Thinking of a service.An

[EnaudRecneps]

Hi, Hello, Howdy, How Ya Doing?

There, got that out of the way....this is more of a question rather than an actual service offer.....I tend ot travel around and look at a great many things in SL and love to marvel at the time, lindens and effort that many people have put into their in world business locations....some amazing construcions!  I also notice at how many of them are shall we say, not as swamped with lookers and buyers as they should be....I grew up in an era that was the height of the "dime store" age.  Me father owned some and I worked both for me and for other national chains.  I am no world beating expert, but I do know something about merchandising both the product and the location......It really pains me sometimes to see a fine product in a magnificent location that isn't selling, because it is just "stuck" somewhere handy, or the customer can't find it (has happened to me more than once in world...Or maybe the area the store or even the shopping area are not done in a style that says....BUY HERE.....

I would love to be able to talk to some people about how to display their wares and maybe how to spruce up their location.... I wouldn't want to be making millions out of the idea, but wouldn't want to give it away for no income either .... 

My question is, does anyone who might read this thread think there would be a market for this service and do you have any ideas that you would think might be helpfu in starting up such a service.....

Anyway, that's about it......

thanks in advance and as usual

I'm 

Duane:manwink:

[sirhc DeSantis]

'I tend ot travel' too. So its not a real service its just another ad scam?

Nothing wrong with that of course - theres people here who think salesperson is a

career choice.

[EnaudRecneps]

No actually would like to think I could provide a real service!   I like to go into stores and stuff....like to travel through an area and just see what's there....no scam at all.....some of these stores could use some help.....

[Monica Querrien]

I think there is a market for this sort of service, but the trick is to find quality people who are serious about revamping their business. I have helped merchants in the past, and a couple of the issues I had with some were

1. they didn't want to pay for the service

2. they were highly defensive and not wanting to make the changes for their business.

I think in order for something like this to work, it would be good to have your own team of builders, photographers, marketers, etc. Using the team, show the merchant what could be done to their product to raise it to the next level, and then talk about costs. Even though you can tell someone what to do, it needs to actually be done in order for it to be a success. A lot of merchants simply don't have the talent or the connections to market their product successfully.

[EnaudRecneps]

Monica....thank you so much....very good points.......I tend to see things that should be done, and forget about the human factor of pride.....oops....again, thank you.

[Madelaine McMasters]

---

Monica Querrien wrote:

I think there is a market for this sort of service, but the trick is to find quality people who are serious about revamping their business. I have helped merchants in the past, and a couple of the issues I had with some were

1. they didn't want to pay for the service

2. they were highly defensive and not wanting to make the changes for their business.

I think in order for something like this to work, it would be good to have your own team of builders, photographers, marketers, etc. Using the team, show the merchant what could be done to their product to raise it to the next level, and then talk about costs. Even though you can tell someone what to do, it needs to actually be done in order for it to be a success. A lot of merchants simply don't have the talent or the connections to market their product successfully.

---

I've always been fascinated by the economy of SL. Clearly there are some merchants and landlords that make a go here, but I've yet to see evidence of an economic vibrance that could support the sort of services the OP is contemplating.

I tried my hand at business development consulting a decade ago and walked away from it for the two reasons you cited...

1) They didn't want to pay for the service.

Many small businesses are hanging on by their fingernails. They're hardly in a position to spend good money on questionalble expertise. Although I believe I had insights to offer, nobody in their right mind should have blindly accepted that claim without some evidence. As I was new to the field, I had no proof I was competent. This will be the case for the OP.

2. they were highly defensive and not wanting to make the changes for their business.

Good grief, this is true. I was surprised by one startup that brought me aboard to review their scattershot business model, and a mission statement that read like an advert for new age meditation. I was highly critical at our introductory meeting, but they seemed eager for my ideas. My modest fees were covered by a local government grant, and I should have suspected that made my services both easy to accept... and ignore. And ignore they did. At the end of my engagement, they were nearly angry that I still didn't like their business plan. They hadn't changed a bit! They foundered for another year before disbanding.

For many entrepreneurs, their business is their baby. Nobody wants to hear that their baby is ugly!

