LEADERSHIP

Continuing our interview with entrepreneur Jesse Flores of Fifth Room Storage, today includes thoughts on marketing, financing, and building a business as a married person.

1) How are you marketing your business?

Marketing is art and science. And it’s tough. Especially when you’re doing something new that nobody has heard of. You have a very brief amount of time, milliseconds, to communicate who you are and why you matter to someone who is skeptical that you can offer them anything valuable. To that end, I think it’s important to focus your efforts on the people you think have the greatest need for what you’re providing and go to where they are in both the digital and physical worlds.

Our strategy consists of both a digital and physical component. We have gone through the process of optimizing our website for “Search” so that we can hopefully get found when people search for “storage center in Atlanta” or some such thing. We also have AdWords, which allows banner ads to pop up based on over a dozen or two keywords we pay for. We also monitor social media such as Facebook and Twitter to stay in touch with customers, offer promotions, and advertise. In the case of Facebook, we have ads targeted very deliberately towards target demographics.

Physically, we use the Post Office’s Every Door Direct Mail program, which allows us to target individual mail routes we think are “high potential.” This program offers reduced rates for standard types of mailing and so the purpose is entirely about creating impressions. We’re also investigating some goodwill/outreach options because want community to be a part of our brand.

Finally, we’re always looking to work with professionals in other industries with customers tangential to ours. We’ve reached out to home organizers, realtors, mom groups, etc to offer our services through their channels.

Whatever methods we choose, though, we make sure to measure, measure, measure. Marketing can quickly become expensive and you want to make sure that you’re getting a good return on investment. Some mediums, like mail, can be difficult to measure whereas others, like Google, give almost too much information. For those “hard to measure” mediums, we offer unique promotional codes so that we know whether a particular tactic resulted in (and how many) appointments.

2) Do you have financing? If not, how did you get started without it?

We’ve self-funded the business. And I actually think that this is a really important point. Self-funding forces you to take it seriously, to put some skin in the game. I also think it makes it easier to appreciate when you start to get a return. It’s your profit earned by your efforts. Finally, self-funding makes you credible when you “seek funding” because it demonstrates you had “skin in the game.” We do have a plan to seek funding, though, once we hit our target growth rate. But, we want to be able to show off results, not ideas when we come to that bridge.

Starting a business is cheaper than its ever been, thanks to technology. At least once a week I’m on the Google Apps Marketplace checking out new services intended to help business more efficient or productive. I’ve used outsourcing tools like Odesk or elance to help with site development or marketing. Small businesses can now take advantage of the global labor market thanks to tools like these. They cut costs tremendously and let you experiment in a low-cost environment.

Depending on your business plan, your needs, and your credit, there are also a ton of small business loans out there that are helpful. I recommend BB&T as a banking partner; they’re pretty good at lending to small business according to Entrepreneur.com and they’ve been willing to work with us, even though we haven’t asked for anything yet.

3) Do you have a time frame for success, and what is your plan if the business doesn’t work and you have to shut it down?

“Success” is an abstract term. We don’t need to be profitable to be successful (remember Amazon?), but we do need customers and we need to be showing aggressive growth. With the latter two, we can find funding.

At a minimum, we have contracts with vendors that keep us committed through at least the end of 2012. I’m not really worried that we’ll default or have to break them.

4) Since you’re married, what advice do you have for other married people who want to start a business?

Make sure your spouse is on board. It’s tough to start a business and there are a lot of obstacles. Having someone who is willing and able to mitigate any stress you might experience is really important. If your spouse isn’t on board, it will be much harder.

Friday we’ll conclude with “the meaning of success.”

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