Can You Franchise an Unsexy Concept?

Biff's Question Song (Stand-up Comedy)

One of the most frequently asked questions that I hear, especially coming from my more entrepreneurial clients, is, “Why would anyone ever buy this franchise?”

This question is usually followed by a series of observations. “Anyone could do it.” “There’s nothing to this business.” “I don’t think this business can be franchised.” And of course, the final underlying question, “Why wouldn’t someone simply do this themselves?”

Their concern is a valid one. Some concepts are simply not well differentiated. Moreover, some of them have low barriers to entry.

So can a business that is not unique still franchise successfully? And if so, how?

The Mindset of the Entrepreneur
Whenever I hear these questions, my first response is to point to some of the undifferentiated concepts that have achieved high levels of success in the marketplace. “What about janitorial services—why have they been so successful?” Then I go through the list. Maid services. Lawn care. Carpet cleaning. Temporary and permanent placement firms. And of course, the list goes on and on.

The fact of the matter is, a significant number of franchise companies are in industries in which their products or services are not readily differentiated.

What these questioning entrepreneurs fail to understand is that, as entrepreneurs, they are the one group on earth that is perhaps the least suited to understand the mindset of the prospective franchisee.

The typical entrepreneur is, at least by my definition, someone who never saw a rule he or she did not want to break. And, in many respects, the entrepreneur is often the last person you would want to be a franchisee. The best franchisees are not the rule-breakers. And, in fact, the truly entrepreneurial are often the least inclined to buy a franchise.

The best franchisees are motivated adopters—people willing to accept some level of risk, but people who, nonetheless, are willing to follow the rules established by their franchisor.

But if the franchisee isn’t buying your “secret recipe,” what exactly are they buying?

Ultimately, what the franchise prospect is buying is a combination of two things: a strong value proposition plus a unique market position.

Developing the Value Proposition
If you are thinking about franchising a business that you feel isn’t particularly sexy or unique, chances are, you have already watched a number of your competitors come and go. Why did they fail, while you survived with a similar product or service? The answer is the system.

The system is the embodiment of all those things that make the ultimate difference between success or failure. Site selection. Lease negotiation. Advertising. Customer service. Branding. Positioning. Purchasing. Pricing. Merchandising. Hiring. Training. Managing. Quality control. Financial management. It can be found in everything from the products you buy to the way your people answer the phones.

When someone buys a McDonald’s franchise, they aren’t doing it because they want the recipe for the “special sauce” on the Big Mac. In fact, they probably aren’t doing it because they believe that McDonald’s serves the world’s finest hamburgers. But few would argue over the quality of their systems—which are among the best in the world.

The best companies not only have developed their systems, but they use those systems to ensure consistency at the consumer level.

And that is what your franchisees want to buy—a consistent consumer experience that has been proven in the marketplace.

And your job, as the franchisor of an undifferentiated concept, is to show the franchisee how to replicate your success. Through some combination of services and support, you need to teach your franchisee how to achieve what you have achieved. That will likely mean the development of training programs, operations manuals, site selection criteria, advertising guidelines and other elements of “the system” that will allow your franchisees to take advantage of the intellectual property you have developed over the years. Moreover, you will want to provide your franchisees with the benefits of your labor and your relationships—the brand, your purchasing power, etc.—that you have developed over the years. Combined, these elements constitute the value proposition that your franchisee will pay you for.

But the value proposition alone is not enough.

Positioning your Concept
Even the most mundane concept can work as a franchise if it can be replicated. But if your system does not have that special “sizzle,” you may have to work hard to sell it.

For those few concepts that are fortunate enough to be “first movers,” their first position in the market can be enough—assuming, of course, that they grow fast enough to maintain brand dominance. But for the rest of the franchisors out there, a value proposition alone will not be enough. The concept will need to be differentiated from others in the marketplace if it hopes to achieve any significant level of success.

