New Harbor Design: How It Works

A lot of people have been asking me to give a little detail as to how New Harbor Design works and why we provide the services we do.

First let me explain what New Harbor Design is and why we are different from every other marketing company out there.

New Harbor Design is a design and marketing service company. This means that we provide a wide array of services to help you with your marketing and design projects and achieve your ultimate sales goals. That sounds pretty generic. Let’s get into it a little deeper…

New Harbor vs. well…Everybody

Okay so how are we different from “Joe Shmo Flashy Web Design?” Simple.

Joe wants to sell you every service under the sun and wants to charge you a ton for each individual service. He doesn’t understand that you have a budget and, though you want or need everything he offers, your budget just doesn’t allow for that.

We know you need a ton of different services and in order to be successful you need to implement them consistently on a weekly, often daily, basis. We also know you can’t afford to do this! So we made it affordable for you. For one price you can have access to everything we offer and as many times as you need it. With us, you get the fun of owning an entire marketing and design department without any of the liability and hassle.

The Owner Operator Conundrum

You know you need marketing. You can’t afford not to market your business. Small to mid-size businesses, especially owner operated ones, first look to market their business themselves…in their spare time.

Spare time marketing equals spare time results.

But you have to market in your spare time because you can’t afford to spend your precious work hours on anything other than running your business. Plus, you can’t afford to pay or even manage employees in order to market your business. Even more, every company specializes in so many different things, it would be a full time job just to manage all of the different marketing companies out there!

The Options: Pros and Cons

Until now there were only two options if you wanted to have someone else handle your marketing and design needs. First, you either hired a staff, managed them, trained them, and paid them. You dealt with workers comp, human resource issues and you still ended up working just as hard as before. Or, you hired a web design company and a social networking person, an email marketing company and maybe even a printer designer. You then would have to deal with all of their different requirements, their schedules, their deadlines, their invoices and you still end up spending more time managing them then you should.

Notice I said, until now…

The New Harbor Solution

It is so simple: One Fee, One Contact, No Hassle, No Stress. We just do it. For one affordable monthly fee you get an entire design and marketing team. But you don’t have to manage them. You only have to deal with one person, in most cases it’s me Adam, the owner (me). That means you have an accessible professional who knows how to market businesses like yours and who will always make himself available to discuss your needs.

Adam is very detailed and consistent with his work. He is very passionate about what he does and the quality he puts forth. -Rick, C9 Balloons

Still not sure? That’s fine. Just email me or give me a call. I am more than happy to discuss anything you need.

Don’t forget, we want things to be simple with no hassle and no stress so you are not going to get some pushy polished sales presentation. You just get quality work with good people at an affordable price.

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Planning for Growth? In a recession? Really?!

Wow, we’ve spent the last couple years devoting all of our time to the challenges of a bad economy. “Downsizing” and “bankruptcy” have been on the lips of everyone from news anchors to home based business owners. At times it has seemed insane to try and start a company in the middle of this economic wasteland. Even crazier, why would you prepare for growth?

My fellow business owners here in California and I have a saying,”if you can run your business in California, you can run it anywhere.” That’s a sad but very true statement. California is one of the worst states to start a business in. There is so much opportunity but the cost sometimes outweighs the potential. Throughout this recession I’ve added to the slogan saying, “if you can grow a business in this recession, you can grow it any time.”

Our flagship company, New Harbor Design is growing daily and we are even strategizing and planning for rapid expansion in the very near future. I’m always reluctant to tell people this as I don’t want to “jinx” the company or get our hopes up. Even more I don’t want to come off as arrogant or, worse, stupid if we don’t expand. I’ve second guessed spending the energy on growth questioning whether we should keep going and then just cross that bridge when we get to it. Regardless, we’re still planning for growth.

Today I got an e-mail from my favorite business magazine, Entrepreneur. I was pleasantly surprised when I noticed a new article “9 Ways to Prepare for Growth and Success.” This piece was very encouraging as I’m not alone in planning for growth. Even better, a lot of the tips they give are already on our list which makes me feel that we’re on the right track.

Take a moment and look over their tips. Are these suggestions on your list for growth? I looked down the list and created a mental report card both for my company and for the companies I’ve worked for in the past who have not faired so well during their growth. It is astounding how much these mere suggestions play a huge role in success and failure so much so that I would not refer to them as “tips” but rather “laws” for proper growth.

Check it out. It’s important.

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Top 5 Reasons Brands Fear Social Media

I’ve been meaning to share this link with everyone for awhile now. Online Marketing Trends posted an article on the top five reasons brands fear social media. It’s really interesting and it makes a lot of sense to me.

I’ve talked to a lot of my clients over the last couple of years and all of them have some reason why they are NOT online. When it all boils down, the main reason I’m finding, other than lack of time, is that they just don’t understand it. They don’t get how it works for their business and they just can’t see the point in spending energy on it. At times I see where they are coming from.

