How to find customers

To find customers for your micro business, you must think like them.

In the movie, Caddyshack, actor Bill Murry plays a golf greenskeeper that must deal with a pesky gopher. He tries to think like a gopher when he says,

“I got to get into this dude’s pelt and crawl around for a few days. Who’s the gopher’s ally? His friends. The harmless squirrel and the friendly rabbit.”

You should ask yourself a few questions to think like your customers:

Where do they live?

• Where do they shop?
• Where do they spent time?
• What do they read? Magazines, newspapers, websites?
• What internet sites do they visit?
• When are they home?
• Where do they go for information or products?

Here’s an example:

My daughter, Emily, wanted to start teaching piano lessons to children. She knew that she needed to reach a child’s parents, specifically the mother, with her advertising. She knew that many mothers communicated with each other on-line and thought that would be a quick, low cost way to advertise. Facebook is a great tool, but wouldn’t really work because Emily was connected with her friends there, but not mothers. Instead, she went to where the mothers chatted on-line. She put out a post on our local homeschool e-mail list. Within a few weeks she had three students and then word of mouth took over. One student’s mother told another mother and soon Emily had seven students and was turning away more interested customers.

Carol Topp, CPA