Business without a phone

Running your craft business without a phone

How many of you who own or operate a local business have a phone number where you can be reached?

(I know most of you must be scratching your heads and asking, “Has Bob gone off his rocker. We all have phone numbers. You can’t run a business without one.)” You’re right, but there’s a message in my madness that I can explain with a short story.

Dawn Basso Bamberg is my daughter-in-law. A great wife to my son and super mother to my two grandchildren. She recently had a birthday and I had not the foggiest idea what to get her. They come up every Thanksgiving, but they live in Florida and I just don’t have enough day-to-day contact to know what to get. And my otherwise sharp son is not much help.

A week or so before her birthday, she leaves this post on Facebook:

I click on the picture, and voila, up pops the picture in Pinterest.com and a link to ilenesgatorstore.com. (Did I mention that both Dawn and I graduated from the University of Florida and are Florida Gator fans.) Ilene’s store let me order one of her handmade gator scarves and ship it to by daughter-in-law in Florida. Birthday present problem solved and I hope I am now her favorite father-in-law.

Back to my phone question. Not having a phone was a sure way to cripple your business in the 1970s and 80s. If you are a local craftsperson and don’t have an online store, don’t do social media like Facebook, Pinterest or Twitter – in other words if you are not busting your keister to develop your presence on the Web – then you are fast becoming an antiquated as a business without a phone number. Ilene has the chance to sell her handmade Gator scarves to the world’s 6 billion inhabitants and you’re selling to the few who drive through Sparta.

Wilkes Community College has held FREE classes that will walk you through it, but in the past, they’ve had trouble getting enough takers. Today, crafters of handmade products would be better off with an online store and no phone, than with just a phone. A website alone, that you are counting on someone to find via Google, was where it was at 10 years ago.

If are interested in spending a few hours learning the ropes to create the kind of Web presence that sells to the world, email me. If we get a dozen or so committed individuals, I work to get a learning opportunity set up.