A blog and a little technology save our desserts

As a dessert bakery the products we produce have a short shelf life.  If they don’t sell briskly then they either get thrown away (a bad ROI) or they get discounted (50% is better than 0%).  We’ve always posted a daily specials flyer in our bakery to move products nearing the end of their lives, but what if you can’t make it down to the bakery?  We have lots of customers, but only a fraction of them come in on any given day.  So we wanted to get the daily specials published beyond the walls of the bakery.  Manually posting them to our web site would be a daily chore, requiring training and time, and emailing to customers wanting this information would also be laborious. 

That’s where a blog and a little extra technology came to the rescue.  After creating our Blogger account we discovered that you can post a blog by simply sending an email to a “secret” email address.  Our resident software developer coded a small program that reads the daily specials document and sends an email to our blog inbox.  Our retail staff continues to do what they have been doing all along – typing in the daily special document – but now a program is automatically pushing that information to the blog site.  With zero training and no manual intervention, our staff is unknowingly posting this valuable information to the Internet.  We added a static hyperlink from our web site to the blog and presto, our customers can find out the daily specials from our web site!!! 

To make it even more convenient we leveraged Feedburner which automatically sends the blog/daily specials by email to anyone who has signed up.  The marriage of a blog and a little extra technology save our desserts from the trash can.

Starting a biz in a bad economy. Advice?

We just celebrated our 1^st anniversary in business and are actively planning an expansion.  It’s nerve racking thinking about putting more money into your business when the economy is really struggling.  Advice for other business owners…

1. If it doesn’t make you money or save you money, don’t buy it.  You’ve got to watch your bottom line.  Think twice about investing too much in the future or giving back too much.  If you’re not profitable right now then you’d better hurry up and get into survival mode quick.  Be prepared to stay in survival mode for a while.
2. Watch your bottom line.  That means you…you watch your bottom line.  Know every transaction that affects your business.  If money is moving and you’re not really sure why or how, get wise fast.  Cash is king. If you run out, what are your choices?
3. Realize you’ll probably struggle for the next 1-2 years.  You can hope for a clutch holiday season, but don’t bet on it.  Plan on a lousy holiday shopping season and then think about on how you’ll survive until the 2010 holidays.
4. Just make it stretch to 2010.  Let’s face it; the financial and housing markets will take more than a year to bounce back, which mean the environment your business needs won’t be there for at least a year.  That means you need to survive until 2010.

One bit of reassurance is that if you can make it in this environment, then you will prove you have a valuable and winning recipe for success.  When this economy springs back to life – which it will – you will be experienced, prepared and in the market ready to capture the opportunity.