It’s college move-in time. For the past two weeks and all the way into mid-September for California students, lots of parents are moving their kids into college dormitories across the country. The experience includes planning, organization, and shopping and spending money. We discovered as we worked with our 18 and 19 year-olds that often times we were quite ready to spend money when we received information about a service that was a perfect fit. If you have already sent kids to college, this is old news. For those of you who have not gotten the chance, this is a preview of things to come. But for all of us, the salient lesson is this: We spent money on products and services that got the word out to us and that met our needs.

Here were a few of our highlighted purchases and some we declined to buy:

• Getting in line at the bookstore is so old school. Not when there’s Amazon Student. Amazon Student is cheaper than Amazon Prime and offers free 2-day shipping. And for expensive science and math textbooks, the prices were better than the bookstore. And offered more used inventory. It’s even cheaper to buy a new calculator here and have it shipped.
• Shipping packages to colleges is happening with regularity. Now, in many places, the student gets an email when a package arrives at the package pick-up and has seven days to go get it. There needed to be a system for all these Amazon Student users. It seems that package pick-up gets used more than the old fashioned mail boxes. Students forget to check those!
• But the college bookstore is still not dead. That’s where you have to pick up your lab packs, chemistry goggles, and all of your university swag. And last minutes (overpriced) items.
• Bellhop move-in service. Not every university has this and we almost declined its usage. Essentially, members of student clubs band together to offer curbside move-in service. No need to wait for carts, elevators or worry abuot physical exertion. The money raised is a major fundraiser for the student clubs. We found that the bellhop service seemed a bit overpriced to students and maybe even mothers, but the dads, when they got the email, were ready to type in those credit card numbers and make it happen at warp speed. Cost: $125. Time for entire vanload of dorm materials to get from the curb into the room: 5 minutes. Money well spent!
• Care packages sold through the university. Essentially, these were collections of junk food that you could pre-pay and would be sent out during the 1st week of school, on Halloween, Valentine’s and during exam week. Seemed overpriced and students have access to food all of the time, and are not starving. Declined.
• Target Takeover. Target stores have teamed up with college campuses and offer a shopping student only party in their stores after hours with buses. They advertise to shop with your roommates and make communal decisions. Awesome marketing and works really well for parents who worry about last minute things that were forgotten (I know my daughter needed a USB drive, but did the room really need a blender?)
• Dorm Room Displays. Several retailers have consolidated all sorts of dormitory items in one place at the front of the store. Comforter sets, bed lifts, desk lamps, storage options all in one place and enticements to other things deeper in the store. Sold.

photo by AP

It has been a tough week for residents of Detroit and suburbs including Warren, Royal Oak, Huntington Woods, Berkley, and Pleasant Ridge, among others.

For those of us who run small businesses and own homes and have kids and partners, we have learned lots of lessons, some painful. Here are just a few:

• Social media is really helpful. We could post on Facebook or Twitter when our contractors were great and getting ready to be done on a job and get them instant referrals. We could ask questions of our neighbors about how to proceed or seek advice.
• Sometimes social media isn’t helpful at all. The contractors (plumbers, restoration people, furnace and a/c repairmen) aren’t necessarily 24-7 operators. They are not using text messages and email, but instead utilize one lady in an office somewhere to facilitate all of the calls and all of the questions and she doesn’t know everything (who does?) So, we were back to being stuck to our phone and stuck at home.
• We can’t find all of the answers online. We delude ourselves into believing that if we search in just the right way, we can find “the answer”. But the questions we were asking like “How much is this going to cost me?”, “Will insurance cover anything?”, “Who is the best person to repair this problem?”, “What tasks are the highest priority?” were really complicated and were on a dreaded case by case basis. We still have questions, are forming partial answers and none of it is a result of search engine optimization.
• We needed our land line. The cell phone would die or we would be waiting for a call on it, and the land line came in handy. Truthfully, we were thinking of ditching the land line. Need to rethink that one.
• Our home office was neither. We tried to gather around in the kitchen with our computers and get work done, but the basement was destroyed, so all the kids were up here too, and the contractors kept calling and nothing was easy. So, the office wasn’t an office and the home wasn’t a home.
• We all cried about different things. We cried about wedding dresses ruined, while the boys cried about losing their xbox man caves and the kid whose clothes were on the floor cried about that, and the parents fought about the money while the sons and daughters did internal calculations as to which of their belongings were not going to be considered essential anymore.
• It is just stuff. We know that it’s not life and death. And we are trying to keep some perspective. But it is disruptive, and it was smelly, and it makes our homes more chaotic, and decreases our personal space, and the multiple decisions that we already make as parents and homeowners and workers and citizens are now dizzying in number and scope. And our family and friends are awesome and we’re all in this together!

I’m so not type A.  Really, one look inside my purse or my car or most of my closets will assure you of that.  Yes, I’m the people person creative type.  I was a good science and math student too—but the obsessive parts of me are just not aligned with neatness, order and the like.  It’s understandable, I think, that a creative type is one who starts a marketing company.  After all, so much of good marketing comes from the capital of intellect and creativity:  great new ideas, clever wordsmithing, negotiating and developing ideas with clients, etc.

