Small Business Can

...and while we're on the subject I posted a video about "Should Small Companies Compete With Big Companies For Tenders?"

hey the still looks like I'm screaming! (I'm not)

Hi Ciaran, the fund is the Labour Market Activation initiative (LMA) and the Enterprise Evolution Programme (EEP) is funded under this initiative (as are the other approved training schemes). The LMA is designed to upskill and re-train people who are unemployed for 3 months or more. Participants on these couses can retain their social welfare benefits while on the training.

The EEP is specifically designed to up-skill graduates and experienced industry professionals in Enterprise Innovation with a view to generating new innovative business ideas though teams of graduates and industry professionals working together. Check out our SBC group or www.enterpriseevolution.ie

Declan.

We have recently launched our online shop : www.clean-it.ie. We offer great products at great prices, We supply products to nursing homes, schools, B&B's, hotels, pubs restaurants, bakeries, valeting, and many many more. We opened a shop in Tralee Co. Kerry this time last year and we have been asked for online purchasing for a while, we now supply customers nationwide. Thank you to our customers for their support while we got this off the ground..

Hi Mary,

have you got a continuity plan or do members pay as they go? Try and introduce a tiered continuity plan (Gold, Platinum and Diamond membership) with additional benefits for each. What about activities outside the gym, like a shopping expedition for sports gear? hook up with someone like up and running in Belfast and arrange complementary gait analysis for everyone. Tell the shop, "hey I'm going to bring 20 women to this shop on friday night. Can you stay open especially, give them the red-carpet treatment and some gait analysis. Then sell the hell out of them and could I have 15% commission for bringing them there."
Then bring all your ladies out to choose some nice clothes and go shopping for normal stuff together, so they can really feel the benefits of belonging to your gym. They'll feel good and they'll be appreciative.

Who'd not like to do something like that?

I know it takes some guts to raise prices, but surely you offer more to people than simply the lowest price? And if you're not the lowest price then ask yourself: why do people come to you at all? They come because the benefit to them is worth more to them than the money they spend.

People tend to be pretty elastic about price, especially where there is significant value or cachet. For example, a women-only gym attracts people for a reason other than price. My recommendation is to schmooze your clients massively; really care for them, make nothing too much trouble. They'll want to stay and people always find the money for what they want.

Price is important yes, but you can see from your own business that it isn't all about price. It's about value. And you can increase the value without (necessarily) a commensurate increase in base costs.

As I say in tendering, "Live by Price, Die by Price". Someone is always willing to undercut you, so compete on an entirely different set of rules and comparitors.

And raise 'em cowboy!

www.winningtenderswithoutconsultants.com/

Hi Karl,

Thanks for the encouragement!

The basis of the code for the site allows for the same process across any industry, but the myriad of different questions is just too large, and just leaving a "Enter your description here" field is too vanilla for any one particular market; if it were to be held on one site.

Maybe there are w hole series of plazas out there; Last week I saw a site which allowed for buying & selling Scottish highland sheep!! The mind boggles!!! Sheep Plaza, Engineer Plaza, ......

Another particluar aspect of this is the geography. There are numerous sites which offer "outsource" programmers- where the lowest cost could just as easily be Romaina or India. I Think this application of the "Compare the Market" concept should work well.

Regards

brendan

type "write tenders ireland" into google and my videos come first out of 459,000 results. "write tenders uk" still gets first page of 3,810,000 results.

As others have said SEO's a bit of a science.

That's one of the reasons why I like to use video. And why I signed up to the amazing Traffic Geyser

It is a complete system for broadcasting your videos out to virtually every video hosting site on the web. Google then auto-transcribes them and picks out keywords. Mike Koenigs - the guy who invented Traffic Geyser, also has a ton of how-to videos to get the best out of it and frankly, there's so much on there that I haven't got through it all yet.

Not only does it provide the technology, they also coach you through the marketing plan and psychology you need to apply. It's working extremely well for me at the minute, particularly as I am trying to reach a very fragmented and un-obvious market. I can't wait to try it out on a mass-market, as I believe it absolutely destroys.

here's the link again anyway - I think it's the business.