We had another one of our monthly get-togethers on January 28th. Twenty or so clients came, with food and stories to share. Chris Bucci, a loan client and the creator of the ubiquitous Heart in Oregon stickers, dropped in and talked about his experience starting up a business, and what it means for him to be an entrepreneur.
Chris Bucci
We also had the lovely music of Autopilot is for Lovers, whose lead singer Arienna Hatfield is also a Mercy Corps Northwest client.
With all this talent, it’ll be easy to keep these events going, and we’re looking forward to the next one.
Budgets & Benefits
On January 16th, we had our first Saturday morning seminar with Suzanne Feucht, accounting coach and trainer, to talk about basic financial tools. There were lots of participants and even more questions, so it was hard to get through everything Suzanne had on the agenda. They appreciated that she emphasized the basics: using the right accounting software, keeping track of paperwork, etc. The big message was they wanted more accounting and financial seminars in the future.
January 21st, Susan Rich joined us for a new addition to her Write it Rich! series. This presentation was on benefit-based copy, and how small businesses can think about what their product or service provides, and use that message to market themselves. We got to look at (and laugh about) some vintage ads, and point out where the key message was and what we were being sold… not a product, but a benefit. There was a lot of great discussion, so much so that we went a little over time. But no one seemed to mind too much – they were busy practicing their benefit-based copy and writing up their own blurbs and ads.
Upcoming Seminars
Happy new year!
In January, we’ve got:
Saturday, January 16th, 10am-noon
Basic Financial Tools for Small Business Owners
Some of you have said weekday evening seminars are difficult for you, so we’re trying out our first Saturday seminar. Suzanne Feucht, an accounting coach and trainer at SF Business Services, will be doing a roundtable discussion of eight of the most relevant financial topics for micro-entrepreneurs, including:
- bookkeeping challenges for different entities
- which software to choose for recordkeeping
- inventory challenges
- and more
Thursday, January 21st, 6-8 p.m.
Write it Rich! Benefit-Based Copy: How to Tell Your Story, and Build Your Business
Susan Rich joins us for a new addition to her Write it Rich! series. How would your potential customer benefit from contacting your business, and how do you get that message across when describing your product or service? In this interactive workshop, learn how to appeal to your target audience and more effectively present your business.
Sign-up information here
Peet’s Lake Oswego Celebrates the Holidays with MCNW
Find yourself in the Lake Oswego area anytime soon? If you stop by the Peet’s there, you can make a donation to Mercy Corps Northwest as you buy your coffee:
A Second Success With Susan Rich
On Monday night’s seminar, Write it Rich! with Susan Rich we all received many helpful pointers about how to we can write better on the internet.
First among them… write a good headline. In fact, Susan recommended writing out different versions of your headline 25-30 times. At this point, eyebrows were raised and heads were shaken in our packed classroom. But wait! Susan said. By reworking that line over and over, you’re forced to really grapple with what your message is, and to get to its essence in the headline. And then, once you’ve spent all that time on the headline, the rest of the writing is easy, because you’ve already gone through the different points you wanted to cover and figured out what message you want to focus on.
All of Susan’s tips were like that: focused, and very useful for small business owners wanting to get their message across to a specific audience and get some sort of concrete result it, whether it’s a sale or a new contact. It’s the second time she’s done this particular presentation with us, and if anything, it was more popular this time around:
“I found the information she presented to be purposeful and clear. The talk was engaging and affordable”
“It was all good – great!”
Next month she’ll be doing a presentation with us on benefit-based copywriting…. it’s gonna be good!
Holiday Social & Potluck
December 10th we had a holiday potluck with our clients, new and old.
We had fabulous music from Kyrstyn Pixton, which set the warm & welcoming tone for the evening.
And some decorations (including a blazing fireplace!)
But guests brought their goods, which looked even better…
Photographs by Peter Blanchard and Grace Weston, cards and pendants from Robin Urton
Hats by Robin Epstein/Bunny Huggins, JonnySport bags by Rachel Elizabeth, naturopathic
kits by Julie Brush
Hats by Mary Kelly, magnets by Mary Hawley, accessories by Adrienne Hatkin (she’s also in a band!)
And paintings by Michelle Purvis – I didn’t grab a picture, so I borrowed one from your website!
Everyone brought and enjoyed lots tasty food – cookies, fruit, cheese and crackers, pasta, fried yam tortilla deliciousness (probably not the official name)
We all got to chat and commiserate
It ended up being quite a good time.
