Saturday, January 23, 2010

First Things First

Lately I've been once again getting a lot of support and help from friends some of whom are professionals in building my dessert company. One, my dear friend Jeff, has a stellar background in advertising and marketing and is steering me in the right directions. In the past, I've had to try to do a lot of things myself, technical, marketing, etc. and today all of the facets that go into creating a new business are, in many cases, even more complicated than before. These sidebars I stumbled through were sometimes successful, sometimes less so. I needed help but it was difficult to find the right talent, the right people who I could trust with my company materials. Being a perfectionist chef, and being in charge, made it even more difficult to let go. But so far I've been learning to give someone permission to help me in the infancy stages of this new company. And, perhaps even more importantly, Jeff helps me NOT to do things I'd probably do if he weren't around. Like what? A few months ago I thought a website was the most important thing to create an online dessert company, so I searched and found a talented artist who did web design. I loved her jewelry so why not give her a shot at creating my website? Well, I severely underestimated how much input that poor artist would need from me, as I hadn't thoroughly largely through inexperience, thought through all of the production stages needed even BEFORE we put a dessert business online. She did a beautiful job with what little I gave her, and I appreciated it. But that was completely premature, and as a result, was stopped dead in its tracks. Thanks to Jeff, I now understand the website which I had considered all-important and believed to be the first thing I needed, is in fact one of the last things I should get done as it is the culmination of the entire ordering and fulfillment procedure my clients will go through when they choose one of my desserts.
This series of posts will hopefully help others trying to create an online company avoid some of the costly and counter-productive mistakes I've made, and, more importantly, show the right way to go about creating a new company which will be successful.