I logged in to my favorite social networking site and I was busy browsing through the different pages when I chanced upon the profile page of one of my high school classmates. He’s now living in Madrid, Spain and is working as a graphic artist. Even when we were still in high school, he was the go-to guy when our class needed visual aids and stuff because he had good hands. Anyway, I was surprised to see some of his present works because they were great! I asked him if he has a lot of clients and he told me that most of his clients are friends. Outside of them, the rest of his clients are all referrals; either a friend of a friend or a relative of a friend. I told him to start giving out his artist business cards to people whether they are existing clients of him o not. I told him that his business card must at least showcase a glimpse of some of his works so that people would have a general idea about what he does and how good he is at it. I saw a photographer’s business card displayed online and although he didn’t say outright that he was a photographer, his business card which was laden with different types of cameras said it all and that was what I advised to my friend. Hopefully, he’ll take the hint and do the same.

From Thursday last week up to this past Monday, I was tasked to look after the family owned store. That’s because my brother and his family went on a mini vacation. That was the first time I manned the shop alone. At the same time, I was left home alone.

The experience was quite fun and exciting and scary at the same time. I wasn’t sure if I could pull the job considering that I don’t really consider myself as a “sales person”. I’m more the “behind-the-scenes” type of worker. Well anyway, apart from the hassle of setting up the displays and closing the store by 9PM, I found myself enjoying myself.

There were a few glitches, nothing major though and among those were clients who were asking for business cards so they can follow up on their orders. It turned out that we didn’t have any! So I had to explain to the clients that we ran out of business cards and if they would be kind enough to just give me their numbers and I will call them up as soon as their orders arrive, to which they gladly acquiesced.

Now I have a new project for our business and that’s to look for printing shops that design custom business cards. In our kind of business, it’s really important that we have a business card to give to our clients, especially those who have just gotten wind of our store. So for tomorrow, that’s the first item on my list of to-dos.