Let’s take another look at McDonald’s. On its surface, especially in the early years, it was a simple concept—basically, hamburgers and fries with drinks. And for years after they started franchising, dozens of franchised competitors came and went. All, that is, except for a select few.

Burger King realized McDonald’s had staked out the “fast burger” segment in the market and knew if it were to compete with McDonald’s, it had to differentiate itself in the eyes of the consumer. So it adopted a position that McDonald’s could not attack: “Have it your way, at Burger King.”

The genius of this position was that Burger King had staked out a position to which McDonald’s could not competitively respond. Burger King’s operating system differentiated it from McDonald’s, and McDonald’s was not in a position to revamp its operating system to respond to this new threat. And Burger King prospered.

Over the years, more competitors came and went.

More than a decade later, Wendy’s was able to crack the “Big Two” using a different form of differentiation: marketing. At that time, both McDonald’s and Burger King were heavily promoting themselves to children. Wendy’s succeeded where others had failed by offering “old-fashioned” made-to-order hamburgers and promoting itself to an older audience, using an octogenarian spokesperson asking “Where’s the Beef?” and an offer that included “plenty of napkins”—which is not what the person feeding children may want to hear.

In order to succeed in franchising—especially if you are in a commodity-type market—you simply have to differentiate your concept from those of your established franchised competitors.

That differentiation can come at the operational level (as in the cases of Burger King), in the form of marketing (Wendy’s) or in a number of other forms. Some concepts differentiate themselves in the eyes of their franchisees by offering a lower investment franchise package (a double-drive thru hamburger operation is less expensive to build and operate than is a Burger King).

Others differentiate based on services: both high and low. Some franchisors tout their high levels of service. Some janitorial service franchisors, for example, will actually procure their franchisee’s customers—so all the franchisee has to do is to service the account.

Interestingly, others have taken just the opposite approach. Some carpet cleaning and postal service franchises got their start by promoting themselves as “the un-franchise,” touting minimal fees and minimal intrusion into the franchisee’s day-to-day operations.

Contractually, franchisors can differentiate themselves through a more liberal contract, through reduced fees or royalties (not a particularly good strategy, in most instances), through a bigger territory, or through different support services.

Be Best at Something
In fact, there are numerous ways for franchisors to differentiate themselves in the marketplace, even if they have a relatively undifferentiated consumer offering. But if you want to capture a long-term market position, you need to be perceived as being the best at something.

Retail consultant McMillan|Doolittle, in their groundbreaking work on the EST model for retail success, propose that a retailer needs to be the best at something in order to survive in today’s competitive marketplace.

The model, in grossly oversimplified terms, states that a retailer has to be best in one of five essential areas in order to “win” in the retail game:

• Biggest: a dominant assortment
• Cheapest: lowest prices
• Easiest: high-service orientation
• Quickest: fast-service orientation
• Hottest: fashion orientation

Moreover, the theory states that while retailers can choose to be two of these at once (biggest and cheapest, a la Wal-Mart), they will make a big mistake if they try to be more than two. They hold that the strategy of trying to be everything to everybody leads to a lack of position and a downward spiral in the market.

In franchising, especially when it comes to commodity-oriented concepts, many of these same principles apply. Over and above the need for a strong value proposition, the best franchisors will actively seek to command their desired position in the marketplace. You may find other things to differentiate your concept—or perhaps new ESTs where you can command the high ground.

One thing is for sure: If you don’t know how you want to be positioned in the marketplace, your prospects may end up being educated on your position by your competitors. And that is generally not a good strategy for sales success. For even more information on positioning, read "The Importance of Brand 'Sizzle.'"

---

Mark Siebert is the "Franchising Your Business" coach at Entrepreneur.comand the founder and CEO of iFranchise Group Inc.,a consulting company that helps businesses assess their franchising potential and develop and improve existing franchise systems.

