Julie Tucker and Jennifer Elias

April / May 2006 Report

2006-06-03T12:13:00.000-04:00

Major Accomplishments
We've been quite busy getting out new products and we released our first official entree into the Travel world, with ParisSmarts - question and answer cards about the world's most beloved city - just in time for graduation and summer travel season. We've already received great reviews about it and folks are flocking to our online store to pick up a copy. We're busy getting other new products ready for press that we're really excited about - they include BabySmarts (with a portion of the proceeds going to the Nurse Family Partnership), DogSmarts (with a portion of those proceeds going to Canine Companions for Independence), and CocktailSmarts, plus other ad on accessories to some of our other top selling products. We're thrilled to be working with great non-profits and giving back to the community.

We've also been doing a great deal of analysis on our financials and our sales are up-up-up! While our sales growth has been only 30%over the past couple years, so far this year our sales are up 78% - $Million, here we come! Thanks to all the attention we've received from OPEN and Count Me In and having a sales manager on contract who is dedicated to increasing our sales and distribution channels, we are now getting a great deal more attention from brokers, distributors, sales reps, and major retailers we believe we are poised to dwarf the 78% growth rate over the next few years once some of these major deals are closed.

3M Support
With the dramatic growth in sales comes increased stresses in our cash flow (most of our sales do come in in Q4, but we still have to pay for product in Q2 & Q3). We had a sort of unrealistic dream that getting in this program, that problem would go away, but unfortunately we've realized that our cash flow problem only gets bigger and scarier. While a couple years ago, we were short maybe $10K, this year we're looking at over $150K in negative cash over the summer months! GULP!!! This realization involved a pretty major panic attack by Jen and myself. While prior to being in the program, we didn't have access to capital, so it wasn't really a problem, we'd just limp along with 30% sales growth and grow organically with through our profits. But now we do have access to loans and lines of credit from Count Me In and OPEN, but it's really scary to take on this kind of debt - and personally guarantee it! And we've been told that no matter how large we get and how great of credit the company has, we will will always have to personnally guarantee loans and lines of credit. The joys of entrepreneurship! And what's worse, it'll only get bigger as we grow. DOUBLE-GULP!

So, during this little panic attack we called every advisor we knew to figure out ways not to go into this kind of debt. We also developed about 4 different strategies to avoid this situation: start some sort of dot-com, sell the company (oy - I said we were panicked), take on high-interest A/R loans that we don't personally guarantee. And then we sat down with our beloved Nell, and she knocked us over the head and told us to get over it! We have to take on risk if we're ever going to get anywhere. We have to think bigger! Well, now we are. We are now looking at growing the company 3 x's larger than our plan early this year. We've developed a whole vision and strategy to grow the company to 100 active titles by 2010, plus enhancing our on-line presence dramatically. And we're looking at bringing on outside investors and partners to help us get there. (Plus today, we're feeling much more comfortable about the debt, because we know, come December we'll once again be rolling in the cash).

So once again, we have to remind ourselves that we're not alone in this journey and we need to continue to reach out to our mentors and advisors for help when times are tough and we're freaking out. There are tons of people who believe in what we're doing and where we're heading, and Nell and the folks at Make Mine a $Million are at the front of the line.

PR & Promotions
As the only SF company from the original Make Mine a $Million award recipient group, we've had the fortune of being able to help promote the June 2nd competition. We've hosted workshops, attended women's conferences, got a panel on women-owned businesses at the Commonwealth Club that Nell, myself (Julie), and a couple other women served on, and were interviewed by KALX radio about being part of the program. It's such a fantastic opportunity to shout the merits of the program and share the lessons we've learned over time with other women (and as an added boost, more people get exposed to our fantastic products). We've also been featured in the Miami Herald, style.com gift guide, and held a webcast about our WineParty on chefsline.com (another cool woman-owned startup).

PS - Congratulations to the 20 2006 Make Mine a $Million Award Receipients. Welcome to the Club!

March 2006 Update

2006-04-18T16:33:00.000-04:00

Major Accomplishments
The biggest news is our TV and Radio spots for OPEN have hit the air. This was quite a fun project for us and while you may not see much of us, it involved 3 nights of filming all over San Francisco (apparently in the film world they shoot tons more than actually makes it on screen). It was fun being TV stars for a few days. Our other major accomplishments include release of two new products - our WinePassports to France and Bubbly. These guys are packed with great information on the regions and are quite handy for all sorts of trips - from the liquor store to the Burgundy region of France. We're also busy developing marketing partnerships with companies such as ZipCar and ChefsLine (a new woman-owned business providing phone and other advice for home chefs) where we offer fun games and product discounts to their members.

