Our business, artstream, has combined three facets in the area of art and design to create one business under one roof. Due to our diversity, one of the main practices that we have moved away from is traditional advertising. It just doesn’t fit. We are in lovely, yet very rural New Hampshire.

As David mentioned in his marketing post, small businesses are bombarded with offers and “must haves” from many sources. How to choose what is right for you? At artstream, we have embraced our creative wits and forged ahead with very little traditional advertising. Sure, we are still listed in the phone book and we have developed extensive mailing lists, but mostly tradition ends there. Some of the alternative marketing we have used may not work for everyone’s business, but I do believe in connecting with people in non-traditional, (and sometimes not as comfortable ways) is key.

Through using our gallery as a reception and meeting place for other businesses and non-profits, we have hosted symbiotic events and met new clients through the process. We are selective with our choices, but plan one each quarter. This keeps us connected to the local market as well as in the know of how our city is changing and developing.

As we are located in rural New Hampshire, our closest city being Boston about an hour and a half away, we have need to reach outside of our immediate area for clients, as well as our artists and instructors.

We have kept our name out in cyberspace with a daily blog, active website, shop and flickr account. Often, this has forged long lasting relationships with artists, design clients and high quality art instructors we wouldn’t have found through traditional means. Many of them have been from Europe as much as from across North America. Interestingly enough, a few have been from less than 100 miles away. Without the website, blogs, and other Web 2.0 materials artstream’s growth would have been slower. We have found that combining the local with the global has created a fertile mix for our business to flourish in.

I think Susan is right to suggest that a powerful means of innovation is to look beyond the expected way of doing things in order to compensate for a perceived limitation. This isn’t as easy as it sounds because, while fortunes can be made on breaking the rules, once you start doing it, you’re largely on your own. It’s not impossible to buck “the system,” but everyone who tries will realize early and often that “the system” is there for a reason (although very often not a good one), and to get anyone to see the logistical possibilities beyond it is like pulling teeth. How hard did I have to fight just to get painters and floor installers to use alternative materials like low-VOC paints and bamboo flooring in my store? That’s the sort of situation when it becomes clear the aspects of the system are built on laziness and ignorance, and those that are built on kickbacks and greed. Some contractors didn’t like those materials because they hadn’t heard of them or had heard false rumors about them, or they preferred to buy their traditional materials from the same people over and over because they got good deals and didn’t have to pass along their savings to me. The other aspect of the status quo is economy of scale and the short-term savings that can be wrestled out of that. It’s not hard to see the destructiveness that results from these attitudes from the outside, but they always seem to make sense from inside “the system.”

Susan discusses artstream’s lack of advertising and lack of proximity to a large city as limitations in the traditional sense, but I’m starting to think that “the system” is the biggest limitation of all. The best innovation is not just looking different, or doing something different just to be different. Although those can be crucial, I’ve found that the innovation that is the most sustainable is what comes about when people start seeing their limitations as strengths and turning “the system” on its head.

Much of my early childhood was spent on a farm in Oklahoma in a sort of communal environment. There was my foster father, Daddy Red, his wife, Momma Mae, her brother, Homer, his son, Ronnie, an adopted son, Tuffy, a handy man, Scottie, and me.

Red and Mae also owned a café where farmers met for coffee, and town politics were openly discussed. It was a place where truck drivers and preachers alike dined on chicken-fried steaks and fried okra. This was where I was exposed to a real cross-section of lifestyles.

Everyone who ever knew Daddy Red loved him. He created a wonderful atmosphere for the people in the café and on the farm. He enjoyed his work.
The natural system he set up integrated all the essential elements – farm, café, family and community – together. This environment, no doubt, influenced the way I envision the integration of business elements.

While attending the University of Arkansas in 1971, I had a company called Video-Acts Entertainment. This company was one of the first to use video tape as a sales tool to book bands. By its third year , the company was keeping up to 20 bands a week busy. This led to managing a recording studio for a friend, Ben Jack. The integration of the management, booking and recording of the bands just seemed normal to me.

