning, and more. The course also includes a series of videos, assignments, and downloadable financial worksheets. Normally priced at $129, “How to Start a Business,” will be offered this week for $99.

The “How to Start a Business” course is also available as four individual courses including:

• Introduction to Entrepreneurship – $19• How to Raise Money for your Business – $39
• How to Budget and Forecast for your Business – $49
• How to Market your Business – $39

“These courses will capture the in-classroom, hands-on learning experience of a traditional educational course, coupled with the convenience and specialization of an on-line educational platform,” said Ms. Parsons.
Following the site’s launch, Bplans.com will continue to add new courses and promotions. For more information contact Monique Perry Danziger (Monique@paloalto.com, 541-284-1261).

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Image via Wikipedia

Will the Netflix Brand Ever Truly Recover?

As marketing experts look back at the best and worst of 2011’s branding campaigns, it is likely that Netflix—and a now notorious pair of its endeavors—will be resoundingly branded in the category of very worst.

While it is still a major player in the movie DVD market, Netflix and CEO Reed Hastings can only wonder what would have been had they not opened the floodgates with a pair of disastrous public relations moves last summer. For those looking to start a small business, I recommend that they take note of how Netflix managed to lose a ton of customers in a very short time.

During a recent UBS Media conference in New York City, Hastings was open and to the point in discussing how the company with the famed red logo had essentially screwed up.

Netflix Was Feeling Pretty Good About Itself

According to Hastings, “We did so many difficult things this year that we got overconfident. Our big obsession for the year was streaming, the idea that ‘let’s not die with DVDs.'”

While Netflix did not die in 2011, it sure put itself in a pickle to say the least with a pair of bad moves, resulting in losing more than 1 million paying monthly customers in less than a month

Meantime, Netflix shares have dropped 74% over the past six months, something no company CEO or its investors want to hear. Looking at it from another vantage point, Netflix stock was soaring back in July at nearly $300 per share, while today it sits near the $70 mark.

First the company went public with its idea to charge separate fees for its DVDs-by-mail and streaming video plans. As if that were not bad enough in a challenging economy, the company then followed up with the negative announcement that it was going to rebrand its DVD service to be known as Qwikster. That, in essence, was strike two.

Two Strikes and You’re out?

With those first two strikes, Netflix soon saw customers taking to social media and other venues to express their outrage at the plans, leaving Hastings and other company officials to enter the spin zone, trying to paint a picture that the price hikes were needed, while the new service would be better for customers over time.

As Hastings would eventually come to admit, the company moved too quickly with its plans, not entirely thinking through the potential ramifications.

According to Hastings, streaming is the future, so he and others were not being out of touch when looking to devote the energy and resources to this area of the movie entertainment business. “In streaming, we’re a cable network from a rights standpoint Hastings remarked.” As such, one prediction is that Netflix’s streaming content licensing fees will jump from a mere $180 million in the last year to a sizeable $2 billion over the next 12 months.

What does all of this mean for a company who stood by as companies like Hollywood Video and Blockbuster watched the curtains fall on their productions?

While Netflix moves forward and continues to be part of the online streaming and home DVD movie discussion, other competitors will continue to put pressure on Hastings and his mates.

Another slip up along the way could end up branding Netflix the latest Hollywood Video or Blockbuster; only time will tell.

Dave Thomas, who covers among other items home-based jobs, writes extensively for Business.com, an online resource destination for businesses of all sizes to research, find, and compare the products and services they need to run their businesses.

2. Max Shreck, Batman Returns: Christopher Walken breathes life into the creepy, twisted, hilarious Capitalist Villain Max Shreck in Tim Burton’s dark and moody sequel to the even darker and moodier 1989 film, Batman. The film plays heavily upon themes of wealth and working-class-life, industry and the lack of morality in business. There’s also some stuff in there about Michelle Pfeiffer in a skin-tight black rubber bodysuit.

3. Nakatomi executive Joseph Takag, Die Hard: And you thought YOUR company holiday party was bad. Set on Christmas Eve, this shoot-em-up joyride of a movie teaches us several things not the least of which is “Scheduling a holiday part on Christmas Eve is a jerk move.”

4. Frank Cross, Scrooged: This is technically a reboot of Dickens’ Christmas Carol but I give it honorable mention because it’s my favorite Christmas movie of all time. Bill Murray takes the Ebenezer Scrooge character and plays him as a wise-cracking, heavy-drinking, TV executive who starts out as kind of a regular guy but quickly becomes sucked into the cut-throat world of television broadcasting. The film is both sidesplittingly hilarious and wonderful. The moral: If you see Carol Kane coming at you with a toaster…RUN.

5. Frank Shirley, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation: Christmas bonuses are canceled! You are now all enrolled in the “Jelly of the Month Club.”