Why we want to start a new back office support business

A little about us. My wife and I retired within the past year from having been in the workforce for a combined 100 years! Now we are older but really in the middle of life, not the end. I am in the best physical shape I have been in for the last 20 years. We are walking and working out at the gym.

But we don't want to disengage from the business world. My wife has her Mary Kay business and I am working for an IT company helping to develop business. We are actively engaged in social media. We are attending networking events on a regular basis and building a strong base of contacts.

We want to give back in the form of helping micro and small businesses grow and succeed. My wife has worked for the Federal Government, a Fortune 500 oil company, merchandising wholesaler, and a large growing manufacturer, just to name a few. I have been a pioneer in retailing in the 70's and successfully ran a school book wholesale business. I ended in the workforce in the service industry in one of the top 30 event and party rental business' and was their business development director helped take that business from 5 million to 16 million in 5 years.

In a future blog, we are going to list our skill sets and impressive resumes and let you know what we bring to the table.

In the meantime feel free to reach out to us with any helpful advice you have.

How to learn from scratch

So after I was hired to run the branch office of the book company I was pretty much left on my own as to how to make it all work. Make it happen and you figure it out were the tow types of advice I got in various forms.

Well this suited me perfectly. Since my time in retail was mostly autonomous I didn't need handholding an coaching.

The strategy was simple at . first, the company would buy a list of school names and addresses and mail out catalogs. The only thing was the bozo's I worked for mailed the parent companies catalogs out off the same list. Their catalogs looked the same as ours and content was identical, except for the company names, addresses, info, and logos.  The only problem was that their company was offering 30% discount off list and we were offering 25% off list. They figure that the local market would order form us to save a few bucks shipping. Duh that made no logical sense, We were competing against each other.