Catching up with masseuse Tina

For a new business, finding customers or clients - and keeping them - is crucial.

Last year we introduced you to three start-up businesses. We've been catching up with two of them to see how well they've done at picking up customers.

One of our start-ups is Tina Ellis, a mother of two who has decided to go it alone in the massage business.

Her plan last September was to provide massages to people at their place of work to reduce stress.

Aromatherapy

She'd done various massage and aromatherapy courses, bought a portable couch and had received help from the Prince's Trust in the form of a start-up loan.

Four months on, Tina has her first serious business customer.

She spends one day a month giving 15-minute, at-the-desk massages to the staff at the Beacon Youth Centre, near where she lives in Essex.

And she seems to be touching a nerve.

"You get stressed out in any business with a heavy workload. We thought that this would be one way of relieving the pressure," says the centre's Emer McNeela.

Christmas promotion

But the new contract didn't just fall into her lap; there's been quite a lot of hard work put into getting it.

"I've worked hard to start a new business, learning who to target and what to say," explains Tina.

At Christmas, she leafleted about 200 homes in her area and sent out letters to various businesses.

She created a Christmas promotion that was built around the idea of buying a friend a massage as a gift for Christmas.

The idea seemed good in theory, and it did work to an extent, but without any research, it's very hard to judge the success of her own marketing campaign.

Expenditure

"It can be difficult when you don't get a lot of feedback from the leaflets you sent out. I delivered 200 to homes near where I live and then sent out 10 a week for six weeks to various companies, " says Tina.

Big businesses often employ advertising and marketing agencies who in turn employ firms to measure the success of their campaigns.

But for smaller start-ups, this type of expenditure is likely to be beyond their means.

Another start-up business that Rob visited in Chesterfield last autumn was the Golf Cafe.

Electrician Patrick Ord came up with the idea for an indoor golf centre which uses computer simulators to give players a full game without having to brave the elements.

"We knew we had a great idea and a prime location, but it's not gone as well as we'd have liked," admits Patrick.

The business got off to a slow start - they were depending heavily on the local newspaper, the Chesterfield Times, to pay the Golf Café a visit and write a favourable article.

"The Times is like the Bible, and we knew we needed some decent editorial coverage to get us noticed. We were astounded that we were not picked up on sooner," says Patrick.

The Times did come eventually, but by that time, in the run-up to Christmas, Patrick and his team were already pushing harder with other marketing means.

After a combination of invitation letters, free demos and radio publicity, customers started visiting in decent numbers.

Through the Prince's Trust, Tina has had the benefit of a mentor and regular meetings with a business adviser to help her through the early stages.

Knowledge

Tina's mentor is a reflexologist, and she has helped Tina come up with different ideas and ways of doing things.

She's helped Tina with advice on what newspapers to target.

"She has knowledge of the area I work in. She is great at coming up with ideas - sometimes that can be difficult when you can't see the wood for the trees," says Tina.

While Patrick and the two friends he's running the business with have had help and advice from Business Link on a day-to-day basis, they are pretty much on their own now.

But the Café has only been fully open since mid-October, so it's still early days.

You're not going to be on full throttle for the first few months Business support manager Pat Fiztpatrick

"If you tell me a business that is up and running and flat out from day one, I'll tell you a business that really isn't telling the truth," maintains Pat Fitzpatrick, business support manager with the Prince's Trust.

According to Pat, a new business will probably only have two or three leads to start with, and they'll be lucky if even one of those turns into a contract.

The key is to make use of all possible means to market your idea. Advertising and PR are good ideas if you can afford them, but also use your friends for informal advice and PR.

For the Golf Café, the Christmas break was hopefully a turning point.

The venue was booked by numerous local businesses for their Christmas events and in the daytime they were busy with clients with leisure time to kill.

The crunch will come now that everyone is back to work. Will the customers keep on coming?

"Because we believed in the concept and knew we had a good location we quite wrongly thought that people would automatically find us," says Patrick.

"We realised that that's not the case and we need to get more public awareness.

"We're quite confident that once people have been in that 70-80% of people do come back and we get repeat bookings."

Tina agrees that it takes time to build up your clientele.

"You have to keep focused. Sometimes it can be difficult juggling everything - bringing up two children, going on courses, building up a business," she says.

"You have to keep positive and focused."

Both Tina and Patrick have learned that you can't take it for granted that customers will come your way.

But once you've pleased one customer, word of mouth can be your most powerful marketing tool.

Remember Patrick and Tina?

They both set out to run their own businesses last autumn - so let's find out how they are getting on.

The good news is that they are up and running and people are getting to know about them.

The not-so-good news is that they both need more customers.

Tina, the masseuse, has a couple of customers who have come from contacts and some direct mail.

Patrick and his colleagues have depended on PR and a bit of advertising to attract the customers.

They've had quite a busy Christmas but it was a slow start.

They both face a common problem for new businesses - what's called a vicious circle:

New businesses need promotion
BUT
Promotion is expensive
BUT
Small businesses often don't have much money to pay for it
BUT
They find it hard to attract customers to bring in the money

Promoting the business

We are surrounded by promotion from businesses.

Open a newspaper, watch a football match, search the web and even when a bus goes by - we see a message that a company wants to tell us.

Promotion comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes: