Part 5 - The Options For A Viable Business Transformation Solution
A small business owner may contemplate reducing some of these expenses by investing his time instead of hiring an agency or paying consultants. However, he must understand that his time does not come without a real cost. The budget to develop these expense outlooks assumes an average cost of $60 per hour. Based on 2,000 hours per year, this equates to a gross salary of $120,000 - a small to medium-sized business owner may value his or her time at more or less than this assumed amount, but the dilemma remains. It will require a minimum investment of 400 hours to determine the strategy and understand all the elements listed above. Let's assume a business owner can carve out 15 hours per week - that's six months of his time just to understand the next step to take and still requires a cash outlay of $20,000 for the website development and business planning assistance.
Then, there are the recurring monthly expenses necessary to sustain the strategy. The $8,000 identified above can be a combination of owners time and cash. Assuming the owner is able to write content and to conduct the digital marketing strategy, then a minimum of 100 hours per month will be required - that's 25 hours per week! Sure, investing an owners time means the cash outlay can be reduced to a theoretical $1,500 per month, but where is 100 hours of owner time going to come from? Furthermore, even if 100 hours of time can be conjured up, there's still a real cost associated with the time - at $60 per hour that's $6,000 of opportunity cost per month!
Couldn't this time be better invested in personal customer and prospect development in the owners local market?
So ... what's the alternative?
Consider the solution we've been developing that's specific to the office products and supplies reseller in the United States. We'll deliver the following components:
- A website specifically developed for the office products industry and for a content marketing strategy.
- Development of a 4-year Business Plan to establish sales, marketing and social media engagement goals complemented with an online performance verus plan reporting engine.
- An information technology assessment of your current platform and recommendations for any required improvements.
- An online education regarding the current state of the office products industry and developing an understanding of why a $20 billion growth opportunity exists.
- An online education of just what e-commerce is and why developing relevant web traffic for the purposes of sales development and e-commerce is vital to survive.
- An education that provides compelling reasons for joining the platform we've been building and enabling resellers in the office products industry to leverage technology, reduce costs, understand risk and improve product quality and service to its customers.
- An education in social media platform setup and optimization, audience building and digital marketing.
- Having us generate all your content, creating and publishing your blog, posting relevant content to your social media accounts and conducting your email marketing campaigns.
- Incorporating the most extensive "vendor-agnostic" office products catalog and shopping cart into your website for the purposes of facilitating e-commerce.
Remember, not only are we experts in the office products industry, we're also experts in the digital marketing techniques and strategies required to transform a business.
Not only are we going to eliminate 90% of the minimum of 400 hours of your time you'd have to invest to go-it-alone and 90% of the ongoing 100 hours per month required to sustain a digital strategy, we're going to save you real dollars as well.
We can't eliminate 100% of your involvement because we need you to commit to invest some hours into our online courses to ensure you are fully educated on how to pursue our business transformation partnership and, on a recurring monthly basis you will need to invest around eight hours to ensure you build a relevant social audience in your local market along with an expanded email contact database.
In partnership with us, we believe less than 40 hours of your time upfront and 8 hours on an ongoing monthly basis will get the job done!
Our goal is to provide you with, and to operate, a digital platform that's specifically designed for the office products industry and the requirements of a small to medium size reseller.
Our goal is to get you into this platform without you having to invest the 6+ years we've already invested in understanding effective digital marketing strategies.
Our goal is to allow you to focus on developing your local market with the knowledge that you have a state-of-the-art digital platform supporting you and helping develop new customers for the purposes of participating in this $20 billion growth opportunity.