Oakland, CA Economic Gardening client, Mannequin Madness wins $100K technology contest from Intel

One of our prize Oakland Economic Gardening http://sustainablebiz.org/ clients has just won a
nationwide competition – and $100,000 – from Intel Corp in its annual The
World of Difference contest.

The contest is meant to help small businesses
create a profitable and thriving future with technology. (
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?release_id=107668)

Judi Henderson-Townsend of Mannequin Madness http://www.mannequinmadness.com/ , a used store mannequin
reseller, was selected from more than 2300 businesses entries from across
the country for her proposal to use leading-edge technology to boost the
growth of her business.

Judi was referred to our EG program shortly after she launched her first
website. At the time, Judi was running a one-person business, and much of
her time was taken up with exhausting telemarketing campaigns trying to find
new retail customers for her store mannequins.

Our initial report identified that she had a huge opportunity on the web,
and we encouraged her to work with Ron Blaise of Net Results to optimize her
site for web traffic. They clicked from the beginning, and the results have
been almost miraculous. In 2.5 years, Judi has tripled her sales. Almost 90%
of her new business is generated from search engine traffic. The time she
used to spend on telemarketing is now spent on long range planning and
promoting her business.

Along the way, Ron helped Judi implement a custom shopping cart that among
other things automatically pumps all sales data into Quickbooks, thereby
eliminating a lot of manual data entry. (Judi’s CPA is now pushing all her
e-commerce clients to do the same thing.)

We also introduced Judi to Contribute II, an inexpensive Macromedia product
that allows end users to update their web pages as if they were updating a
Word document. Being able to make her own changes to her web pages saved
Judi a couple of hundred dollars a month in update fees to her web
developer. Plus, it speeded up the update process. (Like a lot of
entrepreneurs, Judi’s pretty finicky – when she sees a change she wants to
make, she wants to make it now :-))

I mention all of this as an example of how powerful the new web-based
technologies can be, especially for small businesses, where the
entrepreneur’s time and attention is often the limiting resource to the
growth of the business.

Judi is the best client we have ever had in the program. Show her an idea
that will make her business better, and whatever it takes, she gets it done.
Judi has learned to climb up on the technology wave, so that her technology
is now driving revenue growth, customer service, and cost reduction all at
the same time.

Just before Judi left for New York City to participate in the final round of
the contest, she sent me an email telling me that I had changed her life and
her business forever by introducing her to web marketing and hooking her up
with Ron.

Of course, I only did what I have done for lots of local businesses –
identify an opportunity and suggest some next steps. Very few have seized
the opportunity the way Judi did. I didn’t change her life or her business,
she did. But it sure is nice to have something to do with Judi’s success.

The biggest frustration that I have experienced in doing economic gardening
is identifying opportunities for so many businesses that never fully follow
through. But every once in a while, along comes a Judi and that makes it all
worthwhile.

Regards,
Terry

__

Terry O’Keefe

Sustainable Business Alliance and
Berkeley-Oakland Economic Gardening

510-282-5151