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Business Heros - Bob Parsons

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(Business 2.0 Magazine) -- To get a sense of how Go Daddy CEO Bob Parsons leads his life, just ask for a ride in Mad Max. That's the vehicle he keeps at his office, deep in a nondescript business park amid the sprawl that is Scottsdale, Ariz. Max, as Parsons affectionately calls it, is a customized Jeep Rubicon Unlimited: Quarter-inch armor lining makes brushes with boulders a nonissue. A steel bar on Max's front end prevents somersaulting on steep drops. Fifty-degree inclines? Bring 'em on.

Parsons is weaving among the evening commuters on a busy Scottsdale thoroughfare when, barely tapping the brake, he swerves off the road, jumps the curb, and swiftly leaves the orderly world in his rearview mirror. "This is Botswana style," mutters the 56-year-old Parsons, in a voice gruff from decades of hard living that include a combat stint in Vietnam. He plows through the shrubs, weaves between patches of mesquite and sage, and then barrels into a ditch before swerving around a 12-foot cactus in search of another path.

Bob Parsons, you see, is a risk taker.

Howard Stern lite

To some, it was even a risk when he hired the buxom brunet and occasional porn actress Candice Michelle to appear in Go Daddy's first Super Bowl commercial, in 2005. (Advisers wanted him to hire a blond.) The ad created a minor furor over its raciness, and the attention catapulted the Go Daddy brand into public awareness and earned Parsons accolades as a brilliant marketer. Since then Go Daddy has become intimately tied with its tireless and polarizing leader.

When Parsons sees something that ticks him off, he speaks up, on his blog or during his weekly satellite radio show, Life Online. He's gotten into fights with political bloggers about interrogation methods at Guantбnamo Bay. ("I just said that I supported the government," he says now.) Last spring he uncovered problems with the European Union's launch of URLs ending in ".eu," helping set off court battles that are still ongoing. ("The whole thing was a sham.") He pokes fun at companies he doesn't like ("Just what does Yahoo do, anyway?"), and he interviews Go Daddy customers on a radio segment called "Strange Domains."

He also features entrepreneurs and offbeat guests, such as the guy who paints canvases with his rear and sells the work on ButtPrintArt.com. ("So, are you making a lot of tulips?") Parsons's sign-off at the end of each program: "I just may bump with the fat woman tonight." The show is sort of Howard Stern Lite.

Parsons's antics have made him some enemies. Beefy security personnel patrol his corporate headquarters, and he once appeared at a tech conference with bodyguards in tow. But at bottom, the showmanship and bombast are simply props in a remarkable life story, and in a high-spirited tale of unorthodox business tactics and entrepreneurial triumph.

Suffocating quiet period

A self-taught coder, Parsons sold the first company he ever started, a personal-finance software maker, for $64 million. He's built Go Daddy into far and away the market leader when it comes to managing Web domain names and related products, leaving all competitors in the dust. Go Daddy's 4 million customers have registered almost 17 million domain names, more than twice its closest rival. Go Daddy adds a domain name every 2.4 seconds.

It expects 2006 revenue of $240 million, up 71 percent from last year and more than triple 2004 levels. Go Daddy says it is profitable. Parsons says his operating cash flow, a key measure of a company's cash-generating capacity, will hit $52 million this year, up 70 percent from 2005. "Everyone fears Bob," says Andreas Gauger, who runs 1&1 Internet, a German-based registrar and Web hosting company that once hoped to buy Go Daddy. "If he doesn't do anything wrong, nobody in the domain business can touch him."

And Parsons has set his sights high. He pulled Go Daddy's planned IPO in August, blaming a lousy market for new issues; he described the quiet period mandated by the Securities and Exchange Commission, in which he went off the radio for three months, as "suffocating." He says he'll come back to Wall Street eventually, though. Parsons makes the case that in four or five years, Go Daddy will be up there with Google and eBay among the leading Internet companies. It's tall talk. A lot of what Parsons says is. But he's had a knack for walking the walk, sometimes on very tough trails. And whatever happens, he will not fold. "That's just not the way I'm wired," he says.

