As a business owner myself, I have come to realize the importance of having business cards available when I need them. I work from home, and I thought the business I do was pretty specialized. Specialized as in, only a very limited number of people would need my services. There was really no need to have business cards, because it wasn't like an executive recruiter was going to come around needing my contact information to track me to a better life. I figured, what I do is on the Internet, so that is really all the contact information anyone is going to need.
Well, after about a year of thinking this way, I realized just how wrong I was. It turns out that one of the first questions anyone asks you when you meet for the first time is what you do for a living. Because I write for a living, people are naturally intrigued in what I have to offer. I hadn't realized at the time that writers are in more demand than I at first thought. People with resume services in Vancouver, website designers, and others all wanted to know how to contact me.
I would give them my information of course, but if they remembered it at all is anyone's guess, and the answer is most likely no. In fact, any time I did give them my information it was written down on whatever piece of paper I had in my wallet; not very professional, to say the least. And also a lot easier to lose than a business card, which could just be placed in a Rolodex somewhere for future contact. I probably lost out on a lot of business this way; that card could have been given to my private commercial mortgage lender and anyone else with whom I had regular dealings.
But we all live and learn, and the importance of having a few business cards available was not one lost on me. At the beginning of my second year in business, I went to the same business who manufactures custom enclosures for me and asked them where they got their cards printed. Turns out it was easy and cheap to get five dozen cards done, and all of those cards were handed out in the first four months after I got them.
More importantly, those cards had all the information people would need in order to contact me and contract my services. My email, home and work phone numbers, and address are all on my cards, along with my name, the business name, and a small design which illustrates what I do. The cards are in the hands of a doctor practicing naturopathic medicine in Toronto, various lawyers, and a host of others, and business is going great. Don't neglect this important part of helping your business to succeed.
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