Our little family business (3 generations)?

Since Sept.11, my biz. is doing poorly. We have cut back in every way poss. and still no turn around. Other biz. within our vicinity(a very wealthy surburban area )have experienced a 30-50 % decline since Sept.11, so we are not alone. No money in budget to advertize and that is a killer in retail. Debt..taxes..don't want to go bankrupt,of course.Already have a SBA loan that we received when we opened 11 years ago.They are not able to help us financially with an increase in funding. This is a sole prop.,not a corp. We keep hanging in there when other stores and biz. are going out of business. Have tried for loans and lines of credit but none get approved due to lack of income due to poor sales. I know our product is great..lots of customers who are very happy..but people are having to watch their budgets also and are not spending as much as they used to. So hard to give up when we have invested 11 years and lots of love in this company.

That's a tough situation and business is a cutthroat environment. You may try to look into other ways of advertising that may be cheaper. The previous answerer suggested selling online and that's not a bad idea. A site such as ebay may be useful to you and once you get on your feet with that maybe you can try your own online site. Other than that, I can't think of many ways to help without an advertising budget. Hope this helped somehow.

Sell on line

Consider free online local advertising such as Craig's List and http://local.yahoo.com or http://expo.live.com
Use coupons to drive foot traffic.
Direct mail is extremely effective.

try begging or recycling trash from the garbage dumping ground u idiot.!

What is your question???

Move your company to ebay.... no overhead... run it out of your home and ebay is not very strict about taxes.

Do you live in Michigan...Same situation here...
Try the Quantitative Marketing Group website... There are some good marketing ideas there. Good Luck and Keep the Faith!