Great news! We are excited to announce that Flooring America and Flooring Canada are now employing Balihoo Marketer Edition. 

As one of the fastest-growing retail cooperatives in North America, Flooring America and Flooring Canada very well might be right in your neighborhood.

To read more about how they are benefiting from the Balihoo Marketer Edition, Click Here.

To learn how our Marketer Edition could offer you, Contact Us!

So what’s next for restaurants?

The New York Times recently published an article about how restaurants are faring in the face of the economic downturn we’re facing these days, and the situation appears to be mixed.

Some independent restaurants are weathering the economic storm by being flexible with their menu and their prices. That’s an advantage they have over chain restaurants and fast food franchises – which are finding it more difficult to be nimble when it comes to menu and price changes.

But the article also cites Morningstar Senior Equity Analyst John Owen’s opinion that in many cities, big chains may eventually win out.  Why? Because chains “can afford to advertise more than small restaurants and negotiate better deals with suppliers and get better locations.”

At the risk of immodesty we at Balihoo can’t help but think that our Marketer Edition platform is the perfect answer for restaurant chains and franchises looking to seamlessly extend their national advertising campaigns to local audiences.

Marketer Edition allows local chains and franchisors and to quickly and efficiently manage and execute their ad campaigns across all media, so there is more time left to mind the store and deliver the quality food and service that restaurant customers expect.

But don’t just take our word for it.  Right now Carpet One Floor and Home, one of the nation’s largest carpet and flooring franchisors, is helping hundreds of Carpet One dealers across the country advertise on the local level with Balihoo Marketer Edition. This same approach can easily be applied to restaurant chains.   If you’re interested, get in touch! 

For the next few years at least, advertising is going to be a critical differentiator when it comes to navigating the ruthlessly competitive restaurant landscape. We’re happy to say we can help!

While reading USA Today I came across an article that sparked my interest. It discusses how starting your own business can seem overwhelming to many people but is actually a goal anyone can achieve with the right resources. Owning franchise businesses is a popular option since the brand is previously established and much of the work is already done. Since the success of your business reflects on the larger franchise, they are more than happy to offer help and advice to help your business run smoothly. The author states that to make the start-up process easier, a good franchisor will assist you with such things as staff selection, staff training, sales and marketing. 

Sales and marketing is an essential part of any successful business. With new technology, this aspect of running your franchise has become simple and efficient. More franchisors are using emerging web-based applications, such as Balihoo’s Marketer Edition, to make their marketing efforts more effective. Franchisors can improve marketing support for dealers by delivering lower costs and creative templates while providing buying power all within one seamless environment. By creating brand consistency with centralized access to all creative materials, local efforts are in synch with the national brand. As a result, your business will enjoy greater success at a local level giving you peace of mind and time to enjoy your new business.

As companies begin re-assessing their business strategy in these current times of uncertainty, its important to think about market leadership.   In the book Mavericks at Work, the authors propose that the only true form of market leadership is thought leadership.

They suggest asking yourself 5 questions:

1. Do you have a distinctive and disruptive sense of purpose?
2. Do you have a vocabulary of competition that is unique to your industry and compelling to both employees and customers? (an ‘only spoken here’ vocabulary)
3. Are you prepared to reject opportunities that offer short term benefits but distract from the long term goal?
4. Can you be provocative without creating a backlash? (within your own organization or from competition)
5. If your company went out of business tomorrow who would really miss you and why?

Given our current climate, the last question seems to be particularly noteworthy.  How would your business answer these questions?  If you are in the media industry, how can use these questions to redefine business practices and set yourself up to weather the storm and even grow?

Despite the economy, search engine advertising continues to thrive. In fact, marketers would spend more on search ads if the process of finding and executing search buys was not so unwieldy. I read an article today in Adweek about increased growth in search engine advertising. It states that brands are unable to scale back spending as much as they would like and, according to a number of research groups, search engine advertising continues to boom.  

The most remarkable part of the article stated that, according to JupiterResearch, 92% of large search marketers would utilize search spending if they could only find an easy way to buy and manage ads. This is just another example of the need for easy to use advertising portals (such as Balihoo) to facilitate the media buying process. With better tools and technology media buyers could capitalize on finding the right advertising opportunities which is increasingly important in a down economy. After all, brand re-enforcement through advertising can help to maintain customer buys and increase trust in your company’s stability. 

