Working with Patrick

Video transcript: I think for a manufacturer to make e commerce work for them, they have to think about what their long term strategies and goals are, and that takes somebody who's been through the process many times. So my advice to anybody who's thinking about starting a really strong e commerce presence is to find good help at the beginning. And I couldn't recommend Patrick Pittman hire as a consultant because he gives the business owner that inside view of what those strategies need to be for the long term success. We had been selling direct to businesses for over ten years when we finally decided to create a direct to consumer web e commerce platform. And the transition to allow us to sell directly was a real strategic move because consumers were asking for our product directly and we weren't able to be able to. We weren't able to sell in every region of the country. We had tremendous long term relationships with our b two b customers and we did not want to disrupt those relationships. So our approach to going online and selling direct to consumer had a lot of strategic decision making around what was our approach, what was our pricing model. How would we allow for us to sell direct to the consumer while also allowing for those b two b transactions which are so critical to our business? And I think through Patrick's support and strategies, we were able to do that in a way where it did not disrupt our business business relationships, but actually created more opportunity for them due to the access of information they had through our online site. I'll never forget one of the meetings we had with Patrick where he said, do you know who your target demographic is? And we said, sure, it's dog and cat owners. And he said, yeah, but there's so much more. Here's what I found. And he proceeded to pull up the demographic information of our target customer, and he knew that based on where they were buying their products and how we might be able to reach them on an online space. And what we found out was it was the first time we sat down and had data to show that our primary purchaser of products was the females in their forties and fifties who had dogs in their homes. That for us, that demographic information helped us to really understand where our best target market would be. Patrick was the one who delivered that information to us in a very clear, concise way. For the first time, we didn't really know what the demographic information was. And the reason that was really critical to figure out was that we needed to target the look, the functionality in our product design towards our target demographic. And when Patrick came in and said, I have the data to back up who your demographic is. That really helped us make better decisions on how our site would be structured and way in which we'd market to those consumers. Patrick has a tremendous amount of experience in creating strategies that work for business and the business owners that will help them have a growth path to further their e commerce sales in a profitable way.