[Tamara Artis]

Well I would pay you to review everything I do and give me some pointers, something new that I didn't try. But I would like to see some examples/evidence or however you call it, something that shows you have succesfully done it before. Right now you are just a random stranger with some opinions and you know what they say about opinions lol

 

 

[EnaudRecneps]

LOL  that's me in a nutshell.....

a random stranger,,,yep...stranger than most that's for sure..

Opinionated.....sure....l

And unfortunatley I have no proof of what I contemplate doing...they are just opinions....

Like I say, I grew up in the business and formed an idea of what works and doesn't work from many sources with my father being a prime example for me.  Later on a manager at another store told me "What ever you do, be it merchandising an endcap or building a home, always stand back when you think you are done....and then picture that job with a big sign on that says THIS WAS DONE BY DUANE SPENCER and when you can see that and be proud, you then have a start."
 I thnk that migh be in the running for longest sentence in the forums...never did manage punctuation.

Anyhowo since those days so many years ago, I do that with everything I see...always searchig to find better ways in everything.....I got out of retail for many years and started and ran a data processing consulting business for years (mostly with DOD aplications) and after a major life change became a radio announcer until retirement.

So as you can see, no portfolio,, no CV, no pictures....just the words of someone nobody knows........ which is one of the main reasons I started this thread!   It just pains me no end to see some of the inworld talent get shortchanged because they don't know how to present a fine product.   I was in a store last week, having been directed to them by the SL search...was just looking for mens clothes.  Beautiful store, wonderful apearence signs at the front of the store even said "mens clothing[" with all of their other products listed along side. This store, like so many here, was kind of a rabbit warren of small rooms to wander around in, I search for several minutes and just got tired of looking for anything that just resembled mens clothing or a sign pointing me in the right direction....just TPd out of there and found a shirt to buy at one of the next shops listed in the search box.

Another place was done as (I sure hope I'm not stepping on any toes here} as a "beach" area, with all the shops in clapboard and everything on sand with the sound of seagulls and surf....very nice at first, but then you looked again and you had no idea of where you were in the complex. The avenue was all bright beach sand, with a narrow band of planks the same gray boards seperating it from more bright beach sand up to the shop fronts which were surrounded by the same beach sand and the shops had nothing to differenciate them....it was a Symphony in Sameness with more than half the shops vacant.....great general idea, should and could be a magnet for fun shopping....with  just  a few changes.

So, yeah, I have nothing concrete to offer as a bona fide....and darn it, if truth be known (I'll hate myself for saying this) I wouldn't mind just doing walk throughs and giving advice/opinions for free....

Like you said the economy here is so fascinating.  So multi-faceted and complex....If you study economics you realize you are actually studying the way people behave not studying graphs and numbers, but why's and becauses.  If that makes sense.

Hmm, am I into "novel" stage yet with this reply?   

You now have an incomplete CV of me as well as a very disjointed set of opines... don't know what that's worth, but then look what you paid for it :manlol:

[Tamara Artis]

Thank you for sharing your real life experiences with us, and now I want to ask do you have any SL business experience? Imagine a sentence starting with "I was a manager for xy shop, real estate agent and a journalist for xy magazine, currently I am working with this-and-that and own a succesfull shop that sells z stuff. Let me give you few tips to get more exposure for your business" I would say go ahead:) But since you didn't name any of that I can guess you have none. Someone here said people refer to their sl businesses as their babies and for a long time I didn't know how they mean that, well now I know. The thing is, after I spent almost a year building something from the very start, I will rather let it be where it is now then let someone with no sl experience tell me what is supposed to work here. 

Manager for my studio is rl region manager for a huge company and she knows how to deal with our clients bc of her rl experience but she has no idea how sl traffic works and how to get people in, for that I have another girl lol

I'm sure you have many friends in-world that run businesses and they wouldn't mind getting some pointers from you. Everyone has to start somewhere and friends are your best bet for getting future (possible) clients. I would suggest you to create a blog or website and put all relevant infos, make it look like a real project. Describe the whole path from entering the shop for the first time to seeing some new traffic coming in, do this for every business you decide to improve.

You can also offer some good deals for people who decide to hire you in the beginning. Don't work for free, if you don't put a value on your time you can't expect others to do it.