I’ve written before about how you must really understand social media in order to make a major impact. Every one of the five reasons listed in this article can be successfully dealt with easily as long as you have a firm understanding if the medium.

I’m reminded of that old saying, though I’m sure it never was meant for social media, “people fear what they don’t understand.” Well it applies here. You’ll never know that your brand will survive and even thrive in social media until you learn to understand it.

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Tweet Less: Get More (Clicks That Is)

Dan Zarrella is always full of in depth studies. His website danzarrella.com is like a living text book on social media. I was digging through the archives today and came across his study on the click through rates (CTR) of links posted on Twitter. I’ll let Dan explain…

Tweet Much? Don’t Expect a High CTR. New data I’ve been working on seems to indicate that the more frequently you Tweet links, the fewer clicks you’ll get.

His post really goes into the details of why this is. I’ve often said, with no real data to back me up, that people posting endless links for their products won’t get them a valid ROI. This seems to back me up a little.

If you want your Tweet to get noticed and ReTweeted, you should slow down your posting rate.

If you’ve got a moment, his post is really worth a read.

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Amazing Vector Illustrations

I absolutely love vector art. Adobe Illustrator has got to be one of the best programs ever made and the talent of the people using it keeps growing.

Smashing Magazine has a list of some amazing illustrations from around the world. Be sure to check them all out.

Here are some of my favorites.

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Finding the Pain: How to Start Improving Customer Experience – Part 2

Yesterday, we learned that “finding the pain” with your customers could mean a huge difference in your overall customer experience. I even provided you with some working examples on how other companies are doing this.

Today, I want to quickly sum things up and discuss how you actually “find the pain.”

The best way to do this it to simply have a conversation. Talk with your customers. You could even implement a survey in order to get a large sampling with very little effort. However, I have found that actually talking with your customers takes things a step further and even earns some customer loyalty in return. At New Harbor, we do both. We send a quarterly survey to our clients asking them to provide us with feedback. But, “how can we make things better, or even more fun” is always a part of ongoing client conversations.

Ask your customers what they don’t like about buying from you. Do they feel that the sales reps are not knowledgeable? Are the people who answer the phone too eager to get the sale? Is it too cold in the office? What is their pain? At first they may think there isn’t one. After all, they came in didn’t they? But probe a little. What is the “bummer” in their whole buying experience? The “bummer” is the subtle weakness in their time with you. It’s the fact that they found what they wanted easily on the shelf but had to wait in line too long to buy it. Or, the staff was friendly, but you could tell that they had a lot going on and just wanted to get you on your way so they could get back to what was on their list. See, it doesn’t have to be something huge like the examples I gave yesterday. It just has to be…well..a bummer.

One example I may find when surveying this website is that “the content is great and relevant, but I have to set aside a lot of time to read it because the posts are too long.” See, not the end of the world but it’s a bummer.

It is important to note that you don’t want to ask just one customer. If you do this, you’ll end up changing the thermostat for the old lady who’s cold and forcing the rest of your clientele to sweat. Talk to everybody.

Also, talk to your staff. What are some things that they are seeing in your company? Are they finding that there are a lot of customers that are bored by how long it takes to write up an order? Maybe they don’t have a lot of the answers when their customers have questions. It is important to get a lot of opinions from both your staff and your customers.

Now that you’re armed with a list of “pains,’ head over to your competitors’ place. Watch their clients. Do they look to be experiencing the same pains as yours? Why or why not? If they aren’t having these issues start to see how you can implement similar strategies. I’m not telling you to copycat your competitors but it is kind of hard to create a better experience than them if you have a worse one already. Use this time to level things out before trying to take the lead.

In the end, it is all about subtle changes. You don’t need to make sure everyone that walks into your office gets greeted with champagne and caviar. Find out what’s bumming them out and fix it. That could make all the difference.

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Finding the Pain: How to Start Improving Customer Experience – Part 1

The other day I wrote about Virgin America’s customer experience and how customer experience can make a huge difference in your company’s success. I’ve received a lot of great feedback regarding that post so thank you the people who commented, e-mailed or even tweeted it to someone else.

In response, people have noted that the best customer experiences seem to be in high end markets. True, largely there are the hotels that cost $500 or more a night or the airlines that cost twice as much as the others. But there are many companies who are improving customer experience regardless of their price point. Believe me when I say that customer experience doesn’t have to be expensive. It just has to be thoughtful.

Recently I’ve given a lot of thought to the idea of customer experience specifically about how I could improve it within my own company. Like anything in business, starting is the hardest part.

So how does someone start to improve the buying experience for their customers? It’s easier than you think.

Finding the Pain
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Sundry Saturday II

Okay, this week we’ve got a completely random assortment of things from the web.

We’ve got really good beadspreads, geeky apology cards and luxury toiletries in 3oz increments.

Let’s dive in shall we?
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