When we discuss things like accounting, and legal issues, it seems simple to hire someone who is educated and even licensed to handle these things for us. When you start thinking about things like marketing, advertising and public relations things tend to get confusing and you begin to wonder if you should try to save some money and wing it. As a new business, you will get calls from everyone from the phone book sales reps, newspapers, magazines, coupon books – all promising you ROI if you would turn over your hard earned revenues. Who’s best interest do they really have in mind?

How do you know which is right for your business? How do you know what you will ultimately need? One of the best places to start is to look at your competitors. If you offer a service like HVAC, landscaping, or plumbing, chances are a strong online presence is needed to compete. If you offer services that are available online, chances are that you will do just as well skipping the ads in the phone book, magazines, newspapers are not a good fit.

If you’ve never hired a professional firm before, don’t worry. Ad Agencies aren’t expecting you to have all the answers. They should listen to your point of view, get a feel for your business and its style, understand what colors or themes you have in mind and then be able to put together a professional logo and assorted materials for you to use throughout your business. An approach like that can take the bother out of getting your marketing materials in top form.

Your job as a business owner is to decide what you do best and focus on it. Whenever you spend your valuable time outside of those core tasks ultimately it will cost you business. You need to focus on your core strengths and hire employees or consultants to handle what they specialize in. When you have everyone focused on their core responsibilities and not distracted with other tasks, your business will take off and allow you the freedom to enjoy being an entrepreneur.

Are we actually creating work? Who do you use to create those graphics, websites and advertising?

What a puzzling and slightly disturbing question we thought at first. Then we found out, there are many companies in our area that use freelance designers, web designers, etc – many not even local, to produce their work. These designs are re-packaged under the company’s name and sold as original work.

When we first relocated to Southwest Florida we found it puzzling (and slightly disturbing) of the numerous people either claiming to be marketers or graphic designers. What is surprising is the vast majority of these so-called agencies are nothing more than “General Contractors” farming out the marketing, graphic design and pr and simply marking it up.

It’s a bit of a stretch and a questionable practice since these folks aren’t employees of the company, yet their skills are pitched to potentials as standard offerings, yet the owners of those companies lack the talent to produce the original designs, marketing programs etc. It’s sort of like a general contractor offering services of his subcontractors as his own, with the exception that they do not disclose this to their clients.

At SplashWrench we are all active designers. We work either both independently of collaboratively on projects to completion with no account managers.

www.downtownhouseofpizza.com

The Company makes no attempt to obtain information that personally identifies Users of the Website. The policy of the Company is not to sell, share, or otherwise provide access to information collected from Website Users to any unaffiliated third party.

Category I. Information collected from users who visit our site to read or download information on our pages. We collect and store only the following information:

1.       The domain name through which you gained access to our Website.

2.       The exact time and date that you entered our Website.

3.       The URL of the web page through which you linked to our Website.

Category II. Users who send us e-mail containing personal information or include a request for an e-mail response from The Company to a specific person or entity, such as sending additional information, marketing materials, etc. Any information we obtain and data accumulated is collected as a standard business practice, allowing The Company to identify general demographic characteristics of Users who visit our site. This information includes assessing the number and type of Users accessing various sections of our site, helping us determine what site content and business concepts are working most effectively, or are of most interest to our Users. This information also helps with making changes to the site design and other technical modifications that improve site performance.  The Company uses such information in statistical form to assist in developing business and marketing strategies.

As a security measure for the Company as well as for Users of the Website, we may utilize certain software programs to monitor traffic to our site and within our network. This software enables us to identify unauthorized upload attempts, unauthorized access to our system, and other attempts to cause damage to our system.