all the words on the page. the story is the objects they are building. focus on the objects. another thing that really struck me was i think it s great they got a new website. one thing that maybe the next step with them, in a bad economy, there s not many people doing web searches for building a new playground. the traffic may not be coming naturally to their website. look for ways to take the imagery and put it where people are going to see. find other venders to partner with. take pictures of playgrounds and put them on facebook. get the people who are actually taking advantage of and using these playgrounds to share with friends. great idea. i am excited. mike, we are going to have you back in a year from now to go bok and see how they are going. i have faith in them from watching this. thanks for all the great work.
great to see both of you. mike, amazing ease. you did a great job with them. it was wonderful to be out there. they are really, true, american entrepreneurs. their heart is they are true entrepreneurs, their heart is into this. they had so much given to them with your guidance and they were so open to you. do you think it s going to work? srk i do. the amazing moment was when the mentor came on. he went in there and i saw on their faces, they changed their thinking in that moment. they decided to break the pattern that s getting them in trouble and take a new path. i think it s going to take a year or two to play out. i m confident they are on the right pattern now. jason, you have been extraordinarily successful. how do you get out of tough spots when something happens? focus on one thing. draw a circle around your one thing. i think you talked about the things they shouldn t be doing
toiler paper entrepreneur and i m here to get your business back on track. while we wrap up here i ll help you carry that roof in, we ll finish up. and let s stop working on play sets today and let s start working on your business today. here s our wonderful show room. first thing s first we ve got to change that to open, right? sure. so why don t you take me for a quick tour so i can get a sense of what s going on and we ll get to work. sure. this is the show room. okay. and the train is here for parents to let their kids play on it while we talk to them about their play ground. mike s tour got stopped in its tracks when he realized that jerry and evelyn were living behind the show room in a motor home. so we re just really happy we have a roof over our heads. we re lucky. and it s paid for. so what could be done to resuscitate their once healthy business and get them back on track? mike and his team quickly homed in on a few things jerry and evelyn could fix,
imagination, and the image, and the excitement of what it was like when you were a child, when you first got to go to that play ground. our next rescue team member, dana hewins, is a marketing and p.r. expert who was tasked with getting jerry and evelyn some exposure. so i have another surprise for you tomorrow. a reporter from the asheville times will be here to interview you. oh, that s awesome. that s fabulous. and then i m going to sit down with you and spend some time refining your messages and looking at your traditional media, your social media, and looking at how we can blend in your customer reviews of that to get you some additional exposure. after a very long day, mike gave jerry and evelyn a homework assignment for the next day. first of all, you have to identify your top ten clients. second thing is the mentor schedule. we have to work with this mentor and it s our responsibilities the mentees to manage the schedule. they give us knowledge, we give him commitme
the resulting story was front-page news in asheville. which was exactly the kind of local exposure dana was looking for. building on that momentum, dana also approached the customers on jerry and evelyn s top ten client list and asked them to do an online review. mike took the business owners aside to talk a little more about their original question. how to boost sales when they sell a product that doesn t have a repeat customer. you ve got to increase sales. here s how you do it. tip number one is i want you to start asking for what s called vendor referrals. stop going to referrals and asking them for other customers. instead ask them for other vendors they trust and like. if they refer you to them and you can build relationships you re going into common customers as a team. two is trade shows. stock a boost, it costs a lot of money and it doesn t yield many results. guess who is at the trade shows? other vendors. start walking the trade shows. it costs nothing. gives you an oppo