St. Louis Business Journal - July 9, 2001

Opinion
	From the July 6, 2001 print edition

A closer look

The thinking person's guide to business leads

Because of the nature of my job, I receive many resumes from those seeking marketing positions. Some are creatives, some on the sales side, some just graduated from college or recently moved to St. Louis and some have been laid off from dot-coms.

I'm forwarding all of them to Keith Alper, Creativeworks' founder and chief executive officer. However, if these people had read last week's Business Journal article on Creativeworks' new affiliation with Staples.com, they should have been contacting the company directly.

The information that the firm is hiring two or three people to handle the influx of business it expects to generate through the Staples connection is only one business lead in the story. There are lots more....for your company and for ours.

For example, Creativeworks has company-owned stores in St. Louis and franchises in San Francisco and Indianapolis. It's looking to expand to 125 locations during the next five years. If you're seeking a franchise opportunity, this might be the one.

If you're a venture capitalist, Mr. Alper might be calling on you soon, having raised $2 million from private investors over the past three years. In past stories, the newspaper has listed some of those investors who include many prominent St. Louisans. This might be your opportunity to follow their investment lead.

Stranger things have happened. Maxine Clark tells the story of a major St. Louis investor reading of her plans for Build-A-Bear workshops in the Business Journal. He contacted her, carefully reviewed her plans and became an early investor at a critical time. Build-A-Bear has locations throughout the United States, Ms. Clark has won virtually every entrepreneurial award and, we assume, her investor is pleased with the results.

If you're a banker, you might want to hook up with Creativeworks to assist in financing proposals for franchisees; if you're a real estate broker, with national contacts, Creativeworks will be expanding across the country.

If you offer a unique professional service, you might want to borrow a page from Keith Alper's book and try to find a national Website with which to affiliate.

If you're at the Business Journal, as I am, you want to make sure Creativeworks is aware of our national advertising network which can support the Indianapolis office and the San Francisco office as well as the St. Louis agency (which, thankfully, already advertises with us).

Another Business Journal opportunity is making contacts with Creativeworks locally to back up our own creative staff during vacation season or when we get overwhelmed.

We should make sure to include Creativeworks in our sampling efforts on Friday mornings as we distribute free copies of the newspaper throughout the area to reach potential new subscribers.

Those are only a handful of ideas that spring from one article in last week's newspaper. If you'd like a copy of the Creativeworks story, e-mail me at esherberg@bizjournals.com or fax a request to 314-621-5031. If you have other ideas on how the story generates either leads or ideas for your business, I hope you'll share them with me as well.

Stay cool.

Ellen

Contact Ellen Sherberg at esherberg@bizjournals.com.