Parsons learned his most important business lesson while sitting on a wall in Vietnam with the unshakable conviction that he was about to die. After nearly flunking out of high school, he had enlisted in the Marine Corps. He was still a raw recruit when he met up with his squad in the Quang Nam province in 1969 and learned that he was a replacement for one of four guys killed a couple of days earlier. Panic nearly paralyzed him. It was only after he accepted that his life would end in 'Nam that he could function, and he made surviving until each day's mail call his goal. "That attitude's gotten me through all the spooky stuff in business," he says.

One BASIC step

Parsons left Vietnam in 1970 with shrapnel in his legs and a purple heart. He landed a job in a steel mill near his hometown of Baltimore until the prospect of a lifetime in a mill made him do something he had never considered: attend college. He enrolled at the University of Baltimore, where he majored in accounting. "I didn't even know you needed a major," he says. "I just chose the first one listed in the book."

His entrйe into the tech industry was also largely happenstance. An accounting assignment sent him to the San Francisco Bay Area, where, to kill some time, he strolled into the bookstore at Stanford University. He picked up a book on programming in Basic, read it on the flight home, and began experimenting with a computer at work.

Ultimately he wrote a program for managing personal finances and launched Parsons Technology, setting up shop to sell software in his basement in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Twice he went broke, rebounding mainly by incurring more credit card debt. By the mid-1990s, Parsons Technology had 1,000 employees and a 4 percent share of the North American software market.

But the Web was beginning, and Parsons believed early on that the era of shrink-wrapped software like his was about to end. He sold his company to Intuit in 1994 and moved to Arizona to retire, then discovered that he was not the retiring type. He started a software company for building websites and rolled out the product amid the dotcom craziness of 1999. No one paid any attention.

A brainstorming session with his small staff resulted in a name change from Jomax Technologies to Go Daddy, but even the flashier name didn't move software. He then decided to branch out. The system for registering domain names was ripe for low-cost competition. The big player, Network Solutions, was charging upwards of $35 a year for a single name. And as Parsons saw it, customer service was abysmal. So Go Daddy became a registrar in late 2000, offering domain names for $9 a year and what soon became around-the-clock customer support.

Better service

Go Daddy's model, then as now, was to sell cheap to a lot of customers. Snag them with a bargain-priced domain name, and then sell add-on products like e-commerce shopping carts. While plenty of small discount registrars sprouted up about the same time as Go Daddy, nobody attacked the market like Parsons, especially on the service front.

One example: Every first-time customer receives a phone call from a Go Daddy rep the next day. "Attributing their success only to price really sells them short," says Elliot Noss, CEO of Tucows, a domain-name wholesaler that competes with Go Daddy. "Bob took advantage of the fact that the largest players didn't offer high-quality service or features."

In many ways, the domain-name registrar business looks foolish. There's huge money to be made in owning high-traffic domain names; indeed, a whole new industry based on accumulating valuable domains has exploded during the past year. But the margins in simply registering names for their owners are thin, thanks partly to Parsons driving down prices but also to an unusual structure.

A single company, VeriSign, runs the entire back-end system for .com names, which make up the bulk of the 105 million domains now registered around the world. VeriSign charges the registrars $6 a year for each name (a fee it's now fighting to raise). On top of that, the registrars pay 25 cents to ICANN, the nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. So if you pay $6 to register a name - and that's what some companies charge these days - the registrar isn't making a penny.

That's why the add-on products are critical. Hosting is an obvious add-on for any registrar, and Go Daddy's shared hosting business has quickly become the largest in North America. (Shared hosting means that the space you rent for your business is on a server also used by other customers.)

And Parsons was the first to sell private domain-name registrations, which keep a customer's identity out of the public database. Go Daddy was awarded a patent on this feature in November. The idea came to Parsons after he got a call from a frantic customer who said she needed to close her Web store because she was terrified of a stalker.

The Wild West

The opportunities shift constantly, and Go Daddy and its competitors try to squeeze pennies out of every twist in the game. Go Daddy, for instance, last year jumped into the auction business to take advantage of the lucrative aftermarket for domain names. Any Go Daddy name that a customer fails to renew drops into its auction system; the company then sells these names to the highest bidder.

Other tactics are less seemly. Go Daddy struck a deal a year ago with Google so it could sprinkle undeveloped sites with pay-per-click ads, something its customers don't always realize. If you have a dotcom name with Go Daddy but haven't built a site for it, Go Daddy will "park" it, filling it with third-party ads as well as ads for Go Daddy itself. If someone lands on your page and clicks on an ad, Parsons and Google make money.

Parsons downplays parking - which, to be fair, is a common practice among registrars - and says Go Daddy now makes about $12,000 a day from it. The problem is that the person who actually registered the name makes nothing.

"It's sort of a Wild West atmosphere in some ways," says Rich Miller, an analyst with Netcraft, which tracks the business. "And a lot of people work the opportunities and gray areas pretty aggressively. Go Daddy is more restrained than most." (In June, a month after Go Daddy filed to go public, the company rolled out a parking product where, for example, paying $4 a month gets a customer a 60 percent cut of Go Daddy's share.)

Even so, Go Daddy also routinely gets high marks in customer satisfaction, and Parsons credits his success to his unorthodox and somewhat unfashionable approach. He refuses to outsource anything. Virtually all of the company's technology is built in-house.

And its call centers, whose staffs have doubled in the past year to 920 people, are all in Arizona, many in the same business park as the company's headquarters. When Parsons was doing the pre-IPO dance with Wall Street, he was repeatedly asked if his call center would "scale."

Creating buzz

"I said, 'What do you mean, scale?'" Parsons recalls. He disagreed with investment bankers' suggestions that, among other things, he should keep headcount low even as he grows. "People think that because we're an Internet company, we should be less people-intensive. I believe the exact opposite. When it comes to the Internet, people like dealing with people."

Which is why Parsons has worked so hard to give Go Daddy a personality that, like it or not, sells. Parsons alone, for instance, decided to plaster the Go Daddy name on Michelle's chest in the 2005 Super Bowl ad. And for the 2006 Super Bowl, he recut the commercial, featuring Michelle appealing to an arbiter of TV decency standards, 13 times before winning approval from ABC - each time taming it down, and each time watching business climb after news reports revealed that he was having to pull back to placate censors. Says Tucows's Noss, "He played that thing like a maestro."

For proof, consider this: There are now 860 ICANN-accredited domain-name registrars. Other than Go Daddy, how many can you name?

Parsons is looking over the lineup for his radio program, and he's disappointed. The show is promoting an interview with French Maid TV, an Internet production company that makes how-to videos, such as the one for Go Daddy in which three maids pop out of the same bed, rush to a laptop, and give a quick lesson in how to register a domain name.

"What? We don't have the French maids?" Parsons says when he discovers that he'll be interviewing the company's executive producer. "I find that depressing."

The importance of lobbying

Parsons and his co-host, Nima Jones, also a Go Daddy exec, banter with the French Maid guest about how he launched the company and, more important, how he finds women who know how to move a vacuum and wiggle a feather duster. Every now and again, Parsons clicks an icon on his computer and a chorus of female voices says, "Ooh-la-la."

Life Online isn't all silliness, however. Parsons has turned himself into a kind of industry watchdog, and he uses his blog and his radio show, which airs live on Wednesday nights on Sirius and XM Radio, as his soapbox. He rants about issues that he argues are critical to the Internet overall but obviously are of huge importance to his company.

Go Daddy's top attorney, Christine Jones, is a regular guest. As the Internet and Go Daddy have grown, Parsons has learned the importance of lobbying. Jones is just back from testifying before Congress about a proposal between VeriSign and ICANN to boost prices of dotcom names as much as 7 percent a year. The deal, she explains, doesn't require VeriSign to justify the price hikes, was reached "behind closed doors," and will result in a $1.3 billion windfall for VeriSign the first year it goes into effect.