3M Support
We're thrilled that the Make Mine a $Million conference and awards will be held in San Francisco on June 1st & 2nd, and we've had a lot of opportunity to see everyone's beloved Nell and to get involved in marketing the program. We're looking forward to seeing everyone in June and getting caught up on all the exciting news that's going on. I think we are yet again at a crossroads for our business, and we're at a point in finding new and creative ways to spur our growth into new sectors and channels. We continue to have challenges with our identity, but thanks to our mentor, Vivian, and some of her colleagues, we're getting closer to really understanding our strenghts and where we can get some help.

PR & Promotions
In addition to the TV and radio spots for our friends at American Express, we've been featured in their employee magazine (along with Denise, Cynthia and Saundra), Play Things Magazine, Inside Magazines, Gifts and Decorative Accessories, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution. In addition, one of our writers, mentioned us on her blog, which drove a ton of traffic to our website. If you're looking to increase your web traffic, hitting up top bloggers, MySpace.com users, and other online writers is a great and cheap way to go and can really generate lots of traffic to your website.

February 2006

2006-03-02T19:35:00.000-05:00

SmartsCo Update
Once again we had a crazy month. We finished up our Spring trade shows and got lots of pre-orders for our new products - ParisSmarts and our WinePassports to Bubbly and France. We look forward getting these out on the market. For us, this time of year is pretty slow so we have time to take a breather and do some strategic work. We hired a contractor to help us build out our sales channels and help us recruit more reps and manage licensing, international sales and certain target accounts. We've worked with her for years, so it's great to have her on our team. We also brought on a PR agency to help us with marketing, and they got us some great hits on various online media and on VineTimes radio which is on iTunes and was broadcast on Sirius satellite. It was pretty fun and you can listen online from the link. Finally, we assembled all the folks on our new sales and marketing team to help us take a step back and do some strategic planning for the year, which was really useful - we were able to think about our priorities and came up with some great ideas with respect to our brand and creative marketing activities - stay tuned.

Mentoring & Counseling
Our mentor Vivian continues to be a great sounding board for us and pushes us to think strategically and get our priorities in order and she's helping us touch base with various subject matter experts on the areas where we're struggling. We also started interviewing coaches from the Coaches Connection that CMI has set us up with. This is a different process from the mentoring as their focus is less on specific business objectives, and more on our personal goals and challenges. For Jen and I that's tough as all we think about are the business issues at hand - I guess we're really fortunate to have and awesome partnership and to have great people on our team. We're looking for that "Tipping Point" that will really get us on the map, and we hope a coach can help us open up our own creative juices to get there. Also, we took the opportunity to to a financial review with our friends at OPEN regarding the company. It was sort of strange and we learned things about how bankers analyze financials in evaluating company loans. The only problem is, if you're a small business (I think under $5 million), you're not really considered a company, and you're basically evaluated based on your personal credit history and the collateral you have. We were hoping after 4 years and us nearing a $million mark that things would be different, but it doesn't seem to be the case. Thankfully, CMI gets it!

On a personal note ....
It was our 4-year anniversary of the day Jen and I met over a glass of wine to discuss the idea of making a wine trivia game, and we celebrated by taking our staff (all 2 of them now) and a friend for each of us out for some yummy Indian food. One of the best things about owning SmartsCo is we get to work with great people every day and are there for each other when times are tough. We're fortunate that despite Jen and I starting a business together a week after we met, that we have a very positive and supportive partnership. We know we're very lucky. Having two people running the show is great as now we can start taking vacations (I write this as Jen is off to London for a family reunion and I actually got several great ski weekends to Colorado and Tahoe this year - the first ones in years). It's so important to have balance in one's life and time off if you're going to have a sustainable business or you'll completely burn out - I think we're finally getting to that place.

January 2006

2006-01-31T19:43:00.000-05:00

Major Accomplishments
Whew! So we're recovering from a great holiday season and preparing for Valentine's Day (we sell lots of SexSmarts and ChocolateSmarts this time of year) and are busy creating several new products for 2006. The big change we did this year is we launched our own web store that has been very successful and we were pleasantly surprised with our sales. We also upgraded our website with lots of dynamic content, such as a blog, party tips, and coupons from some of our retailers. The other big news (big for us, that is) is we finally got a heath care and dental plan for ourselves and our employees. We've been paying our own and were pleasantly surprised how affordable it could be to create a plan. Another one of those things you just don't have time to concentrate on when you're a small business, but super important to attract and retain good people (founders included!).

How CMI Helped Us This Month
There's always way too much to include in a brief summary, but I think the most exciting thing was the 3M conference in NY last month. We took home a lot of inspiration, but the biggest theme to hit home for us was that we needed to work on the business, not in it! Meaning we need to delegate more. So we've been working with our coach Vivian to figure out how to do that. And that means trusting our existing staff to do more (and our right hand gal, Nikki, has really stepped up and freed us up to do more), bringing on new staff (we hired a new PT staffer, Elizabeth, to help Nikki out now that she's so busy), and hiring other contractors and consultants who have sales, marketing and technical skills that we don't have. Yes, our operating costs have gone up, but as they say, you need to spend money to make money, and now that we have the capital from the 3M loan from CMI and a line of credit from OPEN by American Express, we can actually begin doing that. And in just a few months we're beginning to see a return on that investment in terms of new sales and the ability for us to focus on creating new products.

