We’re excited to be starting this new adventure with Shepherd Dog, so naturally we’ve been sharing our excitement with family, old friends, new friends… basically anyone that’s interested. And in doing so we’ve found that frequently the first question we get from people is, “How do you market something like that?”

Hmm… that is a good question. We never sat down and wrote up a true “marketing plan” for our business. We have a target market of small local businesses and non/not for profits, but no step by step plan for how to reach this market. Which some people might think is crazy… two business majors, starting a business, without a marketing plan? What were they thinking? Well, I guess we’ve both always had this mutual belief that if you do “good work”, the work will come. And when we say “good work” we mean doing things the “right way”, not cutting corners, and doing work with good intentions or for a good cause (not just for the sake of making money). We’ve both always had this belief, and we’ve discussed it before, but never really thought we need an official marketing plan to make sure we continue to have work.

So when people asked this question, which seems to be a very popular topic, we didn’t really have a good official “business-y” answer for it. After being asked about it so frequently we still haven’t come up with an official marketing plan, but we do have an answer:

Our plan is to get to know people. Learn about them and what they do. And when we find someone that we feel truly needs our help, or that could greatly benefit from our services, we’ll tell them about what we do and hope that they will let us help them.

We don’t want to push ourselves into places we may or may not be able to make a positive impact for the sake of getting work. We want to help people who need help. This may be crazy, and so far business has been slow, but we’ve met some great people, helped out with some good causes, and we do have some things in the works.

We’re going to continue moving forward with this “not plan” and see if there’s room for it in the business world or if we truly are just crazy. :) After all, you live and you learn, right?