Parsons chimes in: "This is like the great train robbery if they pull it off." (VeriSign spokesman Tom Galvin calls the $1.3 billion figure a "silly" and "unknowable number." Plus, he says, VeriSign's costs are rising as Internet traffic explodes and security issues increase. "Bob Parsons is taking no responsibility for the security and stability of the Internet. VeriSign is.")

While this topic has mobilized a variety of big domain investors, Parsons has been alone in calling attention to other issues. One was the European Union's messy launch of .eu names last spring. Every company that became a registrar with Eurid, the European equivalent of VeriSign, had an opportunity to go after .eu names. Companies were given connections to the central registry, and at the moment of launch on April 7, computers the world over starting pinging its servers in an effort to snag names.

Crying foul

Parsons was looking over the results of the so-called land rush when he noticed that Go Daddy had failed to get many good names for its customers. With a little digging, he found that some U.S.-based speculators had set up scores of phantom registrars to game the system. He didn't claim that anything illegal had occurred, just that the process was badly run.

Parsons says he called Eurid officials but was told everything was proper. So he turned to his blog to spell out exactly what he'd uncovered. The Eurid auction has spawned massive litigation in Europe, about which Eurid won't comment. "It was so obviously bogus," Parsons says, "and I was the only guy in the world - the world! - who was saying anything."

The soapbox crusades make him a hero to some; to others they are just more of the grandstanding that has made Parsons a sometimes polarizing figure. His ads generate hate mail accusing him of promoting pornography. He knows full well that the safari to Zimbabwe he went on in October, in which he killed an elephant, will cause some outcry. But does he really need bodyguards?

When Parsons attended a conference called the Domain Roundtable in May 2005, he showed up with two beefy guys. They even came a week in advance to case the joint. "They were looking for where to rush the man if anything went wrong," says Jay Westerdal, who runs research firm Name Intelligence and puts on the Seattle conference.

Parsons says people mistook his guests for guards, but they certainly left an impression with the 300 attendees. "It was like they didn't get him in 'Nam so they were going to get him at Domain Roundtable," recalls Frank Schilling, one of the largest domain investors in the world. "That was weird."

A bigger battlefield

Parson's list of enemies will soon include some bigger and more potent entries. His battlefield is expanding to include all sorts of giant companies competing to meet the soaring demand from individuals and companies to build an online presence. Microsoft, for instance, recently introduced Office Live, which offers hosting and domain names to businesses with fewer than 10 employees. Parts of Google's business overlap with Go Daddy's. And Yahoo has long been trying to build a presence in this area.

Just a couple of years ago, Yahoo sent a team to Scottsdale to try to persuade Parsons to sell. Parsons balked. A few months later, he says, Yahoo's small-business unit launched an array of offerings very similar to Go Daddy's. "They called me the night before to tell me there was no connection," Parsons says, flashing a skeptical glance. Parsons feared that Yahoo might crush him. Yet today Yahoo boasts that its small-business unit has more than 1 million customers, roughly a quarter of Go Daddy's. (Yahoo won't comment about talks between the two companies.)

At this point, Parsons isn't fazed by the prospect of going up against the big boys. They'll discover, he contends, that what Go Daddy does is difficult and requires top-notch customer support that they simply don't know how to give. Parsons is still Go Daddy's only investor, so he calls all the shots. When he was preparing to go public, he says, other suitors showed up in Scottsdale. But he's not interested in selling, at least not now. He's focused on adding products that make sense to anyone who wants an online presence via a domain name, and on continuing to pump up the Go Daddy brand.

Parsons is sitting at his conference table, beneath a poster for Stanley Kubrick's Vietnam epic Full Metal Jacket, pecking away at his keyboard. He pulls up a few charts to show off Go Daddy's finances. Then he turns his head to watch a giant flat-panel screen and clicks on something that makes him really happy: an unreleased commercial featuring Michelle sporting a Go Daddy T-shirt and cutoffs and doing a striptease-type dance around a chair.