Social Media With Taylor Ellwood
I’ve committed a rookie social media mistake by not keeping up on updating. It’s no good if lack of activity on a blog would seem to imply lack of activity within in an organization. But of course, that’s not actually the case!
Last Tuesday, December 1st, we had an hour-long social media class with Taylor Ellwood. He went over some of the reasons businesses should be on social media, and also went into some of the demographic details of who’s on social networking sites to remind people that their marketing should be focused on their target market, and if their customers aren’t likely to be on social media, then it may not be worthwhile. His most important message, as emphasized by our other social media presenters, Peter Korchnak and Benjamin Tomkins, is that time and consistency are the investments you need to make when starting a social media presence. He pointed participants to some practical resources to help make them manage their presence online, like ping.fm
Our class on the 7th with Peter Korchak had to be postponed, but Peter hopes to be back talking about green marketing in February.
Tomorrow night we’re doing a potluck gathering with clients. People are bringing all kinds of treats to eat (fruit, banana bread, quinoa, etc), and they’re also going to be vending some of their wares. We have a guest musician, Kyrstyn Pixton, who’ll be playing some nice music, and hopefully a nice warm holiday atmosphere going on. We’re excited!
And as for January classes… we’ve got a lot in the works. We just need to set some dates and we’ll be on a roll.
Your Passions, Your Talents
Last night we had a very small session focused on refining business plans. We opened up this class just to our most recent Foundations business class participants, who finished up their six-week course last week. Six of them sent in what they had as business plans, and our presenter, Yolanda Karp, read them over and came to the session with some pointed suggestions to help them move forward. She also worked with all of them on how to clearly articulate who they are, what their business is, and why people should buy their products/invest in them/care what they do.
I grilled the participants afterwards about whether they liked this session, because this sort of follow-up is something we want to do more of. As we get more and more people coming to us and interested in our services, we have to figure out some ways to better serve them, even as our staff capacity stays the same. One way is using the skills of volunteers like Yolanda, who participants said was “a very good facilitator“. They said the session was “very very helpful for encouragement, ideas, and support“, they “got lots of good feedback” and they really appreciated “the personalized aspect of this business plan review“. Another idea we’re ruminating on is to do some sort of peer mentoring session, where clients who’ve been through the Foundations process and are further along in their business experience can help people coming in. All six of the students last night said they’d be willing to act as mentors at some point in the future.
So, we’ve got many exciting ideas for our training sessions in the future. We’re going to continue with our seminar program, inviting our local talent to share their knowledge and skills, but also encouraging our clients to share all the knowledge and experience they already know and have. Hopefully we’ll be able to reach even more people in the Portland small business community, and serve them even better.
Selling Shoestrings
I got an email the other day from someone who wasn’t able to make it to Peter’s Marketing on a Shoestring class Monday night, but wanted to know if there was some sort of summary or resource online.
I tried, but it’s kind hard to summarize what Peter did. He said he’s taught this class before and that it always ended up being a laundry list of techniques that you could have googled “shoestring marketing” and found yourself. So this class he decided to make more discussion based, and started out by having everyone go around and introduce themselves and their businesses and any experiences they’d had with shoestring marketing. People came up with things like social media, networking with peer businesses, referrals, doing email newsletters with coupons and raffles, etc. And so they elaborated more on some of those ideas.
Then he focused on the second half about the main part of your marketing being building relationships and focusing on people. And so, maintaining good customer service and providing a good product so that that one satisfied customer will go out and recommend you to more. He suggested doing events that weren’t necessarily focused on selling your product, but that got interested people together and allowed you to demonstrate your quality or your expertise in a fun and memorable way. He emphasized in this relationship-building part that it was important not to pester and bombard people with your sale, but to remember that people want to do business with people they like.
Well, that was the best I could do in the way of summary. It was great to have such a discussion-focused class, even though it made it difficult to condense into any sort of handout! But one exciting development is that we’ve got a group who’s going to help us by filming our classes and trainings so that we can get them up on our website and make them more accessible – so next time (or more accurately, starting with Susan Rich’s seminar on December 14th) I can offer people like him something more concrete!
Mercy Corps Northwest helps low-income individuals in Oregon and Washington to improve their lives through small business and self-employment.
To find out about seminars, check out: http://www.mercycorpsnw.org/what-we-do/seminars/
