Hey there, thanks for stopping by. So if you’re watching this

video here’s what I know about you. You’re an Upper Valley

business owner, and you’ve got a vision of what your business

could be.

And you’ve got a vision of like in the future how your

business is gonna serve your clients. You’ve got a vision of what the business itself looks

like, like how many team members you have,

what kind of office space you do or don’t have, you got all that, you can see it… in your

mind and you also have a vision, of how it’s going to

change your lifestyle, o’ the impact it’s going to have on

you,

and on your family and what you’re able to do. And… then, you know, you wake up and

you go to work. And you get to work and all of a sudden you

run into challenges, like, there’s this thing called ‘I’ve gotta run

my business’,

and all the time that you have just like, goes away. You’ve got to go get leads, you’ve got to

figure out how to turn ‘em into clients, you’ve got to deliver for

your clients, you’ve got to manage the team,

you’ve got all these things that are going on and you get to the

end of the day and it’s like ‘wait a minute. I-I thought that I got like 2 more hours to make this happen. Anddd on top of

that,

you’ve got this kind of looming challenge that you’re aware of

which is, ‘I’ve got all this technology out there and every day I hear about a new piece of technology, that’s gonna make

my business super easy,

and the problem is that it’s all overwhelming, like I don’t

really know how to make sense of, what technology I should

use for this, or for that, and so, and I don’t walk around telling

people that as a business owner,

but inside, there’s this element of, dude, I don’t really know how to

make sense of all of that stuff. And, but I know I have to, right.

So, my name’s Sam Putnam, and, what I do, is I help Upper Valley

business owners build predictability into their business.

So, what does that mean. Well, the place to start is the process of how you take leads, how you

turn them into clients, and then how you deliver for those

clients. And, if we’re being honest,

what might be more accurate is the lack of process that you have in your business about

how that happens. So if we’re really going to make any

progress towards keeping your business in front of people and helping you make sense of all

this technology,

like, we’ve got to start, with the process of how you get leads

and turn them into clients. And, you know, the ideal

outcome here, is look, oh yeah, I’ve got this process dialed in, I

know exactly how my leads turn into clients,

I’ve got reporting on it, so I can see what’s happening, and I’ve

got these tools in here, you know like Facebook and Google and the Valley News and radio,

and I’ve got all these tools dialed in,

and it just runs, and it’s fantastic. Anddd, we all want that. And the reason why we

don’t have it is actually, we like to think it’s the software and

the technology, and that’s what we blame it on,

and it’s because we don’t have enough time, and the reality is it doesn’t have anything to do with any of that. It has to do with the fact that we don’t

have a plan of how we’re going to use the technology to free

up our time.

So, I’m a one-man shop here at Sam Putnam Consulting. I get

my mail in Hanover New Hampshire and I work mostly

at my home office here in West Windsor Vermont. I help Upper

Valley business owners build predictability into their

business.

For a lot of businesses in the Upper Valley, that means

getting you more calls. You really prefer to have the person call personally instead of email you. You know, you might not

have an email form on your site on person.

Appointments, orders, everything, through the phone. Now, as the owner, you either have a marketing guy, or work

with a marketing person, a social media person. Maybe

your brother set up a Facebook page for you,

or you’ve thought about getting one, or, the phone

company was setting that up for you, or something. And

you’ve probably got some stuff on there that you think is

important to you as an agency serving people.

And, you don’t necessarily do the Facebook stuff yourself, because you don’t normally use Facebook that much, or

maybe you’ve never used it at all. And you probably don’t

usually do the ads,

and I would bet you haven’t done much recently because

you don’t have that much time. But, then again as a business

owner, you probably do like to handle the advertising. You like

to kind of go through your budget and whatnot and do

that yourself,

and you don’t want to farm it out. You do it internally, and,

you’ve probably got some guys helping you out with that stuff

already. And, you know, you probably have your staff track

everything,

phone book, website, everything, you know, who

calls you and where they come from, even though it’s difficult to do, and, it’s difficult for you to tell if it’s working. Maybe, you do some banner ads in

Daily UV.

Or, you don’t spend any money on advertising. You have no

extra capital for advertising at all. Now, if you’re established, if you’ve been here for 20, 30,

50 years, you’re probably inundated with work.

You might be working with somebody, some website folks, a similar thing. You might not

even have had time to do what you wanna do on your website,

putting some stuff on it or whatnot.

You might be at a point in your career where most everything

you get is referrals, but you put some advertising out there just

so people can find you. And, you’re all about getting in front

of people, but,

you don’t want to spend any time on marketing. Soooo, you knoww it may be shortsighted, and, you knowww you’re kind of behind the times, but word

of mouth, repeat, referrals, knows you exist, uhh,

if you’ve got trucks, sees those all over the place, walk-ins if you’re on a 106, route 4,5, 12 whatever it is, that’s how you get clients, and, again, you’ve already got somebody with

your website who’s doing some things for you,

or, you’ve already got an online presence, and, you don’t really want to spend any time

with this stuff right now, you’ve got too much on your plate,

you’re booked up. And you’re not interested in dealing with

this.

You get back from a trip or you have to catch up on office work

and by the time you do that you might not even make it to

mail. And you could have a partner in your business who’s dealing with other folks as well.

And, if one of you guys does come up with something,

you’ve got to review it with the other. And that takes time. And

word of mouth and prior relationships work pretty darn

well for you, and so,

it’s not a high priority for you, you just need to hire someone

to serve those clients. You need bodies. You’re very short

staffed, you’ve been working in your business, not on your

business, and you need to fill one or two open positions,

with, someone moving, or, you’ve got to add to your

workforce, to get the work done that you’ve already got.