In 1975, while in Los Angeles at Billboard Magazine’s Talent Forum, I got news that the studio had been struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Fortunately, it was insured, and we converted our part of the settlement to cash, sold the goodwill and moved to California.

Shortly after moving to LA, I became disenchanted with the music business and decided to put my marketing degree to good use and experience the corporate world. So I got a job at Grey Advertising, a large corporate advertising company.

In terms of goal setting, a milestone occurred in my life a few years back, when during our holiday party, the agency presented me with an unexpected gift. The group stood in our living room and recited the agency’s mission in unison, like a classroom would recite the pledge of allegiance – “We’re here at The Phelps Group to do great work for deserving clients, in a healthy working environment to realize our clients’ goals and our potentials.”

That was a defining moment for me. For the first time, it was clear that my goals were the group’s goals. The feeling of camaraderie and alignment for a common cause was rewarding.

It was a feeling I’d wish for every person – to feel that you’re part of building something worthwhile, and that the others in your group are with you in your quest to be the best at what you’re doing.

And for just a moment that night, I flashed back to the days on Daddy Red’s farm, and my first memories of “alignment within an organization.” It felt good.

For those more interested in our specific business: The Phelps Group is 65 associates, conducting integrated marketing communications for great clients like Whole Foods Markets, City of Hope, Tahiti, Panasonic and DirecTV. Founded in 1981, we’re one of the largest and 2nd oldest independent agency in Southern California.

You can find out more at http://www.thephelpsgroup.com.

In the fall of 2003, six months before founding Cedarcrest, I was on a mission to start my company. I just had not decided what kind of company.

On a Saturday in September I bought every entrepreneurial business magazine I could find. Fortunately the streets of Manhattan are blessed with overflowing newsstands. I remember buying a wide range: Inc., Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Fortune Small Business (FSB).

I learned how to launch my own power-cleaning franchise using a Can’t Miss Proven Method with only a $20,000 investment. I read breathlessly about the inventor of those little rubber sticks for $3.99 that some women use to arrange an up-do with their hair. She sold millions. I admired the tale of a clever inventor of the mosquito-repelling silent-to-humans noisemaker that leaves your yard bug-free. Could I join the ranks of the proverbial inventor-entrepreneur, and someday find my product available in every SkyMall Magazine in an airplane seat-pocket in front of you?

Well, no. I have trouble changing batteries in my cordless phone, never-mind tinkering to invent something in my (non-existent) garage. My twenty month-old daughter already has more design-build sense with her LEGOS than I do.

Undaunted, I was intrigued by the September issue of FSB Magazine, which ranked the 100 fastest growing small businesses in 2003, as defined by revenue growth, profit-growth, and stock-price growth. The list was chock-full of real estate companies, health-care firms, and a smattering of bio-tech and restaurant businesses. The #2 on the entire list, Asta Financial (Nasdaq: ASFI), was a finance company previously unknown to me. Their main service was purchasing assets which banks needed to sell, whether for financial, risk-management, outsourcing, or regulatory reasons. ASFI had been around for a few decades but only adopted their current business model five years earlier. At the time I was working for a Wall Street firm and knew enough about related businesses that the company’s success made sense to me.

With that germ of an idea I set about researching the market and Asta’s competitors. I logged in many more Saturdays at New York’s Science Business and Industry Library. I spoke to an elderly gentleman from SCORE (Service Corps of Retired Executives) who had no idea what I was talking about but who was very friendly and polite for 30 minutes as I rambled about my business idea.

Shortly before quitting my Wall Street job I attended a conference in Las Vegas, NV of people related to the industry to get a sense for what I was about to get into. Although my chosen entrepreneurial field was still ‘finance,’ it sure seemed far away from my Wall Street job. Against the better judgment of most of my family and the sober advice of friends, I leapt.

