Help. Thats why we are proud to present your business on msnbc. Hi, everyone. Im j. J. Ramburg and welcome to your business, the show dedicated to helping your Small Business grow. Have you ever met someone that leaves with you an unforgettable First Impression . Thats the way we felt about janet goodman. We met her at an entrepreneurial conference back in 2 2014 where she was seeking a startup for auto bags designed to help a person with chronic disease like type i diabetes carry supplies. Janet had a lot invested in the company but hitting some road blocks that were causing her fledgling business to sag nate. We decided to give her a helping hand with a your business makeover to see if we could get her Small Business headed in the right direction. Meet janet goodman. Shes the one with the multicolored specks and enormous smile. Shes 66 years old and winding counsel a 25year career as a psychologist in beachwood, ohio to concentrate her efforts on starting her second act as an entrepreneur entrepreneur. Its an unexpected road the day she woke up with blurry vision unquenchable thirst. I always work out, eat well not overweight. It hit me out of the clear blue. Its like where did this come from . Reporter at age 61 janet was diagnosed with type i diabetes which requires constant blood sugar monitoring and insulin injections to regulate the skis disease. If not carefully controlled the condition can easily land you in the hospital or be fatal that was just devastating to me. I think i walked around for a month just near tears the whole time not knowing just even what to do or how to do it. Reporter we first met janet a year ago at a conference for entrepreneurs in nashville. The name of my business is yadabags. Yadabags is a purse thats designed to carry medical equipment for people with chronic disease. So people with diabetes can put all their paraphernalia in it and actually find it. Reporter she came to us to ask a question on camera about getting funding on her business. Since yadabag is a startup im really interested in how to go out and get funding, if i dont want to go into any more debt than ive already gone into. Reporter it was inspiring. Heres a woman at retirement age, but instead of heading out to the golf course she wanted to start a new career helping herself and others with diabetes. I couldnt retire truthfully, and sit around and just play bridge or sit by a pool. I get antsy. I like to be busier. Reporter when we met janet shed already invested 60,000 of her own savings, but she was a little lost. She believed wholeheartedly that there was a market for her business, but didnt quite know what to do next. So we enlisted a team to try and help her out. Coulda dabags really be a Successful Company . Or should she end it here and not throw good money after bad. Our first call was to marketing expert denise blasovic from the s3 agency. Denise and i had a hearttoheart. Wed both been a little skeptical that the company could work. I want your honest opinion. When you saw the yadabag the first time you thought not a bag for me. So did i. Reporter but we were just a focus group of two, and not the target market. So we decided that if we really wanted to know if this bag had a customer base, wed have to take it on the road to get more feedback. Thank you very much for your help. Have a great day, ladies. Reporter denise traveled to austin texas, to hand out surveys and conduct a focus group at the taking control of your diabetes conference where janet, her husband, fred and daughter, karen, had a booth with a pretty steady crowd. Well i was surprised in austin there were a lot of people who reacted positively to the bag and more people liked the name. I didnt expect it either. And the catch phrase Yada Yada Yada was made legendary in one of the best known tv shows of all time. The Popular Culture tame from seinfeld where wasnt it elaine that i think first said. I met this lawyer we went out to dinner i had the lobster bisque, we went back to my place, Yada Yada Yada i never heard from him again. And it just popped in my head. I said lets call them yadabags. With our hunch about changing the name of the business wrong, we wondered what else we had to learn from the yadabags target market at the conference. The results of the focus group and the survey in austin were mixed. 45 of the respondents thought the bag was attractive and solved the difficult problem of carrying supplies but when asked what they thought the price should be the average answer was 43. That was a big problem for a bag that was costing more than double that to produce. We came back from that research and it wasnt a ton of research, it wasnt Expensive Research but it was research and we came back theyre going new plan, new strategy. It was tough to know theres a market out there for this bag. Yes. Armed with this new information we rolled up our sleeves and started to think about solutions that could get yadabags off and running. Shes aa lot vested in this and a great place that shes coming from but there are a lot of people that have tried to do this and failed. So what we really honed in on how do we make this different and capture whats special so well have a Critical Mass that can make it a viable business. Janet has a lot invested in yadabags, but does she have what it takes to make this business work . Stick around to see what our Makeover Team recommends. Instagram isnt the only social media that depends on visuals to catch the attention of your customer base. Check out these five ways you can utilize images on twitter, courtesy of smallbiztrends. Com. One, bright colors and images and photos get attention. They stand out and make your post pop. Two, horizontal images are best. Long vertical uploads get cut off in certain views and can be difficult to see if fully expanded. Three, share images directly. Click on the little camera icon below the twitter update box to upload straight to the site. Image tweets get double the interaction of a standard link tweet. Four, put words on your