“The secret of your future is hidden in your daily routine.”
“You will never change your life until you change something you do daily.”
One of the tips Donald Trump gave for business success is that one should do a little work, every day. In a product related business, especially initially, one has to make sure sales are happening daily, if not, be working daily on opening up selling opportunities, every day. Pavlo Phitidis (Radio 702's Small Business Guru) says one should make 20 cold calls a day. I believe that in a start-up situation especially in the service industry (or for a new sales person developing their territory) this should be increased to 100 cold calls/tele-marketing calls per day! 20 calls is just a "maintenance" figure once the sales are happening.
For Beautiful Bracelets, I am finding the best approach to opening up new business and selling opportunities is to actually meet the owners of stores face-to-face (or in the case of fleamarkets, the owners of stalls/stands) and negotiate for them to stock Beautiful Bracelets even on a trial basis. One person agreed to stock just 4 Bracelets on Thursday and phoned me with great excitement today (Saturday) to say he'd sold all 4 Beautiful Bracelets to a person who was returning to India and would have bought 10! I have a very keen new retail customer now! Most people are prepared to do a trial run for a month or so, and re-assess after that.
I haven't had time yet to explore e-Bay, "Bid or Buy", or Alibaba as potential platforms for retail, but that is on the "To Do" list. One comment from someone I mentioned it to was that "Bid or Buy" is expensive for retailers. Got to check that. Starting up a new micro business is very time-consuming since you are the product developer, manufacturer, employer, accountant, publicist, marketer, sales rep, etc. It is hard work if you require excellence of yourself.
But the fun and the "joie de vivre" are worth it!
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