Saturday, February 18, 2006

Radio Advertising for SMB Consultants

For just over three months now my company has been doing Radio Advertising. For most SMB consultants, that's very odd territory.

I've spelled out my inspiration (Brad Smith, Microsoft's 2005 Sales and Marketing Partner of the Year for Small Business Solutions), strategy, implementation, and results on my I5PC.com web site. See http://www.i5pc.com/Consider/Radio.htm.

At that site you can also download the radio ads that I've aired so far. At the top of the list is the radio ad I use for to push the Small Business Specialist certification. If you're a MS SBSC, this is one way you can use your new designation to market yourself.

As always, I welcome your feedback.

Saturday, February 11, 2006

Catch-Up 1

I thought I'd post a few events from the beginning of the year to "set the scene."

-- KPEnterprises (Sacramento's Premier Microsoft Small Business Specialist) started selling "Managed Services" in November. Or at least we started calling it that. We've been using service agreements for ten years and selling remote monitoring services for six.

-- January ended with a lot of activity. Harry Brelsford (www.smbnation.com) invited me to help with his "Birds of a Feather" tour in Atlanta and with teaching the Atlanta Microsoft Hands-on-lab for the Small Business Specialist certification (primarily the 70-282 exam).

-- Then Jan. 30-31 I taught the Hands-on-lab in Bellevue, WA.

-- Flew to Los Angeles on Feb 1 and met with Jim Locke, Jim Sterling, and Dave Seibert of SMBTN.org. They brought me up to speed on their conference coming up March 30-April 1.

-- Taught the Hands-on-lab in L.A. on Feb. 2-3.

I gotta say: I don't know how Harry survives all this travel! It's great to meet with local user group leaders and other folks around the country. But spending whole days travelling . . . wears me out!

Off we go into the wild blue blog yonder!

Well . . . Off we go into the wild blue blog yonder!

I've been so busy this year, and it's only the middle of February! I've been running around so much, trying to connect with people and coordinate things.

I considered creating a mailing list, but decided I needed something less formal. I don't want to produce one more thing that has to be out on a schedule! So the blog thing seemed to make sense.

As it says in the description, my goal here is to make this a low volume resource. I want to throw out some ideas on the business side of being a small business consultant. No guru here, but I run a five-person shop and I've been making money doing this full time for almost eleven years. So I do things right.

I also publish a monthly newsletter called Relax Focus Succeed(R). You can see that, along with more than fifty articles at http://www.relaxfocussucceed.com.

Please let me know if you find anything useful here.