imables to convey meaning in a glance. Factoids and motivational quotes on images do well for a business audience. And five tag people or companies in your images. Youll get their attention and if its a positive tweet, they may retweet it. This can be a great way to tap into a larger business following and convert them into customers. When we come back how to manage when youre not a good manager. And can this business be saved . Find out how the your business Makeover Team worked to rebrand and lower the manufacturing cost for the yadabag. American express for travel and entertainment worldwide. Just show them this the American Express card. Dont leave home without it and someday, i may even use it on the moon. Its a marvelous thing oh haha so you can replace plane tickets, travelers cheques, a lost card. Really . That worked . American express timeless safety and security are now available on apple pay. The next evolution of membership is here. The flenlling company say little more than a few steps beyond the idea stage. There is an actual product but the numbers dont add up and there isnt a clear plan on how to turn that around. We have an unusual situation here right now. Every bag we sell we lose money on because it cost us more to produce it than that. This is not terribly unusual at this stage. Especially for a business that started at the dining room table, with janet sewing the first prototypes one by one. I kept cutting up different linings to see what would fit and what it looked like. The first one took about two months to really just sew and create. Once she felt she got the design right she hired someone to do a small but costly production run to see if people would buy the bags. After getting some sales, she was optimistic and ready to produce more. But when she looked into manufacturing in china, which she thought would be cheap, she found that shed have to make 1,000 bags to get the right price. That put her in a chicken and egg situation. Im not willing to risk retirement. If i can get orders and i have to put money in to get product that i know is going to sell i would do that in a minute. With an order for a thousand bags unlikely at this point, we set out to find a solution for her chicken or egg problem, by doing what she thought was impossible finding a domestic small batch manufacturer that was costeffective. And we found just the people to help us out. Janet, i want to introduce you to matthew and tanya. Hi matthew, hi tanya. They are the founder of makers row. Makers row is on online marketplace, we connect Small Businesses and big businesses with american manufacturers to produce products here in the united states. You didnt know about makers row but guess what . We did. So we went and we contacted tanya and matthew and they were a great help to us. You will learn about that in a moment, but theyre going to be help to you going forward, too, because once somebody finds a factory, thats not it right . Thats just the first step. This is a process. Youre choosing a partner that you want to be able to develop a product thats never been built before. Makers row did a little homework for us with an introduction to mitch conn the president of unionware. They helped us surprise janet and fred with a tour of the new work new jerseybased factory where the ordering minimum is 300 pieces, a much easier pill to swallow than 1,000 overseas. Mitch. Nice to meet you also mitch. In is quite a place you have. Lets see your bag. Tell us how much it cost to make this one . Putting it together was 60, not including material. It was labor only. Lets see your bag. Okay heres our bag. Oh. Very nice. And the total cost . The total cost to put it together . Would be around 47, and the material should cost no more than about 7 or 8. Total . Yes. Everything . Oh, i could love him. Would you like to give him a hug . Totally. Mitch explained that the approach to manufacturing in china where labor is inexpensive is less efficient than the way they tackle a wag like janets here in america. We took out almost about 60 steps in manufacturing the bag and thats how we were able to lower the cost. Once we tackled manufacturing, we moved over to marketing. Denise thought the yadabag messaging was not telling the right story. So looking at our positioning, where we are right now, yadabags is a purse with pockets competing against all other purses and medical supply bags. Theres no real focus. So wed like our tagline to be your diabetes your supplies your yada. Brings a smile. I like it. Again your intent. And it tells you what were doing. What was the old one again . Organize with style. But organize with style, i could be at the container style. Although janet liked the new tagline at first, she decided later to change it to organize your diabetes supplies with style. Remember, the research in austin indicated people would only pay about 43 for the bag. So even at the cheaper cost the retail price would be nowhere near that. So denise wanted to expand the target, and to do that she focused on creating not just a product but an entire line something janet had been thinking about before but hadnt yet realized. We want to call the yadabags the classic purse. Its got a classic style. I like that. Uhhuh. Good. It also makes it feel like the company is big. Yes. The idea from denise . Have janet design a cheaper insert bag called the insider. This is when we can reach men, we can reach children we can reach people who have type ii diabetes and still appeal to the women who have type i tie beets our core market who might not have the money for this bag or might not want that style. Denise also had some ideas to revamp janets website. We want to have a happy feeling, nice colors that appeal quee cally to men and women and kids and this here would be a slider. So whatever is featured up here can be featured down here for direct click through. With a plan for marketing and manufacturing in the works, i wanted to turn back to the original question at hand. Should janet spend more money