How to Start a Business without Any Money by Rachel Bridge

Author:Rachel Bridge
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448132041
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

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One effective – and free – way of promoting your venture is simply to get your customers to do it for you, by good old-fashioned word of mouth. If you can get people talking about your product in a positive way and telling others how fabulous it is, they will promote it far better than you, or, indeed, an expensive advert, could ever do.

When Angus Wielkopolski started selling goats’ milk at his farm near Howden in north Humberside, he got his customers talking about it, and telling other people about it, simply by putting pictures of his customers on the side of the cartons. Now every carton of St Helen’s Farm goats’ milk carries a picture of one of their customers together with a story about the farm and the animals. The picture and the story which goes with it are changed every month and the idea has become so popular there is currently a six-month waiting list of people wishing to be featured.

Angus says: ‘We have a lot of satisfied customers who love our products and they queue up to go on the milk cartons. They feel they are part of a club. They identify with us and the farm and they don’t feel they are just getting an anonymous product from a factory.’

His inspired idea has clearly paid off. Having started out with just 300 goats bought for £40 each, his business, St Helen’s Farm, now has 6,000 goats and is the biggest goats’ milk processor in the UK, supplying all the major supermarkets. The operation also makes goats’ cheese, goats’ yoghurt and goats’ butter, and has a turnover of £26 million and employs 100 people.

Word of mouth works brilliantly for service businesses, too. Lisa Shell has an enviable confession to make: she has never spent a penny on marketing her eponymous architectural practice, which is based in north London. That’s because about 80 per cent of her work comes through word of mouth recommendations. Indeed, despite the current tough economic climate, her practice is in such demand she regularly turns away work.

Lisa, whose firm carries out private residential alterations and refurbishments and employs three people, says: ‘I don’t spend any time or money finding work – people ring me up instead of the other way round. We will often get a call from someone saying they have seen the work we did at a friend’s house and would love to talk to us.’

As well as being an inexpensive way of getting work, there are other advantages to getting business this way.

Lisa says: ‘The benefit is that our clients come to us feeling confident rather than feeling on edge, or that they have to test us, because they have seen what we have done and have heard how it went.’

Study after study shows customers respond far more favourably to personal recommendations from friends or colleagues than they do to paid-for advertising. So how do you go about harnessing it in the most effective way?

The first step

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