Seed for Success | Empowering Women Entreprenuers

So much has happened in the past 12 days that I almost don’t know where to begin. Some has been good, some has been bad, and some has been just plain scary!

Let’s start with the good. On Friday, May 16th I spoke with my primary mentor Christina Blenk. It was a great “get to know you” conversation. I think we are going to get along really well. I had two great take-aways regarding my website: 1) make sure your customer “gets it” within 15 seconds of landing on your homepage, and 2) don’t give them too many decisions to make at one time. The first one is so important for a product like mine that requires some education before a purchase. People ask me all the time to further explain my products. I have decided to include a flash component on my homepage that will visually explain what we have to offer at www.redkoala.com. It will require some additional dollars spent, but I am sure it will be worth it in the end.

Her second piece of advice applies to the number of options we give our consumers when designing their art. Instead of taking away some of those options, we decided it would be best to use categories to reduce the number of decision made at one time. For example; I want to offer a large number of size options. However, a long list of sizes can be overwhelming for the average consumer. The solution is to offer small, medium, and large categories and within each of those list 7 sizes. Now the consumer is choosing from one out of 7 instead of one out of 21. It reduces the number of choices that have to be made at one time, without reducing the number of options available. This is great advice for anyone with a complex product being offered over the internet.

I also had a great conversation on the same day with Matt Ledford from Fast Pivot. He’s a very energetic and fun person. I really enjoyed his enthusiasm about my company and his genuine desire to help me achieve my goals of owning a business, while also raising a family. He challenged me to really think about what I’m offering and what people would be willing to buy. He suggested that I offer a lower priced product that consumers would be willing to purchase to “test the waters”. I am working on this, but haven’t come up with the answer yet.

Now on to the bad; my dog needed surgery last Tuesday and has required a great deal of attention. No problem with three kids and a business to start….yeah right! And here’s the scary, on the same day of my dog’s surgery we were hit by a tornado. YIKES! It has been a solid week of cleaning up the mess. I watched them use a crane to lift my beautiful old oak trees over the house for the logging trucks to pick up. Someone was watching over my family when all of those trees fell and only one hit the corner of the house. It was the scariest day of my life, but I feel blessed because no one was hurt. The kids have been slightly traumatized and I’ve worked very hard to get things back to normal for them. So between the dog and the tornado there hasn’t been much time for work. I’ll be busy this week catching up. It always seems like work gets it the way of life and life gets in the way of work. My quest to balance the two continues!

I met with Fast Pivot, my web development company, yesterday. They shared two new website designs with me. Both look great! I really like their vision. Hopefully we can complete the design process soon and move on to functionality. My coder, who wrote the canvas art designer application, is waiting for the new website so he can start the process of putting the application in it. He needs to make sure it works seamlessly with Yahoo’s merchant solutions. This may take some time and I’m anxious to start the process.

This morning my husband, Davis, and I met with Red Koala’s first mentor, Rosemary Coates from The AKA Group. She is an expert in manufacturing and distribution. She’ll be a great asset for us as we begin selling products. Our current production system hasn’t been tested yet, so I’m sure we’ll have plenty of questions for her as our business grows.

For now, we are focused on packaging and shipping. Our products are ordered one-by-one and are all different shapes and sizes. Rosemary suggested we call the big shipping companies and negotiate a rate. I had no idea you could do this. I always assumed that a shipping rate was a shipping rate, end of story. Our homework is to make those calls and position ourselves as a small business, with great growth potential, that needs a discount to meet budget constraints. We’ll see how that goes, but shipping is something we really do need a good rate on. She also suggested that we call around to local box companies to find the best packaging options. After we complete these two tasks we’ll schedule another meeting to go over next steps.

I have a meeting tomorrow with my primary mentor Christina Blenk of AFS Web and WomenOwned.com. I am very excited to speak with her and get her initial feedback of our company and vision.

Stay tuned!

Yesterday was a great day. I have decided to change the entire look and design of my website! I basically told the Fast Pivot team to re-do it all. I want it to be more interactive and have a simple design with a splash of color and GREAT pictures.

The original design was not what I had envisioned, but I didn’t have the resources to change it. My plan was to get everything up and running and at some point down the road (when I was making some money) redesign it. I now have access to a great group of women at Fast Pivot who are going to put together a new look. I am so excited to see what they come up with! Hopefully I’ll have my first peek next week. The planned launch date for the new site is June 30th, but I am going to do everything I can to push that date up. I am SO ready to sell some art!

Speaking of art, I have been working hard on getting the images ready for the site. We have several artists creating hand-painted images just for us. I take each image and painstakingly extract it from the background and get it prepped to be used in the design process. I need to make sure all the detail of the original is maintained. Technology today is truly amazing. When printed, you seriously can’t tell that the image is a reproduction. You can see each paint stroke. This is very important to me. I want the finished piece to look like an original. All of this takes time.

My husband, Davis, who is also the Chief Operations Officer, has been working on the production process. We hope to get to a point pretty quickly where we can buy our own equipment and manufacture these pieces from start to finish. We currently use a printing vendor and each piece is hand stretched at Davis’ family’s art gallery. Hopefully we’ll get too big for the gallery to handle the load. That would be a great problem. Packaging is another big one for us right now. The canvas’ will all be different sizes, and although not breakable like glass, they can be dented, dimpled, or punctured if not properly protected. Our goal this week is to meet with a couple of packaging manufacturers to figure out the best way to ship our products.

We keep moving forward!

It has already been an incredible trip. The response from friends, family, and strangers has been overwhelming. The best thing so far has been the number of people who have been inspired by my accomplishments. It makes me want to work harder and really succeed, so others know they can too!

Since Monday when the announcement was made, I’ve been busy. All three of my kids had the stomach flu – that was fun. I had two meetings with my web developer and an interview with a local newspaper. I spent chunks of my days trying to respond to the unbelievable number of phone calls and e-mails. In between all of that, I’m working on a detailed 90-day plan. It’s a lot, but I have had a huge smile on my face through most of it. I couldn’t be happier.

I had my first call with Fast Pivot, the company that is going to take my website to the next level. I know they are going to do great things! Keep watching and you’ll see a whole new www.RedKoala.com unfold.

On another website topic, the application that will allow you to design art on my site is almost complete! This has been a long road. I started working on it back in November of 2007. Unfortunately, I was told by a couple of people that they could handle this project. Turns out they couldn’t. I did not count on spending so much time looking for a custom coder. Long story short, I am so happy that this part of my journey is almost complete! The day someone purchases a custom canvas on my website, will be one of the happiest days of my life.

The traffic on my site this past Monday and Tuesday was the highest it has ever been. I was so excited to see how many people visited RedKoala.com after the announcement was made. I hope some of those people come back when I have a product to sell. I added this blog feed and a newsletter sign-up to the site. When we are ready to launch our fully functional site we will send out our first newsletter. Please sign-up at www.RedKoala.com.

I also had an interview with the Wall Street Journal, so look for that article in the beginning of June. I’ll share the exact date as soon as I have it.

I’m looking forward to meeting my mentors over the next couple of weeks. There is so much to do and I’m ready to get started. Thank you to everyone who has sent encouraging words. Each message is very special to me.