It doesn’t take long to learn that organized virtual closets are a necessity in a marketing company.  We run several projects at a time for any given client.  In the beginning, it seemed easy to just go with the flow and finish each project as it came up.  Within a short amount of time, it was evident that in order to do the best work for our clients we had to “manage” their projects.

So, what does it mean for us to manage projects?  And how can a free wheeling free spirits force themselves to manage them?

Well, it’s not always easy, but the benefits are so clear that we’ve gotten it down to a few important “musts.”

·         You must use a project management system.  At its most simple, this is a calendar with every project connected to a date and every task and subtask calendared.  We like Vertabase project management software, with the ability to organize things by client, to assign tasks to particular people, to sort, to enter even the most tiny subtask, etc.

·         Every client project of any size must be entered into the project management system.  Really every one.  Otherwise life becomes a world of rushed finishes, crazy deadline days and mistakes.

·         With religious-like zeal you must adhere to a schedule of meetings about client projects and the calendar.  We have found that it is enough to just go through a list client by client of projects, read each one aloud and have a quick chat about due dates and process.  What is in process?  Who is taking care of it?  Is the due date accurate?  Do tasks needed to be edited in any way?

That’s it.  No magic….just the same lesson my mom tried to teach me a hundred times.  Make a list.  Check things off.  Write down the new stuff.  Mom, I wish you could hear this;  You were right.  It actually works.

Today I saw a proposal from a market competitor of K2M Creative Media.  A friend shared it with me, knowing that because of the many complicated layers of friendships between me and her company, I wouldn’t bid for her firm’s website build, but that I’d give an honest and educated opinion.  Well folks…we’re apparently living in the Wild West. I thought things were more under control, but if what I saw today is any indication, I was dead wrong.

Marketing quotes/bids ought not to be part of a game of smoke and mirrors. I remember when I was a little girl my mother wanted my father to come along to the car mechanic with her. She was pretty certain that if she went alone, she’d get a hiked price, or be sold repairs she didn’t know she didn’t need. It seems that marketing and web design (and other online services for that matter) put consumers in a similar situation. Because they are a commodity that can be made to seem mysterious, they can be vastly inflated in terms of price.

Here’s the thing…when you go to the doctor and you need surgery, s/he can tell you and show you exactly what they are going to do to you….and your bill can be itemized.  In fact I have witnessed even the most complicated neurological medical information being explained to laypeople. This happens in court cases, for example, all of the time—something unique, complicated and/or exceptional gets explained in terms that any regular person can understand. Your marketing agency should be able to do the same thing for you.

In a website build, there are elements in a bid that are “tangible” parts of the process and there are those that are less so. Consider the difference between designing the sitemap of the website (what the “layout” and flow should be) versus the concept of the user experience (what the user of the site should feel when they are on the website—welcomed, excited about many choices, educated about the content, etc.)  It is easy to see and/or understand the process and result of creating a sitemap, but the process and result of conceptualizing a user experience can be difficult to see. So much of it happens in the creative process of the expert/marketer/designer.

This kind of creative time and thought is truly hard to “show” but may be the most important part of some bids. In fact, it can be the most expensive part of a bid as well and rightly so—if the creative expertise were not needed, everyone could just do all of their own marketing equally well (and there’d be no Super Bowl commercials!)

However, there should never be a bid that is unintelligible to a consumer.  Jargon and fancy fake fluffy words don’t belong in a quote without explanation.

The bid I saw was for thousands and thousands of dollars for nothing.  The quote was broken down with charges for the most ridiculous parts of the process so as to justify the expense.  It would be the equivalent of my charging not only to write a blog for someone, but also for clicking “save” at the end.

Don’t be afraid to ask the company that is pitching you to explain every detail of the fees.  I’m not suggesting that the price will necessarily go down—brain power may cost you.  But at least you’ll know what you’re paying for.  And if the company can’t explain it to you—dollar by dollar, then know you’re being taken for a ride.

And since it’s my soap box and I’m harping on this quote I saw…if the web development company, or marketing company quotes you for SEO, or other things that help you get found online, but you can’t find them online…well, just turn and run the other way!

At a recent family gathering a cousin asked me, not for the first time, if I was still working in a particular job.  It’s been several years…so, no, I’m not.  How and why I started my business became the focus of our conversation.  I enjoyed putting into words what motivated me to create K2M Creative Media.

I saw a need in the professional service providers with whom I interacted personally. For example, my own dentist’s office needed certain marketing products and services but was too busy with providing excellent dental care and office management to handle the time needed to work on marketing.  A friend who worked in a non-profit was too busy running the programming to invest the time, or to wait for the volunteer to fulfill promises, but needed some marketing.  A local author, who happened to be my father, wrote two sweet children’s books but needed collateral with which to promote them. All around me were professionals who would and could not afford the prices of large marketing companies with slick language and high overhead, translated into high prices.

Mission accepted:  create marketing company and service these kinds of strapped professionals, who are excellent at their professions, who see value in marketing, but who do not take—or cannot take the time to work on their own marketing initiatives. Furthermore, many of them acknowledge that the skills necessary to market their business are not necessarily their own best skills.  A seasoned and excellent attorney, for example, may not be the best at writing accessible language for his website or marketing materials.  And I don’t claim to be suited to write a legal brief.

So…there it is:  Mission accomplished, in the way of happy and satisfied professional clients enjoying increased business and revenue because of the marketing efforts of K2M Creative Media.