Truth in Advertising

When I first got up here and started this gig, I decided that in order to get any real work I'd have to pound the pavement and get my name out there. And to me, that meant cold-calling. I have never done any real advertising before, so I knew I had to start from scratch. I decided that no one should be successful in this day and age without a website: good, bad, or indifferent. So I took the necessary steps to create one and I am proud to say that it is published and is a top search result on Google. This lead to the creation of a professional email address hosted off of the site. With the addition of a phone number and a physical street address, I was off to designing and printing business cards. I knew I couldn't just send business cards to people, that isn't flashy enough. So I decided to make marketing booklets.

I did a little research and sent these booklets out to 10 prospective companies that I thought would be good for a fresh young architect like me to collaborate with. Ten is not a very large amount of contacts, but the booklets cost a lot of money to produce, so I had to narrow down to 10 finalists from a larger list - so these were being sent to very exclusive company... haha. I sent them out about a month ago, and made follow-up calls a few days later. It's not easy to go in cold - in fact, it is sort of a pride-swallowing adventure, and I'm not exactly sure why. Regardless, I knew I had to make it happen.

I was a little discouraged when I did not get one single positive response. I actually only was able to get through to three of the companies, all of them telling me they would keep me in mind if anything came up in the future, which I guess is all I could ask for in this economy. Then it happened. Yesterday I got a call from one of the contractors to whom I sent a booklet and never got a reply. As it turns out they need some architectural work and I guess they had my marketing information handy, so they called me. I have a meeting setup to look at their project, and I am very excited about the prospect. This could turn into a long-term relationship.

You see, it does pay to advertise. If this one project turns into just one paying commission, it will pay for ALL of the marketing I have done to date - that is quite a return on investment, and it subsequently allows me to pay for more advertising to go after more work - a nice upward spiral. Plus I may have room for a little bit of a profit, but I am not going to push my luck. I'm proud to say that hard work may have paid off for me, and I hope for continued successes.