Evan Carmichael shares five quick ways small-business owners can look bigger without spending much: dress one step above your clients, rent a boardroom for meetings, hire virtual receptionists, get professionally designed business cards, and use a custom-domain email. These changes shape how clients see you and help win larger contracts.
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Welcome back, everybody. The young, super successful entrepreneur Evan Carmichael is here to guide us through any small business owners who may be doing the wrong thing in terms of giving a good appearance to make them appear like they're a big, successful enterprise. Good morning.
Good morning.
And I said you look like a baby. You're 27 years young.
Yeah.
But you've been at this for a while.
Yeah, I had my first business when I was 19 years old. It was a biotech software company.
It's amazing.
So it's been around for a while.
So you learned a lot of things, and it doesn't take a lot of time or cost a lot of money. To do it right, right?
Absolutely, absolutely. The first thing really is dressing for success, so having that professional look. So just because you work from home and you're in pajamas half the day, it doesn't mean that your customers know that about you. So the image that you put out there really can make the impact and it can make or break, you know, those big clients for you.
Yeah, with the exception of Hugh Hefner who pulls off the robe at all times because that's his gig. You should be wearing the suit. Invest in a couple of good suits and a couple of different ties, right?
Yeah, it doesn't always have to be a suit. The rule of thumb really is dress one step above what you think your customer's gonna be dressed as. So if your customer's coming in jeans and a t-shirt, then maybe you wear some nice pants and a nice shirt. If they're coming in pants and a shirt, you may want to put a blazer on. If they're gonna wear a blazer, you wear a suit. So just based on your knowledge with the customer.
And the same for women? I mean, go for more tailored looks based on what your clientele is? Yeah, absolutely. Okay, and another thing you say is offices. If you don't have one, you can kinda sorta fake it and have a pseudo office?
Yeah, yeah. If you don't have a an office if you work from home. There's a lot of offices that you can rent out for boardroom space, so you can have meetings downtown at different offices. I did that with one of my first companies. Really? Yeah, we had an office down at Yonge and King where I went down for meetings so I could entertain clients and bring them to my office.
Okay.
But also you can even get meetings at Starbucks. I have a lot of informal meetings at Starbucks at a nice downtown location.
So just make it seem like, you know what, I need a break, I gotta get out of the office.
That's it. Yeah, I like it. I wanna get out of the office, I wanna make it casual, so why don't we just meet up at Starbucks, I'll buy you a coffee.
So do not have them in your home den or kitchen or living room or basement.
Right, yeah, you really want to create that professional appeal.
Okay, very cool. And receptionists, do you say hire people part-time or is it better off getting the automated thing? What do you think?
There's a mix. There's a lot of services you can get where somebody will answer the phones for you and they'll route it to your cell phone or your own phone. There are some automated services and it does make you look a little bit bigger and it's really cheap to get it done. You can hire people part-time for reception services or for other types of admin work. The first person I hired was for 1 hour a day.
Really?
And most people don't think you can hire somebody for only an hour a day, but it was for a lot of admin work that I just didn't want to do, and I hired somebody on for an hour a day, and now I could say I have a part-time staffer, and it makes your company look bigger.
So you've got the part-time staff, your part-time office when they could be coming in for those meetings.
Yep.
So you make it all look like it's, it's the legitimate bigger business than it actually is.
Absolutely.
Which is a great idea. Another thing that's so important in terms of aesthetics is the cards that you hand out. Now what are people doing wrong when it comes to business cards?
The first thing is not to—
Sorry, we should say this is done— this is a good example.
This is a good example. This is a company, a local company called Toronto Dance Salsa, and they teach salsa classes in the GTA. The key thing is you need to invest in some marketing materials. It's not like before where you needed to have glossy flyers and brochures and spend tons of dollars doing it, and then if any one minor detail changed, you had to throw everything out and start all over again. With the business card, you want to make sure it looks professional, so you don't want to do those home-printed business cards.
It's a no-no.
It's a no-no.
Okay.
With the perforated edges, people don't take you seriously if you have those types of business cards. And it doesn't cost too much money to actually go out and get professionally designed business cards, and you can do it online very cheaply as well. So this is a good example of a business card, and the owner has received a lot of compliments as a result of that.
It's a good investment. As well, you've got some examples of websites, because of course this is the way in terms of getting new business and getting yourself out there and advertising today. So is this what we— you would call it a poor example or a good example of how to create a website?
Well, this is, this is the poor example. It's kind of hard for you to see from this angle, but we want to look at two websites. One is a good example, one is a bad, and this is the poor one. It's a company out of Texas. We wanted to show an American company instead of the Toronto, and it's a company called Mike Wagner Dance. And Mike Wagner is a very accomplished dancer and he's won a number of different awards But if you look at his website, it's very poorly designed where his picture is really hard to see, the text colors don't work, um, the pictures are again, uh, very small and difficult to read. Okay. And his email address as well is an AOL free email address, which is another no-no for small business where you want to make sure if you have your own domain name, so his is MikeWagnerDance.com, to use your own domain name in your email address as opposed to an AOL or Hotmail or Yahoo.
No Hotmail, no Yahoo.
No Hotmail, no Yahoo. Use your own domain name. It looks a lot more professional. The big companies that you deal with, the representatives are always using their own domain name.
Right, and incorporate your business name. Don't do like PartyGuy64@hotmail.com, right?
Right, yeah, absolutely.
More information, go to EvanCarmichael.com. Very useful tips, thank you so much.
