When you shovel snow from your driveway, you have an easy metric to measure your progress. Where you’ve shoveled is clean, where you haven’t shoveled is not. Most people will not spend time shoveling the clean spots, as it will not get the job done any better or faster.

Metrics in your business can guide you the same way. In addition to measuring financial goals, they can be used to measure the success of various efforts you make to grow your business. Advertising campaigns, direct mail, networking events, Adwords, SEO, all can have a positive effect on your top line sales. If you control your associated expenses toward those efforts, you can measure the dollars spent vs the return for each of those dollars. In essence, it will help you to shovel only the parts of the driveway with snow on it. [Read more…]

Internet of Things (IoT) used to be a niche product for technical geeks. With Amazon Echo, Google Home and Apple’s Homekit, these products are moving mainstream. Your clients hear about this stuff every day. If you get ahead of the curve, you can position yourself as the local expert at a handsome rate.
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In a previous post, we discussed Digital Immigrants, an underserved market segment that might be attractive to computer techs looking to expand their business. This often-overlooked client group consists of residential consumers over age 60.

How does one go after this market? What is expected of you if you do?

Finding Clients in this Market Segment

With any market segment, you need to be seen where the clients are looking. If you’re selling Ohio State t-shirts, you don’t go to Michigan. Older clients are much less likely to be found looking at social media, for instance. They’re less likely to pick a business card off the board at a coffee shop.

Digital Immigrants are of an age where they like to deal with people they know, or failing that, with people their friends know. The sweet spot with seniors is visiting them in their homes and putting your hands on their precious computer. Consequently, they need to trust the person they’ll be inviting into their home and with their personal information.

A warm, confident referral from a friend of theirs goes a very long way in making them feel comfortable with you.
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