Then you have to understand what you’re doing?

by Stuart Livesey

We had a wonderful time this morning with a local small businessman. He wants to take his small business online … and not just with a brochure site. This guy wants to go the whole 9 yards and sell his products online even while they’re still in a container at sea. He even pointed us to a well-known marketing site here in Australia and told us to build him something like that.

Our time with him was wonderful because this is a guy who understands what it takes to produce a website that sells. He understands that what he is doing is opening a branch of his business online and to do that effectively is going to cost money.

If you were moving your bricks and mortar business to a new location there would be costs involved in fitting out your new premises and getting it set up for your business and there would be ongoing costs as well. It’s the same in the virtual world.

 You want your place in cyberspace to be set up and functional so that you can sell your product and that is going to cost real money.

It would cost real money to move to a new location in the real world and take planning and execution by professionals so why do so many small business people expect a move into cyberspace to cost $50 and  be entrusted to their nephew or some kid in high school?

Obviously it can’t and the guy we talked to today understood that so the session wasn’t about convincing the client that he was going to have to spend money. Instead the session was about listening to the client’s dreams and devising ways of making them happen.

By the time this site is built our client will have a bricks and mortar location and a website and I wouldn’t be surprised if the website didn’t outsell his bricks and mortar location … and that’s saying something because this guy moves a lot of product every single week and quite often his container loads are pre-sold before they even arrive on the docks.