to see if she can get this Company Going or should she call it quits . What did she need to see that would convince her that its worth it to invest more . She told me if she could sell out the bag she currently has, shed feel confident about dipping back into her savings. That means you got to throw spaghetti at the wall you have to think of every single place that you can sell them. Umhum. Marketing is great, but its not great if nobody is seeing it. Right. I got to get them out there. So your homework is think through where you would find a bag like this. Umhum. Go introduce yourself. Give them some bags to put on their shelves, to sell. You could give it to them on consignment if they didnt want to buy them from you. Right. Prove to them theres a market out there. To help janet find marketing and get her bag into the hands of customers we introduced her to several key players that would serve as an informal Advisory Board like suzanne, a diabetes educator who also started make a bag for supplies. Her business didnt make it but she wanted to make sure that janets does. Hi. Hi janet. How are you . Okay suzanne. How are you . And we introduced her to raica barabas, the director of badgirl adventures in cleveland, ohio. They let janet sit in on some of their saturday entrepreneurship classes, opening up an opportunity to bounce ideas off of and network with. Janet hit it off with Christina Castillo wright she offered to help janet work on the new insider concept that denise suggested. Im out here in portland oregon, and i am a help aide designer. With all of the resources at hand, we gave janet a challenge. Pull this all together to relaunch yadabags by november just in time for American Diabetes month. So this was a big day. Oh wow. Really big. Do you have after this day is this the business you think it could be or thought it would be . I think its really moving in the direction that i envisioned. What did you learn . Oh wow. I think the biggest piece for me is feeling like i have some support in developing it and somebody to think with as opposed to trying to figure out all of this stuff out myself which i cant do because i dont know a lot of it. But by the way, youve done an amazing job. No manufacturing experience no design experience, and right. You created a bag. Uhhuh i did, right, i got there. You didnt yet create a business. Well i sort of got there but i didnt get there. Youve got a bag, not a business yet. Ive got a bag. Denise blasovic the ceo of the 3s agency you saw in that piece is here with us now. Hi there. Thank you for all of your help with that piece. Is a pleasure she is such a good cause. You spent so much time with her, what do you think . Will the Company Survive . Is it worth her spending more money . Any new business is a big risk and i think her industry others have tried and failed so her very best chance is to listen exactly to all of the experts that you guys compiled for her. I think if she does that she has a really good fighting chance. All right good we hope so. We want to hear from you, though, do you have any ideas for janet and her company . Should she invest more to keep it going or should she just stop now . Let us know what you think on our Facebook Page or on twitter, we are msnbcyourbiz. Its time to answer some of your business questions. Denise blasvick is sticking around and ben par, cofounder of dominic fund an Early Stage Venture Fund and author of the book captivology the science of capturing peoples attention. Good to see you, ben. Thank you for having me again. All right lets just dive right back in. The first one is about being a manager. How do you build a Strong Management Team when you, yourself, are not a great or experienced manager . I love this question. Because it is the problem, the key problem in so many startups so lets start with you, denise. It is a key problem and so many people dont realize the value of having one and dont get to the point where they need one. I commend this gentleman for saying i need to do this. So where do you go from there . To me the the biggest thing whether or not you use a recruiting team or boot strap you want to make sure you get the right people. If you bring the wrong people in as Management Team the rest of the country will wonder am i ready for this and was this the right decision and not just the right position. Top grading. Com, its a system developed by a gentlemen called dr. Bradford smart. Its all about interviewing. We dont learn how to interview as entrepreneurs. This takes the interviewing process to a completely different place. Its more uncomfortable. Ittic tas longer. Someone has to want to work for your company. You get a lot more insights before they make the commitment to be part of your team. Thats a good point and you have to hire people who you are willing to learn from. Right . You take the first step which is admitting he is not a good manager himself. Is he open minded enough to listen . That leads to my point. You have to hire people who are smarter than you. That is number one. There is a second point to check your ego at the door when you do hire people smarter than you. The greatest are able to recruit smart people who have experience and knowledge better than them and allow them to do their thing. To do the work they do best. If you are not an experienced manager, you hire them and listen and learn and check your ego at the door. You will be a better manager, but you have to start with hiring those people. Great advice. Lets talk about extending your brand. I would like to know more about how to strengthen my or business while focusing on expanding and diversifying. My core business is not very scaleable, but i want to maintain it because thats my bread and butter. What do you think . There is a couple ways to go about it. You can spin it off or have a small theme is dedicated to it. She is showing foresight in thinking about how to make the business move forward faster by looking at growth strategies. Figure out a core group of people focusing