Thank You For Coming To Lowes

This past weekend after spending a majority of my time outdoors – hiking and playground hopping with my 3 year old son - we ended the weekend with some rain showers and a trip to Lowe’s. No not the movie theatre (that would have been much preferable), but the home improvement center. Nothing too exciting – we needed to pick up a new medicine cabinet for the downstairs bathroom. I couldn’t help thinking to myself as I walked through the store that exactly a week prior I was bar hopping with my brother-in-law in Nashville, Tennessee listening to some killer live music. The other thought that I had walking through Lowe’s was how much work needed to be done on our house. It got overwhelming as my wife and I talked about all the projects that we want to tackle.

It’s very similar to my business, GigMasters. There are a TON of things that you want to accomplish, but there are only so many hours in a day. All you can do is stay calm, keep a clear head and stay focused on the main priorities (or ‘major initiatives’ as we have started calling them around the office).

So what are our major initiatives? Well, I don’t think I’ll be giving away too much if I mentioned a few of the big ones:

1) Conversion To Flash Video – There’s probably nothing more important for a performer to get booked online than having video that customers can view. Up until now, we had displayed video in all different formats (Windows Media, QuickTime, mpeg, etc). It made for a less than smooth customer experience as all different plug-ins were required. We’re now moving to an all-flash video experience which should greatly improve customer experience and in turn bookings.

2) Downloadable Contracts – This is a new area we are venturing into gradually. Basically, we are going to give performers access to an optional downloadable PDF contract that they can use if they don’t have their own. Working with our entertainment lawyers, we have come up with what we think is a well balanced contract – and by well balanced we mean one that protects both the client and the performer. More to come on that in a few weeks.

3) New Performer Signup Process – When we redesigned/rebranded our website a few months back, we didn’t have a chance to redesign the performer signup page. So visitors to that page are still seeing remnants of our old brand. This will soon change as we have re-enlisted the help of our designer to overhaul that as well. Should be a big improvement not only in the way it looks, but in the way performers will be able to choose their categories.

4) Event Planner Targetting – We have a major initiative under way to attract more professional event planners to the site. These event planners are potential repeat bookers and we are working toward making the site more useful and user friendly to this all important customer segment.

5) Category Expansion - We are the process of greatly increasing the number of categories on our website. Some of these categories are completely different from what we’ve had before (Animals for Parties for example) while others are just offshoots of ones that we’ve already had (Comedy Magician for example). This increase in categories should help pull in more traffic and give people an even wider entertainment selection for their events.

So that’s just a few of the big things going on. This doesn’t even touch on all the little fixes that are happening day in and day out to make the booking process smoother. But it certainly keeps me busy, and gives me an excuse to tell my wife why I don’t possible have time to put up that new medicine cabinet!