PR
We've had a particularly exciting month in terms of publicity, thanks again to our friends at CMI and American Express. We're thrilled that we were selected to be featured in an ad campaign for OPEN which has been great (and yes, that really is our office, although a bit cleaner than it normally would be). Not only has the feature been excellent exposure for us and gotten us some excellent leads and opportunities, but we've also had the chance to learn about a lot of great programs that are available to card holders (such as discounts on FedEx and such) that we just haven't taken the time to learn were available to us. Another big piece of publicity we got was also thanks to CMI was a nice feature in February Entrepreneur. While they failed to mention Jen (a lot of people don't really understand how to deal with partnerships, we don't know how people could ever do this on their own), they did give American Express and CMI a big plug. Stay tuned for some exciting news next month.

August - October 2005

2005-12-14T20:59:00.000-05:00

August, 2005

Major Accomplishments The month of August has been a pretty exciting month for us. It kicked off with the great news that we won the Make Mine a $Million Award. This new capital enabled us to bring on a part-time sales manager to help drive new sales. August is also Gift Show month in our industry and we were able to announce this award to all our sales reps, partners, and customers. We exhibited our products at gift shows in New York, San Francisco, and Seattle and were pleased with the positive response from buyers to all of our new products. Currently we're in the midst of planning our new products for 2006 and are weighing all the new financing options available to us through the CMI loan and American Express financial services. These new options will play a critical role in boosting our growth.

Coaching We have completed the DiSC profile and are looking forward to going through the alignment process. We also look forward to having our first call with our coach Nely and getting her advise on other ways we can grow the business.

PR and Personal Commitment Winning the 3M award has gotten us even more excited about the future of SmartsCo. We raved about the award at recent tradeshows, on our blog and in our newsletter which goes to over 2000 members of the SmartsCo community. We were delighted to have calls with folks on the PR team at American Express and look forward to working with them on future PR efforts, events, and the like. We have already been invited to serve on a panel at an upcoming NY Times Business Summit moderated by OPEN's president in September and also understand one of our products with a profile of SmartsCo will be in a gift bag at second conference in October. In addition this month we have been reaching out to media to get them excited about featuring our products during the upcoming gift season.

September, 2005

SmartsCo's September has been filled with marketing and product plans, as well as a new infusion of financing thanks to American Express OPEN, through the 3M award. We finalized our product plan for 2006, planning to create seven new products, expanding our wine line as well as creating new products that will have appeal to different kinds of retailers and could have stronger sales in Q2 and Q3 traditionally our slower quarters. We also finalized plans and management for an October 5 marketing event for one of our new products, WineParty. This event is in partnership with a new wine web site called lolawines.com, and will raise funds for San Francisco Women's Community Clinic, providing free, quality healthcare for women, by women. Additionally, near the end of September we received a $10,000 line of credit from American Express, thanks to the contacts developed through CMI and Make Mine a $Million. We have large printing bills to pay for our new products and this line of credit is extremely helpful.

October, 2005

October has been a big month for us as we get ready for the busy holiday season. We got in our much anticipated shipment of new products and were able to ship out lots of orders to customers eagerly waiting for them. This represents substantial growth for us, doubling the number of products we have on the market from 5 to 10 different SKUs. We celebrated this accomplishment with two release parties for our new WineParty gift: the first at one of our top winery accounts, J Winery, and the second as a co-launch party with a new web site, lolawines.com. This event was also a fundraiser for SF's Women's Community Clinic.

We're also planning fun launch parties for WineParty, BeerSmarts, and our WinePassports in DC, NY and SF in November. And we got our first media coverage for WineParty, in the Sunday, October 16 Washington Post. We've spent a lot of this past month working on developing new products for the February and Summer shows of 2006, doing some writing ourselves for new WinePassports, interviewing designers, and working with writers for other new products. We had our first call with our coach Nely Galen which was highly valuable. During this call we discussed the "growing pains" we are having evaluating all the opportunities on our plates and how to prioritize those opportunities that will give us the most visibility. Nely has put us in touch with a top publicist who we plan to meet with soon to discuss our PR and promotion strategy. We also had our second call with Dresdene and look forward to putting together our 90-day plan. We're also meeting with a financial advisor from American Express to look at our financials and provide advice.

Our most exciting news is we've been selected by OPEN to participate in a national print ad campaign. After some scouting agents came over to the office to interview and photograph us, we were selected based in-part on the positive experience we had with American Express providing us with a line of credit and extending that line in just 24 hours to help us pay for our print run as we wait for payment from our customers. We had a great time during the photo shoot with the film crew and folks from Ogilvy & Mather and look forward to seeing the ad in print next month. Quite an exciting opportunity