About Biz-comm, Inc.

We are a company's unofficial board of directors. We're here when you need to vent, bounce ideas, get our advice on running your business. While our core capabilities are in marketing your business, getting leads and closing sales, we've been around enough to have learned from many firms what works and what doesn't.

Officially, our "consulting fees," ie, listening to the vents, offering advice, etc. is in our contracts at $150 an hour. However, for our long time clients, Stephen has spent hours on the phone with no invoice passed along. Patrice, on the other hand, is NOT a phone person. If you want to pick her brain, use email!

We are convinced that a company does best when not listening to "coaches" who often have their own agendas, want to refer what we do out to their own friends. It is usually a death knell when a client informs us that he or she has hired a "coach." Maybe because that client is paying by the hour to be "coached," it has more value for them. We always shake our heads in amazement when we run into this. An analogy: "Too many cooks in the kitchen."

Our core competencies are in communicating our clients' messages to their target markets, using a variety of tool sets, whether that is corporate branding, direct mail, newsletters, websites, press releases, sales materials, ads, TV or radio spots, show displays... well, the list goes on forever. After all these decades, we've been there, done that, and have the t-shirt.

Why do we work in this field?

Well, it isn't the income, trust us. It supports our household, but we could both go get high paying corporate jobs that would do that and much more.

What it does give though is a window into others' business and lives. There is just nothing so satisfying to have made a small struggling company leap up to big time. The emails that we get telling us how our work made them succeed are priceless to us. We are in a position to really make a difference and it is very intoxicating.

The established businesses are also impressed. One of our most passionate testimonials is from a multi-state, millions+ company who has been with us for more than a decade.

While we "give away" our consulting to actual, under contract (read: have spent some money with us over the years), we do not spend time on the phone from total strangers who ask: "What can you do for me? What should I do for my marketing?"

It is amazing the number of phone calls we get like this. Whenever we get one of these, we take a deep breathe, try to be polite, and at some point in the conversation, think to ourselves: "I wonder if they call up a (fill in any professional, ie, doctor, lawyer, accountant), ask for a free advice." Of course they wouldn't think of a free doctor's appointment, but when calling us to analyze what they should do for marketing, it is the same thing. It just doesn't translate into the same value to a company.

We take the time to learn about a company before ever volunteering advice/recommendations, much less write a two year marketing budget. We do not review a company's marketing material, tell them where it succeeds or fails, on the HOPE we could land a client. It's not only not fair to our time and effort, it is not fair to whomever did the previous work. Bottom feeders troll the Internet constantly doing that: find an out dated website of one of our clients (never mind that it was created five years ago and a client has no budget for keeping it state-the-art, that we have let them be online for free for the past two years because they just didn't have the hosting fees, and we KNEW if we pulled them off our server, they would be TOTALLY out of business.... ), and tell our client how out of date it is! We KNOW the site is so '90s and out of date, but our client has no budget to improve.

So, no free advice for a random phone call. Sorry!

We belive in NO SURPRISES when it comes to billing and work.

Each project has its own Letter of Agreement (larger, detailed projects) or a FAX authorization, both of which spell out what the project is, how much it costs, extended third party estimates (printing, postage, etc.) NO project is undertaken without a signed OK.

Exceptions: After a client has been with us a few years, knows how fast we are, etc, if they call or email us with a request, and we deliver immediately, it's on the hour at our contract rate. We only use this method for small, immediate tasks with long time clients who trust us. (And it's cheaper in the long run to use actual time sometimes as opposed to scope/time. If we know the client well, we already know what they want.)

When we accept a new client (and we've refused a few over the years -- it has to be a good fit for both of us), we exchange contracts. One is a general contract covering all aspects of our relationship, including privacy, etc. If web work is part of the scope, then a separate web contract spells out all the aspects of site hosting, including international laws with terrorism, child pornography, etc. (So no bad guys need apply! :-) )

After contracts are exchanged, we do extensive interviewing to determine what the goals are, what budget we have to work with, and then a "mini" marketing plan budget is established. This is NOT to be confused with an indepth marketing plan that is a blue print for your operation, and could be used to secure funding.

To recap:

We are your partners, not your vendor. We help you get to where you are going, offer advice if we think your goal needs adjustment (ie, walk before you run), and provide you tools to grow and run your business. We are NOT vendors. We have no interest in a limited relationship where we have no "skin in the game" of YOUR success. Partners only need apply.

All projects require a 50% deposit, check or credit card. All projects have an expected delivery date, outlined in the project authorization or letter of agreement. If a client holds up completion, due to no fault of Biz-comm, payment is due within 30 days of start date.