Happy Holidays

Well its that time of year….I will be gone for a couple days to be with family. I wish you all a wonderful green holiday. Take care be safe! I’ll be posting again on Saturday.

Developing your marketing plan for 2010

Developing a marketing plan is probably one of the best ways to ensure that you are paying attention to all aspects of your business throughout the year. For those who took classes or did a lot of reading before they started their business it’s no surprise to learn that marketing is actually everything you do in relation to your business, from location, to products and services, advertising, hiring, choice of furnishings, investment, customer service; yes everything you do in relation to your business is a part of your marketing strategy. So updating your marketing plan is like doing a complete review of every aspect of your business; how it was, how it is, and how you want it to be.

It is also a complete review of you as a business owner and/or how your board of directors and executive director are doing. It is important therefore that you get input from customers, vendors, and employees as to how you have done over the past year. Their perspective may be very different from yours and may give you a great deal of insight as to how they view you as a client, employer, and resource. It will also give you insight as to what will sell this year, and how you can give more and/or better service.

But this year will have a different twist. For one thing, all of your figures from 2009 will be affected by the economic recession (depression). If you have a 99 cent store you did great if you were a non-profit, donations may have fallen to an all-time low.  So deciding how to make changes will be based on how you feel the economy will be doing in 2010. It will also affect your reinvestment plans for 2010. If you have that very successful 99 cent store is it wise to open another store or will sales fall drastically as the economy recovers. Your non-profit may need to merge with a larger more stable non-profit.

In January we are offering a Marketing Workshop to guide you through the process, if you don’t have thousands to invest in a consultant or marketing guru, this 3 hours may be the most valuable 3 hours of 2010. If you are interested in the workshop, we suggest that you request a marketing plan worksheet this week so you can begin to prepare for the workshop. You will need some data to move forward and we hope you will be able to leave the workshop with most of your marketing plan finished.

Green Business and Green Jobs

The conundrum, which came first the chicken or the egg is much like the green jobs dilemma today in the USA. Although substancial funding has been made available by the government to increase green jobs in the USA, without green businesses to create these jobs most of that money has been going to conventional non-green jobs such as transportation, (the building of highways) and to the purchase from foreign manufacturers of renewable energy components (solar panels etc.).

This blog was started with the vision of; helping American entrepreneurs to think green and begin creating the thousands of green jobs that our government is willing to subsidize, greening the American economy, and lifting the poor in this country out of poverty while improving the quality of life for all Americans.

I invite readers to link to relevant articles or to comment on all postings on this blog. Together we can move the country forward.