Helping my Dad's business

timbers85

Hi All,

My Dad is self employed and has his own little business. It is very old fashioned and has never advertised as has always kept him ticking over.

As credit crunch has severly affected his new sales, I am looking to increase these for him and will get paid commision from him.

I have started a little free website, which am working on at the moment.

Have listed a special offer on gum tree, but am not getting much success.

Any ideas of what else i might try? It is fairly high value item, and health related, and he offers supply and install services.

Anyone, who has any experience with online sales or small business, would love some advice.

Thanks in advance

zrblue

Hi,

what product is he selling / installing?

timbers85

It is a water purifier, installed under sink, he then offers the service and supply of filters.

Didnt want to mention too much detail, as didnt want anyone think was trying for free plug!

Any thoughts? thanks

Horace

Maybe joining his local chamber of commerce might help - loads of networking opportunities and he may well find some new customers. Has he thought about diversifying too as that will increase revenue and the customer base.

timbers85

Thanks Horace, I said exactly that to him and he is suck in his ways! Am researching possible opportunities for diversifying at the moment, then we will have some cross selling maybe to do.

Chamber of Commerce a brill idea, will look into it now.

zrblue

Does your dad manufacture the purifier? or filter?

Does he have exclusive sales rights from the manufacturer within a certain area?

Or is it simply buying and selling on with and installation service?

timbers85

Hi

No he does not, is case of buying, installing and service.

He has customers all over country, but know there are a couple of other small companies doing similar with similar products

zrblue

timbers85 wrote: »

Hi

No he does not, is case of buying, installing and service.

He has customers all over country, but know there are a couple of other small companies doing similar with similar products

one business im involved with sells and supplies solar panels for swimming pools and we found selling them to the general public to be quite slow and hard going, and selling large quantities to pool stores who would then sell them on was also hard going as they didnt want to take the risk.

So, the best solution we came up with was we approached pool shops, plumbers merchants etc, and struck up a deal where by the shop stocks our solar panels, but doesnt pay for them. They take 50 solar panels each, just as if they had purchased them, they then sell them over a period of time and we bill the shop only when one of our panels sells...

The plus side for us is that we were able to get rid of our warehouse where we stocked hundreds of these panels. Our sales have gone up remarkably and we haven't had any problems of any sort. we've now got this system set up in the US (Florida), the UK and Greece.

Maybe you could incorporate something along those lines.

timbers85

Hey

Thats an awesome idea, will do some research into potential groups of people who might be interested in doing the same thing for us.

thanks very much for that.

sonneti

Who is the target market? Old people/Young/Poor/Rich/Business/Residential

Where is the target market?

Does your target audience know they need this product?

Could suffers of certain diseases benefit from using your product?

Where can you advertise so your target market will see your product? Could be web/paper/flyer/tv/radio/mail

Does your business do anything that others don't? Have you told your potential customers?

I notice you built a website so go to adwords.google.com/select/KeywordTool & type in the keywords that people would search for when they want to buy your product. Are you listed in the front page? If you aren't you need to optimize your website for the search engines, that involves formatting your website a certain way (known as onsite SEO) & build hundreds of links to your website using your keywords as anchor text (offsite SEO)

You can check out w3optimizer.com and see if your website is formatted properly to rank well.

Just some ideas for you, best idea is to look up which marketing books are good on the internet & then buy them or go to the library..

g'luck!

timbers85

Thanks Sonneti, and what an amazing first post!

You have given me loads to look at, am doing the key words check at the moment.

The product is ideal for those following Gerson Therapy for Cancer, so am in process of compiling a list of groups and organisations to contact.

Will certainly be referring back to your post for a couple of days!

Thank you so much!