Business Card Fiasco

Whenever you meet a subject that you wish to do business with, you want to leave them with something to remember you by. In the beginning, a punch in the eye or humping the subject's leg had proven to be affective for aiding the subject remembering you, but it has been shown to be counter-productive in generating any actual business with that subject. As an alternative, the ancients created what we call today: the business card.

The basic concept of the business card is simple. Take some information about yourself that would aid a person in doing business with you and throw it on a card. Hand said card to subject and wait for them to contact you. Now there is etiquette to giving out business cards, multiple types of paper used, double-sided and a slew of other choices that one must consider when creating / using business cards.

Let me re-create a business card snafu that we just recently encountered. Just like all new business owners, we were excited to get our business cards and begin giving them out. We searched the government incorporation office for Florida and discovered a name that we wanted to use. We ordered the cards first anticipating that it would take the longest to create (since you can file a corporation online in Florida).

We went to Vistaprint and created 500 cards with the name and information required along with a logo that we created from scratch. All this cost us about $50. Shortly thereafter, we decided that the name we chose was limited in nature and we needed to expand the name description to better suit our purposes. Generally, we will doing vending and real estate under this LLC so we didn't want to break them up into separate entities. The initial business name included the vending in it which we didn't think would be very professional looking as we presented the cards to real estate folks.

We still got the cards ordered of course even though they were totally wrong at this point. When we looked at the cards we realized that the design was all wrong. The logo was too big and used up too much space. Because of this, the writing on the cards was too small and difficult to read.

Keeping these lessons in mind we created a new business card implementing our changes. So we returned to Vistaprint and created a 1,000 cards knowing this was going to be the right card for us. This cost us about $65. Well, the lesson here is don't order cards until you get verification that the business name is truly available from the state. We had looked online and saw that our new name had been used in the past, but currently was not in use. We saw that and thought incorrectly; that we could use that name for ourselves. We later discovered that a new law had just passed the summer of 2007 that said you could no longer immediately utilize these previously used names without jumping through some hoops. We guessed that it would take some time to jump through these hoops so we passed on that name and chose one that had never been used.

You guessed it, that meant we had to create another logo and more business cards. This time we waited to get confirmation from the state before we actually ordered the cards. So tack on another $65 for these 1,000 cards for a total cost of $180. In the grand scheme of things this truly is not that much money, but it is a cost that we could have avoided if we went about things differently.

So, just remember to get verification from the state first and create your business cards utilizing the appropriate techniques. Follow this link to 9 business card mistakes: http://www.businessknowhow.com/marketing/business-card.htm and good luck.