Small business can not really afford to have a famous PR Agency on retainer.

Most small businesses can not have a large advertising budget.

Year ago we spent money to be in the Sacramento Yellow Pages and it worked some.

Now small businesses have modern web sites to attract their customers.

Producing their own instructional YouTube video are another good investment for fly shops.

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About 30 years ago a young lady came into my shop and told me she wanted to do her Masters thesis on my small business.

She was studying Business and Communication at one of our local universities.

She made up a one page flyer with ~40 questions and we gave it to everyone who came into the store for maybe one month.

We had them fill it out and we gave them a free leader or spool of tippet material.

At the end of the 30 days she came in and picked them all up.

Some time later she came in to give me the results.

She said your business is running on "The World of Mouth" and our donations and advertising don't do much.

She said over 80% of the people who filled out the form had heard about our shop from someone, somewhere?


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I was in the retail sporting goods business in Sacramento for over 50 years and I have to thank my good friends who continued to

sent people to me over the years. I guess these people knew I would treat everyone right.

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I started working (1960s) part time at Sports Unlimited on Arden Way when I was going to Sac State studying fisheries.

It was one of the top sporting goods stores in Norther California at the time. We had guns, hunting, back packing, and fishing.

Our boss/owner, Lou Pia, told me that my job was to give good information to the customers to help them make better discission.

He told me "don't worry about trying to sell them anything because they will let you know when they are ready to buy".

Lou said all that Dale Carnegie hard sell sales stuff was just bull shit.

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I never told my staff how to sell. If you have a good inventory and a knowledgeable staff it will all work out just fine.

After some time I figured out that to work for me you need to be a better fly fishier than I was and enjoy talking about it.

Over the years I had some fantastic employees like Joe Shirshac, Chuck Campana, Chris Pasley, Jeff Putnam, Alan Barnard, Andy

Guibord, Terry Thomas, Jim Christensen, Doug Duncan and Tim Au-young. These guys were the "A team"....

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Some fly shops will have only two employees at a time in there but we had 4 to 5 every day but Sunday, we had two.

That way we could take off weeks at a time, traveling with groups of our customers to exotic fly fishing destinations.

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One time Marilyn and I were at the Sacramento airport headed to Christmas Island and the shop called us.

They said the computer system had "crashed" on startup and it was "smoking" too?

In a short time we heard laughter......they said they fixed it........



Many of us looked forward to driving to the fly shop....it was more fun than work.