As the war for talent heats up, life speeds up, and technology frees us from the desk, we’ll find that the most precious “perks” we can offer employees are flexibility and freedom. So we must innovate to allow this freedom.

Freedom, expressed as time and place – where I want to be when I want to be there – has to do with: flexible time to take care of other life chores as needed; experiencing more of the joys of family, friends and new challenges; the flexibility to work from virtually any place at any time; and to be connected to families and communities more than ever before.

We can have that flexibility now, because technology finally allows us to sever the tether from our offices and desks, yet stay in touch with our teammates.

Professional service people often are thinking about their work challenges in the shower, on the freeway and, too often, when they should be listening to their spouse and children. They’re working, or have the potential to work around the clock. This is a far cry from the “leave it all at work when the whistle blows” mentality of the factory workers and, to a great extent, many of the white-collar workers of modern day bureaucracies.

The combination of this desire for freedom, the flexibility made possible by communications technology and the “always on my mind” mental work calls for an organizational system that operates with a high level of trust. The departmentalized, “always in your face” pyramidal hierarchies originally invented for the military and factory work are simply outdated.

Joe Phelps

In college I immersed myself in the ethic of outdoor experiential education. One of many inspiring readings from Outward Bound that I’ve kept for the last fifteen years is a short quotation from Woodrow Wilson Sayre’s book Four Against Everest. Sayre, who as a middle-aged philosophy professor in Boston decided to become part of the first American team to summit Mt. Everest, wrote:

"The truth is that part of the essence of mountain climbing is to push oneself to one’s limits. Inevitably this involves risk, otherwise they would not be one’s limits. This is not to say that you deliberately try something you know you can’t do. But you do deliberately try something which you are not sure you can do."

Innovation at Cedarcrest has been that way from the beginning, and it’s felt a bit like high-altitude climbing at times. We’re not doing anything impossible - but we are frequently doing something we’ve never attempted before, and that I’m not sure we can do.

Looking back on Cedarcrest’s first three years, I see I improvised and innovated from the beginning. In fact, before the beginning. At the very first industry conference I attended, before I’d even “quit my day job” and launched Cedarcrest, I met a man named Maurice who changed the direction of my business.

Maurice, a chain-smoking 75-year old high-school dropout, was an unlikely guru to me, a Wall Street bond salesman fixing to launch my new finance company. But I now know that the half-hour coffee break with Maurice dramatically changed the direction of Cedarcrest. Like a guide to my entrepreneurial mountain-climb, he described a few seldom-followed paths to building wealth. In the months following that fortuitous meeting, I set out to try his suggested paths, unsure of what I would discover. Those innovations suggested by Maurice now form a core part of the Cedarcrest business.

Susan writes about innovative marketing techniques because of her unique location in rural New Hampshire. She’s writing a blog, arranging meet-ups between symbiotic groups, and wooing European partners in cyberspace. Definitely not your grandmother’s tried-and-true Yellow Pages techniques.

Now, marketing is not the same as climbing Everest, but it does require the willingness to try new things. When I started Cedarcrest I had no idea that marketing our services would be a constant uphill journey requiring untried techniques all along the way.

I think about our new marketing efforts in the past year:

1. Attending a Trade Show as a participant
2. Attending a Trade Show as a vender with a Booth (twice)
3. Networking over Breakfast with professional networking groups
4. Participating in panelist discussions
5. Writing articles in trade magazines
6. Writing articles on-line
7. Sending direct-mail to potential customers
8. Advertising in magazines
9. Posting free banner ads on industry websites
10. Posting paid banner ads on industry websites

The marketing mountain we’re climbing goes endlessly upwards, and the trail is not exactly clearly marked. We’re trying new methods without knowing in advance whether it will work because I don’t know anyone who has built a company like mine.

