My dad turns into an accountant during tax time.
During a random, "How are you doing, Dad?" call, I noticed he was stressed.
The customer count was down and he was worried. I reminded him that it was a bad economy and asked him how he was marketing. His business was generated with old-fashioned techniques; word of mouth with a good reputation.
I told him to fire up his old dusty PC in the back of the auto parts office so we could check google. My dad can perform a computerized 4 wheel front end alignment with Hunter Equipment, but he has little interest in the informational technology world.
Twenty minutes later, we tried to google "car repair" in his city. Commands like "www" were perceived as "double u?", the "F5" key were "F" and "5" and when we had to "delete cookies", he refused to throw out his Oreos?
Finally, twenty businesses popped up in the search engines, but not my dad's shop.
"My buddy, Sam's Tune Up is listed, but where am I?" he asked.
Sam was grabbing customers because he had a webpage. My dad said that he also had a bunch of webpages with Yelp, Merchant Circle and Superpages. After explaining that they were free listings, I told him it was time to have a have a webpage so new and old customers knew his shop existed.
I called the website builder listed on the bottom of Sam's Tune Up's page. Within one day, carrepairwebsites.com had my dad's shop popping up on google. My dad was tickled pink when I told him he had website.
Next hurdle is to convince him to activate the voice mail feature on the shop phone system.
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