on the business and build up the other side. You want to turn the revenue into a new and better business. Its a smart thought that she having. Its a core business that is like the Angel Funding for the other ideas. How can she do both . Parton my driving analogy. I think that way and i know you cant drive two cars at once. Very important to decide am i going to spearhead the bread and butter operations or am i going to be the one who takes this leap and do the new stuff . Whichever you are best suited for, you have to find someone to head up the other one. No question. You think its a hiring issue. I do. Its a leadership issue. You might have someone on your team, but it is definitely a leadership issue. She talks about her brand. You focus on brand. How do you maintain the brand of the core business while trying out other things . If she is talking about snag is and can be a brand extension, thats easy. If she is discussing something that is different, i dont know that the brand is relevant. Make a new brand. And to your point. Spin it off. Absolutely. If its part of travel making that extension doesnt matter. Its harder when its a completely different business. Lets move on to the next question. An email about the marketing which said i look to market myself as clergy to take advantage of the things i learned, but a lot of people find it an issue. I would like to hear your thoughts about that. It is an interesting question. You get stopped up on the word clergy but you can reflays with doctor or professional. Does that take away from the efficacy that you do. The question is do you want core or more . You have a core group that you know and they love you hopefully. Thats all the people you can reach without getting bigger. You have to decide what you want to do. It worked for dr. Oz. Joel osteen. It worked for him. They said they person doesnt know what they are talking about. They are just a marketer. Its a careful balance. We talked about authenticity and its a buzzword but it gets to that. If you are authentic to who you are, its just cheesy marketing. My advice is to focus on content marketing and promoting what you are doing and talking about what you know. In this case having a personal blog or a blog for the clergy worker. Going on medium. Com. Instead of going here i am i am clergy talk about faith and family and building the reputation. Content marketing doesnt feel like marketing at all. It feels like you are giving advice and insight. Thats a perfect way to go. I agree with that. You dont need to send direct mail. You can do it all different kinds of ways. Great, ben and denise thank you for your advice. Thanks so much. If any of you have a question for our experts, head over to our website. When you get there, hit the ask the show link. The address is your business m business msnbc business msnbc. Com. When working with somebody on a performance challenge, address it early with an open mind. Vice president of Home Improvement company porch. Com writes dont be easy. Saying yes to every task or meet up or request can hold you back from success. One of our favorite guests and enterprise fran tank inton tweets i learned in football and business teams win, individuals lose. With phone in hand and a computer readily accessible, sbps are entrepreneurs are relying more on tools to organize our lives and companies. Which asked some which they swear by. An app i like is toodle doo. Its a simple app that enables you to plan and prioritize the things you have going on in your business and in your day. You can organize according to is this a high priority and what is my goal for this task as well as when is it due . An app i love is win streak. It allows you to have goals for the day. Each morning i implement the goal and this is how i manage my wins for today. As an entrepreneur motivation is so important. When i go to the win streak app and see how i am producing that day, it keeps me excite and motivated. If you go to google. Com and type in mobilefriendly, you come up to this mobilefriendly analyzer and type in your website and it will tell you right there. Is it mobile friendly enough . The new rules are pretty soon if its not mobilefriendly, they are not going to list it. You have to test out the site and show you how it looks on a phone and what parts of it look good and what dont. You have to go to google. Com and type in mobilefriendly and type the website address and make sure you get it done and fixed. An app i used it called cozi. It blends between our family and our business. Its our Life Management tool. It is a scheduling tool that allows us to put everything that is going on and that is a godsend for us. Thanks everyone for joining us today. Please check out our website for more. Open forum. Com your business. You will find your segments and pieces that will help your business grow. Follow us on twitter msnbc. Com your biz. The best way to help an animal she loved is to start a company introducing people to them. You cant go diving with a shark. Funny how amazing they are and not want to try to do something to help save them. I see that change in people every day. The switch from fear to fascination. We go swimming with the sharks in hawaii. Until then im jj ramburg. We make your business our business. American express for travel and entertainment worldwide. Just show them this the American Express card. Dont leave home without it and someday, i may even use it on the moon. Its a marvelous thing oh haha so you can replace plane tickets, travelers cheques, a lost card. Really . That worked . American express timeless safety and security are now available on apple pay. The next evolution of membership is here. Good morning and thanks for getting up with us this sunday morning, june 21st 2015. It is the summer solstice, the day where we will be seeing more daylight than on any other day this year. That symbolism is everyday in charleston, South Carolina where the emmanuel ame church doors are opening as we speak for the First Time Since wednesdays