And as you’re working through your backlog of 50, 60 hours of

work, you’ve also got these internal processes, that you

want to work on.

You’ve talked to some marketing… software people

about it, maybe you’ve been to a SCORE workshop. And,

internal processes are the real priority for you. At the same

time, for some of you,

there is a quiet time of year, and you do think about this stuff, and you might need to think about it a little bit, but

you wouldn’t put doing it it out of mind. And, you know if your

business is a little different than most businesses,

you might do a handful of jobs a week, you know, not that

many clients. And, doing one more job a week is really good

for you, but, you’ve been getting everything through, the

yellow pages,

or some trade magazines or publications, or really just word

of mouth. But, if you got one more job every week, that’s good for you. You know, if

you’ve got a high ticket item, whether that’s an ongoing

service,

a membership, or Repeat business. So, the core of your

business is probably a 30, maybe 50 mile radius. So,

you’ve probably tried either the Valley News, or the radio,

or the yellow pages, or,

even a vanity phone number, although, that can not really work out as well as you hope

for some companies, or if you’re established for a long time you never ever want to

change your number,

but you know, you put an ad out in one of those places,

radio, phone book, print, and, you’re always glad to hear

when you put that ad out and you know it’s visible and that

it’s being noticed.

And, for the yellow pages, it’s really waning, you know, it’s

not working as well as it used to, and you’re probably

downsizing there unless they give you a super deal, but, if

you’re in there,

you’re probably still getting a significant percentage of the

people that call you from that, it’s a generational thing, people in their 20s are not inclined to

go to a telephone directory and look something up,

of course, this other side of it is, it’s pretty difficult to try to

google someone’s phone number that you want to call,

unless they’re also with a business. So, also, if people don’t have internet, or have

dial-up,

it’s really slow, and they’ll pick up the phone book and call you

from that. So, maybe you do Great Eastern radio, you know,

Kixx 100.5, 92.3 GXL, Q106, Cool 93.9, or the River, or

public radio, whatever.

And If you do a mix of radio stations, for a number of years,

that’s probably been pretty productive, radio could be

what’s worked best for you, you know, whereas, with print,

it can be hard to see predictable results so you

might cut that out altogether, especially if you were doing Co-

op ads. With radio, you run it on a pretty regular basis and

you get a fair amount of feedback,

being out in public, you don’t need a jingle, just a plain ad with you talking on there, it might be your most valuable source of traffic over the last 20 years. And, you, it makes some connections with the

community,

if you work through someone who lives around here, if you’re

doing business in the community, you’re advertising

through someone in the community, it’s your voice on the radio. People you don’t

know come up to you and say,

‘you’re the guy on the radio’, and it’s comforting to know

someone’s listening. And, you don’t expect them to

remember the number you put in your ad, but, you imprint

that association of your business and being a number

they can call.

So…you’ve got something working, and, you can’t just switch all the way to digital.

You need consistency. Presence is important too. You can’t just

do two weeks of radio, you need to do it for 10-15 weeks.

And, it depends if it’s at drive time, but, it probably works

out to about 5 thousand dollars, and, the Valley News

for a 3,4 inch ad, maybe you do color, maybe it’s a lot bigger,

it’s more like a couple hundred a day,

and a fair number of businesses pay that, because

that’s the clientele they’re trying to reach and they’re

going to keep doing that consistently, but it’s expensive,

but, you never know with radio, either.

So, you know, the key to all of this is the tracking, to ask people where they heard

about you or how they happened to come to you.

Tracking. Now, Facebook might seem like a whole different

world.

And, you don’t want to do any of this stuff in the immediate

future. But, this is the key, and, what we do is set up

predictability for businesses, and, really, the easiest way to do that is through my system,

and the if you don’t think that system’s going to involve the biggest website on the world, Facebook, um, you really are going to be left behind, you know, not this year, but, you know, 2018 is just a month

away now,

and, you’re gonna be leaving money on the table. People

who are not using this system, uh, they are leaving money on the table. So, that’s what this all about, reclaiming some of

that revenue that you’ve already lost by not using

digital,

and by not having a system, and in this 30 minute webinar I’m going to go through some strategies with real numbers

from real businesses in different industries, and

answer any questions you can come up with about why you

don’t want to do it.

And, you know, you’re not scared to do it, but, what we do as business owners is we

come up with these rationalizations as to why we’re not doing it. And again, I don’t care what you do, but, if you

do work with me,

I’m not going to let you throw money away, so, I’m very

convinced that radio, and the Valley News, and, to you know,

just enough so you’re gonna keep doing it, the yellow pages,

those are really working for Upper Valley businesses.

But, you can’t master all of those, and you can’t expect to

one, manage all of them successfully, and two, to get a payoff from all of them. And,

you’re really making life harder for yourself if you’re not

spending a little money on digital.

And honestly you are late in the game already to the biggest

social network in the world, and that’s facebook. So, sign up

for the webinar on Thursday right in this box here, right

here, And, I’ll talk about anything on there, that you

ask,

provided it’s a real problem you have and you’re located in the Vermont, New Hampshire area, so people watching, and

listening, can benefit from that. Ok guys, I’ll see you on

Thursday at 2. Bring a pen and a notebook,

so you can take notes, because, there’s going to be a lot of

material, and yeah, I’ll see you on Thursday at 2. And, that vision I talked about, that vision you have for your

business, Let’s get that vision you have a little bit closer. See

you Thursday.