About
The Problem We Solve
Do you need more clients or customers?
We provide services and training for small locally-focused businesses that need to be more visible on the internet
in order to acquire more customers.
Holistic Web Presence takes an unusual approach. We educate our clients to do as much for themselves as they want to do. As we develop a method of improving a client’s online visibility, we capture and share that knowledge through online training. All our clients get access to that knowledge and know-how.Holistic is a skills-based services company. We hire smart, run a modern virtual operation with staff in the U.S. and the Philippines. We train, look after and pay our staff well.
As a result, we have a high level of staff retention rarely losing anyone.Offshore and working smart. You will notice that half our company is offshore. This means we hire English-speaking, graduate-level, very smart people with a strong work ethic. We can pay them well and yet save on costs at the same time. This enables us to get more done with less, thus passing the cost savings on to our clients.
Just think about it. No office costs, no infrastructure costs. Our staffing costs are a fraction of the rate of more traditional companies. Like it or not the world is round and we are competing in a global economy.
To be competitive it is vital to leverage technology and the global community.
Our Values and Mission
Do a Great Job for our Clients, Helping them to Grow their Businesses
- Measure our own performance on the success of our clients
- Be smarter than other companies offering similar services
- Continuously figure out better more efficient or more effective ways to get things done
- Become experts in the things we do
- Focus on the things that make the biggest difference
- Aid, Educate and Enable our clients to do as much for Themselves as they Can and Want to do
- Achieve Revenue and Profitability Growth Goals
Beliefs are often Self-fulfilling
What does it take to be successful?
What role does belief play in success?
The “SECRET”, you are what you think about.
If you believe something is true then in all likelihood it probably is, at least for you.
- Your beliefs, how much you really believe and commit, can create the reality and therefore justify those beliefs.
- If you believe you can be successful, and commit yourself to it, then you probably can be successful.
- If you are not really convinced that you will be successful, and therefore hedge your bets, then you are much more likely to stay stuck on the fence of life
Need a great bookkeeper? We use the QuickBooks services of:
Columbus Bookkeeping & Accounting Services
5500 Saltzgaber Road Groveport,
Ohio 43125
(614) 205-5676
A True Story
BANKRUPT!
Back in 2010, I found myself working in a business that was failing.
Not a good word for any small business owner or employee. Bankruptcy is bad news and traumatic for the owners of a business as well as the employees of that business. You know the statistics, 80% of small businesses fail. So it is not unusual, especially in these economic times, for people to suddenly find themselves out of a job.
The question is: if you find yourself in this situation what do you do about it?
Post-Bankruptcy: a Phoenix Shall Arise?
This story however is not about the bankruptcy itself, rather it is the tale of three salespeople, Jerry, Nancy, and Fred, and what they did after the bankruptcy.
Two of the salespeople went on to create successful businesses and one failed. They were all good salespeople. All started from the same point. What was the difference between them and what caused their successes and the failure?
When the company failed, the salespeople, like anyone in that position, naturally went through an emotional roller coaster and realized that they would need to find alternative jobs. Jerry, Nancy, and Fred having been the top salespeople in the company for an extended period had achieved a very good income and standard of living. In part, this was due to their sales performance but it was also due to annual pay rises.
As they thought about the process of finding a job in another company, they realized that it may not be a given that they would be able to immediately maintain the same income level. This is a common problem long-standing successful employees face.
At the core of it, their reason to get a job would be to work for a company that would do the marketing necessary to generate a flow of leads that they could turn into sales. Don’t get me wrong, they were capable of developing their own opportunities but the problem is that it would, by nature, be a very slow and inefficient process. A process unlikely to enable them to generate enough income to live on or maintain their standard of living.
Be an Employee Again or Start a Business?
This is where I come in. Knowing these people and their strengths very well I encouraged them to consider starting their own regional-based businesses. Essentially doing what they did before but doing it for themselves, rather than working for someone else.
Conversely, they knew me and had some idea of what I could do in relation to generating leads for them through online visibility.
I saw raw talent in these people and knew I could help them by doing what I loved. Namely online marketing and I could also build a business around it.
They were all very effective salespeople, experts in their fields and they knew their products very well. I knew that all they needed was leads. I was very confident that given a flow of incoming leads, they would all do a great job of turning those prospects into sales.
Holistic Web Presence was Born
They invested what savings they had in the new business and began by injecting the same energy and singleness of purpose they had applied to being top salespeople.
Hence we partnered. Holistic Web Presence was born, initially focused on helping these three people to create and grow their businesses. Jerry and Nancy immediately “went for it”, investing what savings they had and applying the same energy and singleness of purpose they had applied to being top salespeople.
To achieve this, he invested a just little in the business, being somewhat skeptical that it would provide him enough income in the short term.
Fred on the other hand was cautious by nature and felt that he had to protect his family by easing into a business in small steps. To achieve this, he invested a just little in the business, being somewhat skeptical that it would provide him enough income in the short term. While doing that, he sought other forms of income by doing contract work of various types to supplement his income.
Jerry had a backlog of clients and projects that he was able to develop to carry him over for a while. While he was doing that I focused on building his website and driving visibility at a local city-based level, mostly for the east coast of the U.S. He also funded several Adwords campaigns that we used to generate some immediate initial business. While Adwords did not return a brilliant ROI, we were at least able to create enough extra business to keep him going.
It took about six months and a lot of work to start to see the leads coming in without Adwords and by the ninth month, he was doing very well.
It took about six months and a lot of work to start to see the leads coming in without Adwords and by the ninth month, he was doing very well. At eighteen months Jerry achieved a million-dollar annual run rate and has not looked back since.
Fred with the little he invested in the website wanted to see some results before going further with it. Fred was focused in California and knowing that this was one of the strongest markets for the product, I really wanted him to be successful.
I did way more work on the site than he funded, my intent being to get him some initial results to try to convince him to go after it more aggressively. After about four months we achieved some good traction with it ranking quite well in Orange County. He did not invest in Adwords at all though.
As we increased the visibility of his site I attempted to talk to him several times but found it hard to get hold of him on the phone. This was a concern to me, in that I knew if people call as a result of visiting a website they generally expect someone to answer the phone! It also made it difficult to generate more content for the site. If I called Fred he would sometimes take many days to get around to calling me back.
Nancy reports a really good revenue level and is so busy she is hiring staff to keep up with it.
He simply did not hear the phone!
I discovered that the reason he was erratic in returning my calls was because he was busy doing project work on a noisy building site. He simply did not hear the phone and by the time he had a chance to call it was late in the evening.
Nancy was a completely different character. Nancy was also a bit of a skeptic and decided to engage with an alternative web development company based in India. She did this in order to drive down costs and execute very quickly. After about six months, little traction, and several thousand dollars out of pocket we re-connected and started working together again.
From there Nancy’s story is similar to Jerry’s, with her business focused on Texas and the mid-west. She reports a really good revenue level and is so busy she is hiring staff to keep up with it.
For Fred, the net of his approach, his belief that investing in web presence was unlikely to produce results, turned out to be a correct, completely self-fulling prophesy.
Fred’s attitude was that he would “believe it when he saw it”. His level of skepticism was such that he invested the minimum, not really convinced that it would work. The resulting lead generation from his online presence was mediocre at best and when he did get something, he was rarely available to answer the phone.
For Fred, the net of his approach, his belief that investing in web presence was unlikely to produce results, turned out to be correct.
He gave up on the website after about nine months, right at the time Jerry’s business was ramping. He got a job working for a company selling the same product he was before which only lasted a few months. What he is doing today, I have no idea…
For Jerry, the net of his approach, total commitment once he made a decision, was that he ramped quickly and is now a leader in his market with a very good business revenue level and reputation. He is highly visible online in a range of places.
As Fred was not fully in the game we jointly made the strategic decision to re-focus Jerry’s online visibility in California. We were able to acquire Fred’s website at a low cost, develop it further and use it as a vehicle to drive more leads to Jerry.
For me, this was a challenging time. I went through the first year without making any significant profit or earning a living.
By doing a great job for them they have become advocates for Holistic and have helped me to gain additional clients.
Income at that point barely covered the costs of running the business.
Over time, however, Jerry and Nancy have been able to increase their spending on marketing as their revenues have grown. By doing a great job for them they have become advocates for Holistic and have helped me to gain additional clients.
By doing a great job for our new clients we have gained even more clients.
A Major Life Learning
Stuck on the fence of life
“If you believe you can be successful, and commit yourself to it, then you probably can be successful”
What I find most fascinating about this story is the way both Jerry and Fred proved that their beliefs were correct. Jerry believed that it would work out and committed himself to make that belief come true. Fred on the other hand did not believe it would work and proved to himself that he was right, it didn’t.
A major learning for me, therefore, is that “your beliefs, how much you really believe and commit, can create the reality and therefore justify those beliefs“.
In other words, “if you believe you can be successful, and commit yourself to it, then you probably can be successful“.
Conversely, “if you are not really convinced that you will be successful, and therefore hedge your bets, then you are much more likely to stay stuck on the fence of life“.
Discontinued Pages
- Video Confessions – Holistic Web Presence
- Google Map Pack
