Businesses owners are in need of advice. But sometimes they haven’t got the budget for the experience they require.
So if you run a business consulting company, how do you provide information to those clients who can’t afford to pay?
Well, if you’re Devan Perine and Brad Farris, the answer might be to launch an online community…and try to figure out another way to offer your business knowledge and to get other businesses to pay for it.
Welcome to EnMast
Farris is the principle advisor at Anchor Advisors, a Chicago-based business consulting company. Perine is an online community manager. With Perine’s help, Farris launched EnMast, an online extention of his consulting business. The community markets information to small businesses in a couple of different ways.
“We started EnMast.com in 2011 — it’s a small business owner community,” Perine says. “Brad Farris is the brains, I’m the brawn who makes it all run!”
The community offers some tools for free and others at a cost to non-members. Small businesses can also pay an annual fee for membership in the community and get access to additional resources on the site with that membership.
What Community Members Can Expect
So what can members of the EnMast community expect from membership? Well…pretty much any information small businesses need to operate their businesses as they grow.
EnMast includes a library of tools, ebooks, webinars and more to address business owners’ needs at different stages along their company’s growth process.
“A lot of the business owners we work with are really good at their trade (say, graphic design, for example), and their business grew and next thing they know they hired their first employee,” Perine explains. “Then 5th.. 10th, etc.”
“But with growth means there’s a lot of things that they have to deal with now — payroll, taxes, hiring, firing, budgeting, etc.,” she says. “And that’s the stuff they figure out as they go, but don’t have much of a clue on how to do it all, and often screw it up.”
For example, the site has features like the “Small Business Budget Tool Kit” which can be downloaded for free. Other tools and information, like how to write a job add or how to set up an employee bonus program come with a cost to non-members or free with membership.
Finding the BizSugar Community
While building and promoting EnMast, Perine ran across another community, BizSugar, and saw obvious synergies.
“I discovered BizSugar somewhere around a year ago,” Perine recalls. “It’s such a huge resource for us — we even wrote about it a little while back. I’m always searching for good content, and it’s my go-to place to find it and catch up on latest trends. Plus it’s been a great traffic generator! And not just general traffic, but the business owner audience that find the most value out of EnMast.”
So would you like to be a Contributor of the Week here on BizSugar? You can have your business profiled here on the BizSugar blog and, of course, in the meantime be a great source of small business information for people just like Perine.
Well, joining the BizSugar community is easy and free. Here’s how to get started.
Simply sign up for your free BizSugar account and start contributing small business news and information to the community. You can have a look at our Contributor’s Guidelines for a better idea of the kind of content our community prefers.
Then “like” our BizSugar Facebook page, start commenting and voting on the submissions of other members and your in. We choose our Contributors of the Week from among our most active members. We can’t wait to meet you.