First Semi-Offline Success (Hint I Took Action)

Okay, so here's another me-too semi-successful story. I think the point is I finally got off my butt and did something.

The other night I went out to dinner with my parents. I began talking about where I want to head business wise. They were asking about work (the day job and so forth).

I've read many of the threads about offline marketing and have bought a few of the WSO offline reports (They are awesome by the way and teach nothing but practical and ingenious business sense).

My dad has a close friend who just opened up his own baseball facility here in the Northwest.

He does have a website, as is the case, and I the friend I could help him. I didn't ask for any monetary gain on this one up front. He just opened three-four weeks and cash flow is tight. I thought this could be my training ground.

I'm looking at working with him more as a huge learning experience as I also work on my own side project when I'm not at the day job.

We sat down over lunch for 2 hours and he was taking notes like a mad man. Today I went to his actual baseball facility and realized a couple of things. Learning lessons.

1. I hadn't been in control of the situation during parts of the conversation yesterday.

2. I offered to write a short 'report'/salesletter to promote a $997 camp we had brainstormed with. I wrote 5 pages of copy last night and was going to present it to him today. When I arrived he had several players doing training. The timing was bad as I wanted to review it with him today. (I had two other people last night review the copy and they thought it was good).

What I should have done was instead of saying I'll come over the next day during his busy time, was ask what works for you during the weekday when he has more down time (the facility targets youth baseball 12-18 years old.) He was all ears and I'm not worried about him going to the 'competition' or doing the ideas himself.

3. I gave him a lot of good information and but I just don't think I was aggressive enough. You know go for a real close. I think part of it too was I didn't steer our conversation enough towards getting some clear plans of action laid out.

4. My dad has been in sales all his life. After our friend left, I asked him what I could work on. My dad goes what do you want to do for him? What do you want? I realized I had gone in so many different directions with all the different possibilities that I should have said let's start with this and this and then go from here.

He has a contact page on his website with a basic html form. I asked him would he like the capability to follow up with email addresses he captures instead of having to respond to each one manually. And then have the capability of following up with them. He goes I'd love that. How do you do that?

So it is out there. People want this stuff and are curious but in the end they will be too busy most of the time with the daily operations of their existing businesses to worry about the technicalities of that 'web site internet thing.'

I think the most important thing is I just got off my butt and did something instead of being a lurker and dreaming constantly.