Ethix Systems: Part 2

As I mentioned, I got invited to a networking group for our business. What is a networking group? A networking group is a group of businesspeople who meet once in a while (in this case every week) and they "network." For the most part, each person gets to give a 60 second commercial about their business. The idea, is by sharing information about each others' businesses, it will encourage people to spread the word about your business, and you should be able to market your business more effectively.

At this networking group, we met several business professionals who were very willing to work with us. When we began to meet with the different people, they were very interested in learning our story. Since we were young and very new to the business world, these meetings were very good for us. We got to learn a lot of things about how to market ourselves. These professionals offered introductions to other business people, and word about us and our services spread. Unfortunately, it didn't spread too quickly. We had a long time of having very little work. If it weren't for some of the smaller jobs that we did for the people in our group, we would have had nothing to do at all.

As time went on, we began to realize something. Most of our work had come from website design and smaller tech support projects. We hadn't gotten very much programming work. But this wasn't because the work didn't exist. It was because of how little we marketed it. It is much easier to tell someone "we build websites" and "we fix computers" than to say "we build software." However, we decided almost a year after starting our business, to stop marketing our website design and tech support services, and to begin talking about software development.
As time went on, we slowly learned what to say to people to explain what we do. It's a lot easier one on one, so we scheduled a lot of meetings with people one on one to explain what we do. As time went on, we realized the situation that we were in. Not only can we build software well, but there aren't many people out there who can do it. We have a very solid niche market as a result. We are only just now starting to tap that market. As time goes on, people will find out more about what we can do, and will take advantage of the computers they likely already have in their place of business.

If anyone reading this doesn't know what I mean by "building software" it doesn't surprise me. You can start to get an idea about it by checking out our website at www.ethixsystems.com. However, if you want to learn more....tell me. I'll try to explain it better in another post.