I love to write about random observations and facts. I also love to write about our products…so in this blog I’ll try to tie the two of them together.

Over the last few days, I’ve heard one similar thing five times, making it not-so-random, especially over such a short amount of time.

Two people said to me they are eating more because of the stress they are feeling from the economy. Two different people – both of whom I’d consider financially savvy individuals – said they are going to invest in snack companies because during time of economic worry, people seek comfort food and products. Warren Buffet would be proud! The sixth thing, merely a self-observation and tough to admit - I ate Twinkies today. It had to be the first time in 10 years I bought a pack of Twinkies. I forgot how good they are.

The most interesting observation I’ve heard was from my brother, Joe, who is a hairstylist at Orlo, one of the handful of salons in the world that can command over $500 a cut. Assuming business would be down for him, I asked my brother how things have been since I last saw him, which was the day Lehman Brothers defaulted a few weeks ago. He said he has never been busier and that his salon had its best month ever. I was initially surprised by this, but given how people flee to comfort foods, products, and services during times of worry, it actually made perfect sense. Despite the cost of an Orlo cut, even if their multi-million portfolios are down 25%, the rich and famous can certainly still afford an $800 cut and dye to add a little self-esteem boost during an otherwise crazy time.

In the words of Cliff Clavin, ‘it’s a little known fact’ that the cosmetic industry was largely born out of the Great Depression. The first American cosmetic stalwart, Revlon, started at the nadir of the depression in 1932. Despite the bleak economic outlook, women still bought lipstick, nail polish, and blush – the small cost of looking good had a disproportionately positive effect on their mood, which was well worth the $0.29 cost for a stick of lipstick.

Another great ‘comfort food’ example is how companies like Campbell’s and Lipton saw a major uptick insales post-9/11. People sought comfort during a very difficult and emotional time, and what could be more comforting than a bowl of chicken soup? It is also well-documented knowledge that Americans, on average, gained weight after 9/11 (access one such study here), largely a result of eating too much comfort food.

Even though comfort product companies may do “relatively well” in comparison to other companies, it doesn’t mean profit margins will be robust and all companies will probably seek ways to trim costs. Oftentimes, advertising budget is the first expense to be pared, but doing so can put companies into a death spiral – slow sales –> less advertising –> slower sales, etc… So, during times like these, retailers need a low cost way to advertise and our Marketer Edition provides just that – a low-cost and efficient platform for franchisors and retailers to drive ad campaigns down to the local level. Some premier national brands – like Carpet One and Flooring America – are using our software to drive lower cost marketing in all markets throughout the country. Even though we didn’t design our Marketer Edition with this downturn explicitly in mind, we built the company on the premise that advertising has got to become more efficient, and we are trying to help in this vein.

So there…I tied some random facts about the local economy to one of our products. And, I’ll definitely work out tomorrow to burn off those Twinkies!

Today, in the Entrepreneurial Edge section of the New York Times they are featuring an article which focuses on Idaho start-ups entitled ‘Start-Ups Give Idaho and Identity Beyond Potatoes’ and happens to highlight Balihoo.

The author James Flanigan did a great job conveying the fact that Idaho isn’t all potatoes and farming but also has several thriving technology and green manufacturing companies. Read it below or directly on the NYT site here.

Start-Ups Give Idaho an Identity Beyond Potatoes

Idaho may be best known for its potatoes — it produces, after all, a third of all the potatoes in the United States. But its economy is increasingly being driven by technology and green manufacturing companies, big and small.

Most of those companies have settled in the Boise Valley, an area of about 600,000 people, where they have received an enthusiastic response from city officials and technological and business assistance from Boise State University.

“Some 70 percent of Idaho’s economy is in high technology,” said Jason Crawforth, founder and chief strategy officer of MobileDataforce, a Boise company with a software system for compiling and transmitting information from handsets in the field to databases in the home office. Mr. Crawforth cited American Electronics Association statistics that show Idaho’s exports to be chiefly in computer chips, parts and equipment, notwithstanding the potato.

