How to choose your clients and turn them into friends?
Meet David Choy, a partner at King Cow Interactive LLC a small web and print firm. Learn how his sustainable approach increases sales and about his golden tip for success.
King Cow Interactive LLC is a small web and print firm supporting artistic, educational, environmental, and social causes. He has a Ph.D. in environmental engineering and loves when he gets to apply some of his math and engineering experience to his web app.
David is the generalist in the business, on both the creative and business sides. His current favorite projects include a web app that controls audio devices on movie sets, a nonprofit membership organization for musicians, and a web app that encourages recycling among pavement engineers. These projects have different applications, but they all support causes he loves and require similar skills.
Who are your customers? What is the main channel that attracts them to your business?
Our customers range from artists and nonprofits to architects and engineers implementing their work with the environment in mind. Almost all of our creative work comes from referrals and word of mouth. By staying small and keeping costs down with almost 100% remote work, we choose projects to work on and pass projects onto others in our network when we are not the best fit.
How do you grow your business?
As our company gains experience, we grow organically; almost completely through referrals and word of mouth. Instead of taking every opportunity that comes our way, we select clients and projects that we love and refer them to our friends and contractors when we aren’t the best fit. Our growth year or year, therefore, has remained slow but steady.
How do you reach out to new clients?
Most of our new clients come to us via our website or email. However, when I do occasionally reach out to new clients, I try to find where they are already present and reach out to them there. For example, if a prospective client is on LinkedIn, I’ll reach out to them there. New clients usually learn about us from previous clients.
What are the two tips you’d give other business owners on bringing new customers through the door?
I have the main tips. The first is don’t try to directly increase sales, and the second is to find the companies that are the best match for your business and referrals will follow. It’s important to find clients that you love.
“Find the companies that are the best match for your business and referrals will follow. It’s important to find clients that you love”
What were the things that you tried and didn’t work?
One strategy that we see failing a lot, especially among smaller clients is AdWords campaigns. They oftentimes don’t have a big enough budget to do statistical keyword analysis or face stiff competition. For example, we donated money to support a non-profit solar project with Google AdWords a while back. It worked great–until big corporations like BP started raising the click-through fee bids. We couldn’t compete when that happened and needed to switch to cultivating organic draws.
What advice would you give to your past self before opening your own business?
First, keep track of your hours. All of them, including overhead. With that in mind, only work with clients that you love, and don’t mind racking up some unpaid hours for good causes.
David Choy, a partner at King Cow Interactive LLC.
*The purpose of this page is solely to provide information and should not be considered as financial advice
**Melio does not provide legal, tax or accounting advice; you should consult a professional advisor before making any financial decisions.