From the beginning, innovation at Cedarcrest has been a combination of

A) being open to suggestions from unlikely guides like Maurice, as well as
B) Trying new techniques that I’m not sure about in advance.

As a small-business owner, this is the joy of the journey.

Susan hit it on the head with “Necessity, the Mother of Invention.” In today’s world of advertising, we simply cannot get away from it. This means a large part of our population can simply tune it out. To communicate with an audience, we have found the wrong approach is the direct one. You must get your product in front of your audience without them realizing it.

Like Susan, we began our company with traditional advertising all the way down to the quarter page ad in the yellow pages. A surveyor called the other day inquiring about my “Yellow Page” reading habits. I really had to think to recall the last time I opened that book. Yes, the book is right there under the phone. But to look something up, my laptop and Google are so much quicker and easier. The same goes for newspapers. I get all my news online these days.

Methods to getting your business out in front of people are changing fast. Think about it for a minute. We’ve used phone directories, newspapers, mailers, television and radio as our way to communicate with potential clients for better part of a century. Now, that has changed in less than ten years.

As Susan stated, every business is different and how you get your message out will vary. What’s important to understand is WHO your potential clients are and HOW to reach them so they think of you when they are ready to make a purchase.

First question is, where are your customers? – That is, what percentage of them is local as compared to national or even international? Don’t forget that in today’s world of the internet and Federal Express and American Express, a few clicks of a mouse can bring whatever you want to your doorstep within a few days from anywhere. Think locally, think nationally, and think globally.

You should take your advertising budget and spread it out accordingly. Absolutely, positively you must have a website. You must have presence on the web. The more urban the community, the more likely your customer will reach for their laptop before they reach for the phone book.

Then develop a mixture of traditional and non-traditional methods to get your name out there. One area that works for me, focus on news articles that ultimately drive people to your website or store front.

My favorite travel guide in high school and college was Lets Go: Mexico for my frequent trips South of the Border. I recall two pieces of travel advice from the guidebook:

1. Lay out the clothes and money you think you need for the trip. Now pack half the clothes and twice the money.
2. Never pack more than you can carry at a dead run for a mile.

This continues to be sage advice for traveling where the Federales are not always your friend, and where it can take a long time to get out of town when the buses don’t run until mañana.

The risk of travel in Mexico was that, if things didn’t go well, it could be a long time before anybody realizes. Friends and family back in the US really had no way of knowing where you were.

In the small-business context, I think the analogous advice for this risk is “Try to get by on half the expected costs, and realize that you’ll need twice the revenue you originally planned.”

And the basic reason for this advice is that, like a gringo stuck South of the Border, many of your customers don’t know you exist. Whether you’ve got a great product or not, it could be a long time before anybody realizes.

This is biggest risk Cedarcrest has faced. Specifically, if my company offers a really good and important service, but nobody knows it exists, do I have a business?

The answer is no.

I imagine every small business runs this risk. You may provide a great service or product, but if not enough people know about it to buy it, well then you’re stuck.

My regular entrepreneur-insomnia-hour of 1AM to 2AM (if you don’t know what I’m talking about you’ve probably never been a small business owner) more often than not is filled with variations on this theme. The mind spins: “How do I get the word out to customers, to get enough scale, to get enough transactions, to get a little bigger, to get to the next level, to…” well, you get the idea. Good times at 1:45am!

In my case the solution to this risk came from another South of the Border concept: Outsourcing.

After two years I found a marketing company willing to provide services for Cedarcrest on a contingency basis. The marketing company’s payments are directly tied to my growth in customers. If I operate at a small scale then my payments to them remain minimal. But as they get the word out about Cedarcrest and my revenues grow, they earn more money.

That marketing company’s solution is not universally applicable to other small-businesses. But I do believe in paying outside experts to help you get scale.

I expect to pay my marketers extraordinarily well over time, since they now share my biggest risk. And when I get there, the cervezas and margaritas will be on me.