SBI - there's some great help out there!
There've been some lifestyle-changing moments in my career. Discovering SBI has been one of them. It ranks alongside such moments as : - Having a year off between school and university; passing my driving test; graduating; meeting my first Germans in Portugal; passing my USPTR tennis teaching exam; leaving Germany after 13 very happy years; setting up an academy in France that has now passed its 20th year; watching my children grow into tennis players.
The academy has been running in France since 1991. I decided to abandon all previous publicity concepts, and share my experiences through a website. Here's how SBI welcomed me.
How SBI welcomed me!
Coming to the absolute end of my playing career, my previously high value as a practice partner is also ending. I have been planning this moment for a few years, but putting a new model in place has been tricky. I knew that the internet was the only way to make my tennis business options more flexible, more commercial and more efficient.
What should I do with my limited technical knowledge of the web? Not a problem.
Where you start at SBI
I have so much access to the web, through work and play, that I know what is on the internet. I know how the internet has been essential in the revamping of so many businesses, of how business is done. Also, many businesses who fail to capture their specific niche in the internet publicity machine, lose out to competitors.
I already had established my niche twenty years ago. If I needed to find a new niche, it would be easy to find one with the SBI niche search engine.
I have a niche, do you?
I see the internet as competition of a sort. It is not the same sort of competition as before in the concrete world. The fact that I am able to 100% personalise my offer, and modify it on a daily basis, from my office, is something I have never been able to do before. I float an idea on the internet, and the feedback and ideas surge is thrilling. It is at the same time swamping, so there is a danger I cannot find the time to deal with it all!
An information paradise
I need to look at all of the feedback coming through. It is nearly all useful, both in pure marketing terms, that is understanding what my readers would prefer to see, but also, because I know how much essential information I have gleaned from all of my partners already.
I have so much feedback from so many participants in the tennis tournament scene, a big question was how to manage that information. An updated daily blog, or a website? For my French tennis circuit, I needed a website.
Create a blog or website
My "competitors", who are running tennis websites, or academies, or training programmes, are actually my colleagues. They are mostly offering things I cannot, and will not, offer. If you're a tennis player out there, the choice of website destination is enormous, and all the info is at your fingertips. I know that by using SBI I can gather market information efficiently, and produce a unique site. I haven't seen a site like mine yet!
Success stories - my colleagues at work
If I were 18 again, growing up in today's internet world, I would be spoilt for choice, and the specifities of each website model is a lot to do with it. In my domain, the tennis academies are sharpening up their operations, because the internet demands it. Some of these operations are limited only because their concrete programmes must have a standardised form. On the internet you can make different offers, not possible in the concrete world. You get instant feedback, and get your delivery perfect. I have simply never had this luxury.
Can you sell a service?
Now I can write as much as I want!
I think I've always sold my skills quite well on a face to face basis. The expense, and complexity, of selling yourself through brochures or visiting cards was always a headache. That has all gone, and I'll never go down there again. What a relief! Yet the images that I created in those brochure days are still available, and being used. It is the flexibility of their use that has changed. Everything I can offer is on my site, and visually I can never-endingly perfect it. Any of those titbits I've forgotten will be reminded to me soon enough by my readers. I had no idea how to construct a website at the beginning. SBI showed me the steps in the right order. It was a new world, not especially complicated, but the building blocks needed to be put in the right order with the right content. It has been better than I imagined it.
It was a technical discipline, and me loving technical exercises, it was great fun. There were testimonials which said, anyone can do it. And I can vouch for this. Anyone with a bit of persistence, logical thinking, and regular availability of work hours, can put a site together. Anyone.
Proof of website success is all around us
I'd like to thank Solo Build It for the great package they have put in place. The generous nature of other SBIers has maintained my confidence until the end. Now that I am approaching the end of today, the end of today's experience with Solo Build It, I realise that I am at the end of the beginning.
Everything I have done before is real people experience. The website repositions, and dynamizes, all that I have acquired before. It is clean and fascinating, global, yet intensely personal. I would never have imagined such an intensity!
