P,P,P,Pick up a Pro!

It’s suddenly dawned on me how grateful I am that I’ve got a team of professionals around me who are experts at what they do. We had a meeting yesterday with Laura from Fido, and she just clarified our thinking a little bit. We had this idea to hand out free packs of crayons to potential members, but when we worked out the costings, we realised that it was going to be difficult to estimate how effective the PR had been.

Our key target at the moment is to capture email addresses on our holding page, so that when we launch in March, we can directly tell these people by email.

So whilst we had lots of great ideas for PR, we need to now prioritize them according to their cost and likely effectiveness. It’s so tempting to do something now because it may be seasonal, but instead maybe we should be a little patient (something I really struggle with usually!) and use it next year, when it may be more appropriate to the stage of the business’s development (ie after we’ve launched).

So we are just tinkering with the crayons idea to see if there’s any way we can make it really work for us. And thankfully I’ve also got a great promotional team on board (OZ Promotions) who really understand the way promotions work, and so they’ll be able to give me the benefit of their experience too. Also, our promotional merchandise company (Angus Limelight) will be able to give us ideas about other potential (& cheaper) products that may also do the job for us at a lower cost.

Also, I’ve just had an email from Nick our lawyer, who has sent over the draft of the Deed of Assignment, which Champion Marketing (our creative designers) have to sign, in order to give us ownership of our logo & website design. It does of course make a lot of sense, but it’s not something I would have thought about if we hadn’t appointed someone with his calibre. He also pointed in the direction of a great trademark agent who is searching the market for any potential threats in that area.

Phew, there’s no way you can run a business on your own, and it pays dividends to use the best experts you can afford. I’m sure this will be money & time well spent. Much like last night, Patrick Kielty was very funny!