You know, the thing about being an entrepreneur is that you’re the Captain of your own destiny. Or so I thought. When you think about starting your own business, you’re confident in your own skills and your ability to sell those skills to potential clients. You imagine that when you walk in the door and show them your wealth of knowledge, clients will line up for your services and throw giant wads of cash your way. The truth of it is rather cold. It’s a tough economy, and most clients aren’t ready to devote large portions of their marketing budget to an upstart company. You find that you have to put feet to pavement, press the flesh, and send out e-mails to whoever will receive them. You get your foot in the door, and you work with the companies that will have you. After that, you know that you’ll knock their socks off and the process starts over. You find that you’re happy to be working with them, helping them achieve their goals and gaining valuable experience. You relish a client with a challenging business model who poses difficulties you hadn’t imagined. But sometimes, while your newest client might be a rich and rewarding experience, it’s not what you would call the ‘ideal situation.’
Your mind begins to wander and you start to think of your dream stable of clients. Maybe it’s a little local company that you know you help to destroy their competition in rapid succession. Or perhaps is the giant whale of a company who would love the attention of the little guy. Or maybe it’s the site that you’ve loved for years who you just know, that if given the opportunity, you could help them hoist their bottom line.
So while I drove my Prius home, with the fresh air of a New York Spring flooding the cabin of my car through windows that have been firmly rolled up for the mandatory hibernation period of the last 6 months, I thought about who I’d like to work with more than any other site. And with that in mind, I’d like to present to the very first in my ongoing series of dream clients.
W.B. Mason on the Green Monster - Photo taken from Flickr
W.B. Mason – I’m a Red Sox fan, born and raised. I have photos of the Fenway Park strewn throughout my home and office, with the grand plans of one day creating a to-scale replica of the Green Monster in the Still-Exists-Only-In-My-Mind sportsbar in my yet-to-be-finished basement. It would be impossible create a true to live replica without a giant W.B. Mason advertisement flanking the left field side of the Monster.
“Who But” W.B. Mason is one of the nation’s largest office supply retailers. They sponsor Major League Baseball, including my beloved Red Sox and the Yankees as well. They have a seemingly unlimited marketing budget including presenting ‘The Encore’ post game show on the Yankees’ flagship network, Y.E.S. Through various creative television, radio and print advertisement they have done an excellent job in creating brand awareness. Which is why it was shocking to me to see that they have seemingly neglected their web presence.
A search for “Office Supplies” in Google shows WB Mason somewhere in the range of the 3rd or 4th page of results. Not great for a company competing on a national level. Now I know a little bit about this company and I’m certain that the lion’s share of their sales come from regional sales associates who have face to face meetings with clients. They’re an old fashioned company that believes in good service and loyal customers. But why then spend so much on advertising and sponsorship? The answer is simple, to create new clients. This is why they are a dream client. They fit one of my all important criteria for a dream client… the ability to do something great and accomplish tangible results with a high R.O.I. for them. I could work with a client that already has No. 1 positioning in all of their rankings, and while that might pay the bills, it wouldn’t bring me any satisfaction and eventually they’d cease to pay us. Now, a company like W.B. Mason, that’s a company I could do something with.
I think about their annual marketing budget, how ridiculous that might be. And then I think that if they took less than 1/10th of 1 percent of the budget they spend, on say television commercials, and invested that with us I begin to salivate at all that could be accomplished. With a budget in that range, my little firm and I could do wonders, heck we could accomplish seemingly miraculous results. We could devote countless hours to developing and fostering a rich linkbuilding campaign and optimizing the site for exceptional organic rankings. We could tap into creative Social Media outlets to help further the brand recognition through numerous online communities. We would be constructing a new highway to their online retail venue that they hadn’t thought possible, with traffic that would rival the 405. I hear the phrase R.O.I. bantered about every day, but the return on this investment would be exponential. And my little firm and I would have the utter satisfaction of knowing that we had helped a good company tap into a giant market for nothing more than pocket change.
And as proud as they were of us getting the results and themselves for choosing us, well just maybe then they’d get us box seats to Sox/Yankees in late September. I know, I know… I’m dreaming. But it doesn’t hurt to dream does it? And wasn’t that the point of this post?
I’ll be back with my next dream company. “The Little Local Site that could…”
