You know how sometimes, you look at your Hi-Fi system that you have had for many years – Old Faithful, and you think – ‘Well – time I bought the latest gizmos and replaced the whole lot with one that works’.

I remember the first system I bought, and where I bought it from. It was from a little store in town, where the manager was really helpful and friendly, not at all pushy, and he even offered to come round that same evening and help me sort out all this new spaghetti wiring that seemed to spring up from everywhere.

Because of this helpfulness, over the years I went back to this store on many occasions, but with the passing of time, even me, with my loyalty, increasingly turned to the internet for my purchases.

Something inside me though, made me revisit this store – especially after seeing their pathetic attempt at a web site. You know the sort. It says something like ‘Hello, welcome to my web site, our company has been here for 35 years, we sell this and this and this’ all beneath a great big LOGO.

Now logo’s are very impressive to the owners, but usually mean diddlysquat to any passing surfers.

Also, they seemed to be spending a lot of money on equally bland adverts in the local papers – you know, prime front page bottom right position – and total ignorable.

When I got to the store, I spoke to the manager (his name was Andy by the way), and asked him why he had never updated his web site. “Oh, we don’t sell on the Internet” was his reply, “we can’t compete on price on the web, so we get all of our business from local advertising”. The fact that his site, crappy as it was, was Number 1 in a Google search for business of that sort in his area was totally lost on him!

Then I asked him which advert, which paper, pulled in the most leads. His response was also so typical of many a small business owner. “Well, as long as we get 20 or 30 leads a week, we don’t worry about where they came from” he said.

When asked how he handled the leads, he said that they just employ a girl to follow up by phone, give it two attempts, then moved on to the next lead. He also admitted that they don’t keep an up-to-date on-line database, and don’t keep email addresses of their old customers (including me!). Now, to me that all sounded like a real waste of time, opportunity and money.

Having been involved in copyrighting for some time, and now selling my own Direct Marketing systems for small businesses, this to me seemed like a challenge. Out of a fondness for his previous good service to me, I offered my services to give his business a complete marketing makeover totally free of change ( except of course for the fact that I would want a glowing testimonial afterwards – I am after all, a Marketer).

Just digging around in their business, I discovered so many interesting facts about this company, which could have added such tremendous added-value potential to their customers and prospects alike I couldn’t believe it. I knew that had these facts been pulled out in front of surfers, or indeed their existing customer and prospect lists, the hits would have shot through the roof.

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