Yet it was the potato, in a way, that started Boise on a path to high technology industry. In 1978, the late Jack Simplot, founder of the J.R. Simplot Company, developer of Idaho russet potatoes and of freeze-dried French fries for McDonald’s, invested in a start-up called Micron Technology, a maker of semiconductors.

Micron now has more than 20,000 employees and close to $6 billion in annual revenues. (Micron is not immune to the turmoil in global economic markets. It announced last week that it would lay off more than 3,000 employees in the next two years because of a glut in microchips.)

Idaho farmers have been backing technological start-ups ever since. Gerald R. Thompson, for example, said he raised $2 million from farmers near Boise in 2006 to start a company, Sky Detective. The company combines global positioning satellite technology with cellular phone technology from Qualcomm to produce a device capable of tracking people and cargoes anywhere in the world.

Mr. Thompson, now a retired deputy sheriff in Los Angeles, said he saw a device that added satellite surveillance to a Qualcomm system to monitor the whereabouts of commercial trucks and found that law enforcement agencies were interested in the device as well.

So he went back to Boise, where he had grown up, raised the start-up money and now has a company with 13 employees, as well as contract consultants in the United States and a manufacturing staff in China. “We make the hardware in China,” Mr. Thompson said. “But for software, I recruited engineering students at Boise State University who came up with all sorts of great ideas.”

The Sky Detective product is now being used by law enforcement agencies, and the company is pursuing expansion worldwide and into consumer markets, so users can track children and pets. It is also seeking substantial capital investment, though Mr. Thompson said last week that “it’s a tough time to raise money.” He added: “I am seeing very cautionary demeanors in the venture capital and investment banking community. But they also tell me there is a lot of money on sidelines for the right opportunity.”

MobileDataforce, Mr. Crawforth’s company, also uses cellphone technology for tasks as diverse as enabling workers in the field to give instant estimates and insurance payments for damages to automobiles and homes to keeping track of every metal rod and bolt in the new Bay Bridge under construction between San Francisco and Oakland. The company, Mr. Crawforth said, is awaiting a contract from the Agency for International Development to monitor distribution of AIDS vaccines and medicines in 13 African countries.

And yes, he said, the company has concerns these days about cash flow. “We do the work ahead of time and need to keep payments coming in.” Mr. Crawforth said he and Mobile Dataforce’s three other owners were looking to raise capital.

Another Boise company, the two-year-old Balihoo, uses complex Web-based software to help advertisers find potential audiences in the fragmented media field of social networks, Web sites and phone devices, not to mention newspapers, television and cable channels. “There are unmanageable numbers of Web sites,” said Vincent Martino, who is in charge of technology as Balihoo’s chief operating officer. “But our software can communicate with 100 sites directly and get the advertiser information to make an intelligent, efficient decision.”

Balihoo was founded by Peter Gombert, an entrepreneur who had previously started and sold three software companies. The company, which has 75 employees, is financed by $5.5 million in venture capital raised from Lacuna Gap Capital in Boulder, Colo., and Highway 12 Ventures, a Boise firm.

As to current economic conditions, Mr. Gombert said in an interview last week: “As a venture-backed firm, we do not rely heavily on general credit markets. The bigger concern is whether recession causes companies to reduce marketing and advertising. We have seen some pullback from our advertisers, but nothing significant at this point. The true tale will be told over the next three to six months.”

Boise’s enthusiasm for business encouraged Dr. Carl R. Thornfeldt, a dermatologist for 25 years, to found a company, Episciences Inc., and create nonprescription products to reduce skin inflammation. The company now distributes those products through physicians’ offices. Episciences has 22 employees and, he said, “will expand this year through a venture in Japan.”

Sandhill Industries, which recycles plate glass to make tiles for kitchens and bathrooms, moved to Boise six years ago from Alaska. The company was founded in 1998 by Terri Raudenbush, an engineering graduate of Colorado State University, and her husband, Jim, a forest firefighter for the federal government, with close to $400,000 in grants from the state of Alaska’s Science and Technology Foundation and the federal Environmental Protection Administration. The move to Boise helped her business, Mrs. Raudenbush said, “because we are closer to a supply of plate glass and to customers for shipping.”