Parsons lets forth a slow growl, "Y-e-a-h." Then he asks with a smile, "You think I'd get in trouble for this one?"

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GPSDude Maps Out Success

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With apologies to "The Big Lebowski": If you're in the market for a GPS unit, the Dude will do plenty more for you than just abide.

Jay Moore, a.k.a. the "GPS Dude" of GPSDude.com, has been at it for over four years now, with steady revenue and site visit increases every month. It's about three and a half years longer than he ever thought he'd be advising on and selling satellite-based navigation devices to consumers.

"I initially thought, if I make a little money, great, but I'm only going to have it for a little bit of time," admits the 40-year-old Moore, who holds an MBA and has also been doing business consulting since 1990.

It was a drive to help his consulting clients enter the online marketplace that got Moore interested in starting GPSDude.com, which he still calls an "experiment" — an internet laboratory to test e-commerce methods, using his own money, from which he could report back successes and failures.

"It was an incubator, and it still is," says Moore, who lives near Cincinnati. "I'm constantly looking at things." Choosing to sell GPS devices came easily; Moore spends a lot of time outdoors, and has used a GPS device wherever he goes for years.

Opportunity Knocks

But it was also financially appealing. The GPS market, led primarily by Garmin and Magellan, was exploding five years ago, yet big-name retailers were slow in catching on. Moore also figured out he could drop-ship the units online (relying on third-party distributors to fulfill orders; he now has five), and keep prices high enough to offset shipping.

Moore now sells 300-400 units per month, enough to push him towards $1 million in annual sales. But the secret to his success isn't technological at all — rather, it's old-school customer service.

The most popular feature on GPSDude.com is "Ask The Dude," where visitors can fill out a query form and receive advice from Moore or his one employee on which GPS unit to buy, depending on the customer's needs and budget. And, it works, pure and simple: 75 percent of these customers are converted to sales.

"All that most of those folks want is a little personal contact," says Moore. "When we send an e-mail out, my name's on it."

He doesn't stop there, though. Aside from military personnel and traveling salesmen, many of his prospective buyers are retirees — Moore admits pleasant surprise at the 70-something set's Web proficiency — who want GPS units for road trips.

Selling to the Senior Set

More often than not, retirees fill out the online form but request a call back instead of an e-mail. "There's not a high level of trust with Internet retailing," says Moore. "If I talk to them on the phone, it's a guaranteed sale. Unfortunately, there's just not enough time to talk to everyone on the phone!"

All purchases are made by credit card online, never by phone, with PayPal Merchant Solutions processing charges. Last July, Moore switched his hosting solution from Monster Commerce to ProStores, another eBay-owned company.

"I liked the fact they were integrated with PayPal, and they're affordable," says Moore of ProStores. "I figured we wouldn't have any problems long-term with them being in business. Hosting companies are like a lot of Internet stores, you don't know who owns them, or how long they're going to be there."

As for his storefront, Moore likes to keep his site navigation as simple as possible, separating out his left-side menu by brand (he sells seven at present) and model. Yet he still wants to improve its functionality, and better connect customers to their ideal GPS units. "I haven't found a great way to do that yet," he admits.

Viral Marketing is Catchy

Marketing his site, which costs him about $2,000 per month, has also been a mixed bag thus far. Moore uses Google and Yahoo search-term services, although he says they result in few sales. He also places ads in print publications, including RV magazines, military publications and newspapers, and spends many hours posting responses with his name in popular GPS online forums and bulletin boards — a viral marketing technique he feels is most effective.

Regardless, Moore continues to focus most on providing superior customer service, advice he also continues to give his consulting clients, as old-fashioned as it sounds.

"Like any business, I have to get my name out there," Moore says. "I'm going to be a failure if I try to compete on price; at the end of the day, Wal-Mart is going to sell it cheaper than me.

"I'm attempting to build a brand, in this case, The Dude, that some small segment of people will recognize and buy from."

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