WHAT IS YOUR "NATURAL GIVE"?

This will be a quickie on a topic that is becoming more relevant as we become more well known—charitable giving.

Face it. When you are small and cash flow is a frequent struggle and bills are mounting, it is difficult to shell out cold, hard cash every time a charity rings, and it often does not feel right, which is what this blog is really about.

As a business, we are solicited to provide products and cash for charities, gift bags, raffles, auctions, and the like, or provide time to various causes and charitable events.

Some of these requests hit like a lead balloon, and some actually feel pretty good to me. I took a look at the types of things that felt good to us and those that did not, and this idea of a Natural Give hit me. Asked about startup businesses and charitable giving the other day, I turned to this idea of Natural Give.

I define Natural Give as that type of giving that feels effortless and sustainable to you and your company, that feels right whether it results in sales or PR or not. We have discovered that our natural gives are 1) small product donations to local community events for raffles and auctions; and 2) providing entrepreneurial mentoring time to local youth; and 3) providing information to and sharing experiences with other business people who read this blog. Having defined our Natural Give, we stick with it. We do not sponsor teams, or donate cash or multitudes of gift bag freebies to local organizations (one organization wanted a gift bag donation of 300 pieces, a little much for us right now).

Peter Shankman’s help-a-reporter site is a great example of a very successful Natural Give that I am sure involved some money, but mostly Peter’s time and his natural talent for connecting people. In an effort to help reporters and sources get together, Peter created a thrice-daily email that in a very short time has reached over 16,000 people, connecting them all and helping everyone. We have certainly benefited from help-a-reporter, and the reporters we have contacted have certainly benefited from talking to us.

So, instead of feeling guilty every time you are solicited to give, find your Natural Give and stick to it. Remember that there are others out there whose Natural Give is different from yours, so many types of giving are occurring all over the place, even though you are not participating in all of them.

SCAMS

The other morning I received an intriguing email from someone wanting price lists, if I shipped overseas, and if I took credit cards. We startup manufacturers love to get emails like these, but this one just did not seem right. Here is the text:

Hello Sales,

I am interested in purchasing some of your products, I will like to know if you can ship directly to Australia, I also want you to know my mode of payment for this order is via Credit Card. Get back to me if you can ship to that destination and also if you accept the payment type I indicated. Kindly return this email with your price list of your products..

I await your quick response.

Kind Regards.

Mario Hernandez

Addresss

3M SUPPLY AU

184 Darley Street

Mona Vale,NSW 2103

Australia

Phone: +61 243 607 865

FAX: +61 243 636 6785

I put the email address in Google, and not much popped up, but on Mr. Pinball's site, this address was listed on the scammers page. Thank you Mr. Pinball! I emailed Mr. Pinball, thanking him for taking the time to keep up the scammers page, and he sent back some very helpful information:

Hi Gretchen.

I'm glad you found out about this thief. We are contacted daily by people like yourself who discovered our list of scammers and are grateful they found us.

If you run across any more of these types of scammers, please forward their emails to us and we'll post their information for all to see.

These scams are primarily from outside the USA and as such, little can be done about them. If they have a confederate inside the US (such as someone sending a counterfeit check) then that US-based person can be prosecuted.

I recommend any of the following courses of action.

1. Ignore any further contact from the scammer. They will just go away because they will realize that they are getting nowhere with you.

2. Lead them on and let them believe you are interested. If they want to pay you with a credit card, then let them send you the credit card information.
Report the credit card information to the credit card company as stolen.
Then tell them the credit card number is bad. They will often volunteer another card. Repeat until they run out of numbers or lose interest.

3. If they want you to pay them for something, then just ignore them. Do NOT educate them as to how you found out they are a scammer. Educating them just makes them better at fooling the next person.

4. Report them to their email provider at the designated abuse address, which should be something like abuse@yahoo.com and get them to terminate the account. Be sure to include full headers so they can verify that the account is being used for fraud. Terminating an account will stop all the scams in progress with that account and so will probably be the most helpful. The main problem with doing this is that it may take several days for the provider to get around to verifying and terminating the account. Although I can't recommend this, sending lots of email to the account can fill up their mailbox and prevent them from getting mail. Doing this sort of action may violate your email provider's Terms of Service and may get you in trouble--that's why I don't recommend this--but be aware that it is probably the *most* effective action that can be taken once you report them to the appropriate abuse account.

Whatever you do, DO NOT cash the check they may send or send them money.
Attempting to cash a known counterfeit check is a felony. Sending them money means you will NEVER get the money back. These countries where they want you to wire the money do not require a government ID to pick up money, so any money you send will be lost with no recourse.

Regards,

Daina

I will know what to look for when something does not quite feel right from now on. I am sure as we grow, we will be the target of more types of scams having to do with manufacturing. I will post them as they happen.

For now, please do be careful and if you have been caught in a scam, please post a comment.

INDEPENDENT REPS PART 3 - HIRING ONE

First off, look for reps who work with products you sell. If you sell a toy product, don’t sign on with a rep who sells housewares. Second, look for reps who sell to those outlets and regions in which you are interested, i.e. brick-mortar retailers, catalogs, online retailers, large chain stores, independent specialty stores, nationwide, regionwide, etc. When putting out information about what you are searching for, be sure to include your parameters. Personally, I would steer clear of any rep who claims he/she can do it all and cover everything. It just does not work that way.

Based on our aforementioned education, when a rep is interested in our products, we have a sheet prepared that we hand to them. If they still feel like working with us after reading the information, then we move forward.

Here is what our sheet contains:

1. A company introduction. One short paragraph about what our company manufactures and where our products are currently sold (not names, just regionally or nationally).

2. A sentence or two defining what kind of rep you are looking for (e.g., “if you have proven experience with placing _________, __________, or _______, we would be interested in talking to you.”). Also, list your preferred outlets in this paragraph.

3. For our screening process, we ask for a resume that includes or is accompanied by 1) list of current retailers they work with, 2) three business references, 3) the names of three buyers the rep works with directly and their contact information, and 4) a list of product lines the rep represents.

We then include our full contact information and where to send the resume and supporting information.

In some cases, we will work with the rep without having all of the information. If the rep does not flinch at the information we request and run the other way, they probably are quite interested in selling our product and confident they can do it.

Once a rep is interested, we negotiate an agreement. We have devised our own agreement, and that is the one we use. It covers everything, including territories, payment terms, and the number of samples that will be provided.

Now, with all of this in place, we are comfortable working with reps and confident that we will not incur financial disasters in doing so. Good luck! Feel free to contact us with any questions.