In a factory just outside Boise, Mrs. Raudenbush and three employees fuse recycled powdered glass in a low-energy furnace, add pigment for up to 36 colors, cut and bake tiles in kilns, cool them and ship them out. The company was included in a list of green producers on Martha Stewart’s television show two years ago and has distributed its tiles through its Web site from that time. Sandhill Industries has about $500,000 in annual sales, Mrs. Raudenbush said.

“Our big advantage is the fact that we are a ‘green’ producer,” she explained. As to the current economic financial environment, “We have minuscule debt,” she added, with emphasis. “We pay off every month any advances we take from our $10,000 credit line from the bank.”

This post is Balihoo’s contribution to Blog Action Day.  

Poverty and hunger are issues that many Americans associate with third world countries – sure we know there are poor people in America but true poverty, true malnutrition and true helpless - those issues must be foreign to the US, right…? Unfortunately, that isn’t the case at all. Sadly, poverty is all around us.  In your city, in front of you at the stop light, perhaps even right next door. We should all be aware that members of our communities are suffering. 

While Idaho is a fantastic place to live, it along with every other state in the nation, is not untouched by poverty.  According to the Idaho Food Bank an average of: 

66,000 Idaho families worry they cannot afford food. 

4 – 5% of Idaho residents are hungry at any given time because they cannot afford to buy food. 

16.3% of all Idahoans live in food-insecure households. (88,000 of which are children) 

20% of Idaho’s households don’t make the $20,534 ($9.87 per hour) per year needed to rent a two-bedroom house. 

17,000 people in Idaho need emergency food assistance on any given week, and 81,400 Idahoans per year need assistance. 

2 of every 3 people who rely on the Food Bank are either children too young to work or seniors who have worked most of their lives.  

79,183 Idaho children (21.24%) are food insecure. 

42% of school-aged children (74,433 Idaho children per day) qualify to receive a free or a reduced priced lunch. 

Over the past 2 decades, the poverty rate amount working families in Idaho has increased by nearly 50%.

Idaho is the 13^th hungriest state in the country. 

Please visit the Idaho Food Bank website to find out what you can do.  

One of the easiest ways to help is to hold a Food Drive in your place of employment or you can simply click here to locate one near you.

I am sitting on a plane (as usual) heading out to visit a prospective client and the entire ride has been bumpy. I travel all the time and have become accustomed to small bumps, however, I still get a little fearful when we hit big bumps thirty thousand feet in the air. Startups can be kind of like that. The more time you spend working in one, the more acceptable small ups and down become; you feel them but simply carry on with your work. However, when you hit a big bump fear still takes over. Thousands of venture backed startups hit a REALLY big bump over the past week. The general state of the global economy went haywire and fear was being spread wide and far. It was not enough to turn to any media outlet only to be bombarded by doom and gloom stories, but just when things were looking really ugly Sequoia Capital one of the most venerable venture capital firms in the country held a mandatory meeting of its CEO’s and explicitly announced the end of the good times (more on that meeting can be read here, but be warned that you may need a vomit bag by the time you are done reading this).

Now, I will be the first to admit that the general state of the economy and the unprecedented events of the past few weeks are tremendously scary to a venture backed CEO, however, smart companies will use this opportunity to retrench, get back to good solid business principals and eat the lunch of their competition. If the world follows the advice of Sequoia all of the early stage companies will be cutting to the bone and just entering survival mode. What an opportunity!

I am not advocating ignoring the writing on the wall and carrying on as nothing is happening. Smart companies will do their best to reduce non-essential expenses, focus on their core strategy, and execute flawlessly. In an environment paralyzed by fear it does not take much to move past the competition and grab market share.

While I am not a big fan of Gordon Gecko “greed is good” – I am a big fan of Warren Buffet and one of his principals “be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy”. I need to run now, I am going to go close some deals.

Here’s the picture of the visitor that was in my office earlier this week.  That’s Mozley, she’s a 10 week old chocolate lab that belongs to Sam Martin, a media buyer here at Balihoo.  She’s so cute it hurts and I couldn’t resist taking a quick picture of her amongst our “Scout” (the Balihoo dogs name) schwag. 

Sam, you’re lucky you made it out of here with that dog, I desperately wanted to take her home!