HATTIE: When you think of emergency services, you probably don't think about competition. But the woman we'll profile in a moment faces plenty of competition every day in the ambulance business.

Welcome to SMALL BUSINESS TODAY. For the next half-hour, we'll call on small-business people around the country who will share their insights on making a success in business.

We'll also hear some great advice on how to develop your marketing plan, plus our regular features, Law Talk, Smart Practice, You're Wired, and Deliver Your Message, all with information you can put to use to make your business a success.

But first, a small-business owner In The Trenches.

Baltimore has the Orioles, the Inner Harbor, and Vickie Rosellini. If you're ever here and need help, you're in good hands with Vickie.

Unidentified Man #5: We're gonna need your ETA to St. Joe.

Unidentified Woman #2: (On radio) Ten to 12 minutes.

HATTIE: Absolute Care is one of the 44 ambulance services in Baltimore. With about 80 employees, 17 ambulances and multiple locations, Vickie Rosellini is constantly stretching.

Is this where all the action is, back here?

VICKIE ROSELLINI (Owner, Absolute Care Ambulance Service, Baltimore, Maryland): Well, actually, the action is probably at dispatch.

HATTIE: Dispatch.

Man #5: Absolute Care Ambulance, may I help you?

HATTIE: The day we met Vickie, her assistant was out trying to buy a helicopter to transport patients more efficiently. What you are about to see are the results of 17 years of very hard work.

VICKIE: 911 will take you to the closest facility, but they won't take you to a doctor's office, they won't take you to the hospital of your choice where your medical records are, where your doctor practices, and I think until the occasion happens where you really need an ambulance, you discover that there's another whole aspect of ambulance.

HATTIE: You were saying that 911 gets bogged down. That sounds like there's lots of business.

VICKIE: I think the ambulance situation is saturated. There's like 44, 45 companies. Companies open up every day, thinking it's just a, you know, great field. But it's a very trained and skilled field. It's not something you can open up and just start doing.

HATTIE: Why does everyone think running a business is so easy?

VICKIE: I think everybody that sees somebody else in business thinks, `Oh, it's just really simple.' You know, they open up and all of a sudden they're profitable. Or everybody, they think, in business is, quote, "rich" or doing really well, which really isn't always the case.

I wanted to get into the medical field, and I just happened to be in a situation where I was just recently divorced and didn't know what I was going to do with my life, and I was having breakfast with a bunch of paramedics from Baltimore County, the 911 sector, and they just said, `Why don't you buy an ambulance and we'll work for you.' And I said, `Yeah, right sure,' you know. But I got a trade magazine, I just started doing some research, and I called Medicare and Medical Assistance just out of curiosity to see what would it really take. If they're willing to work and I could just sit home and tell them where to go, that seems like a good idea. Of course, that's not the way it works. So I wound up getting trained and riding the ambulance.

When I first started this service, I worked it out of my home and I really didn't have a car. I used the ambulance for--to go to the grocery store, to pick up the children from school, to--even when I had New Year's Eve parties--to pick up the liquor.

HATTIE: Well, did your friends' children--were they jealous of your kids because they wanted to go home in an ambulance?

VICKIE: Believe me, they all got an ambulance ride. They'd always want to go out with us, I mean, basically when I took the kids out that's what we did, we went in the ambulance.

HATTIE: Now did you do that to save money, meaning if you'd spent the money and bought yourself a car then you would have less money for your business.

VICKIE: Not only that, but I was on call 24 hours. For the first four years, I did all the calls. So no matter where I was and no matter what I was doing, I would stop and go pick up someone and do a call until I got started. So I was always ready. I was in uniform at all times. I wore my uniform 24 hours a day, and if a call came in--I had a beeper--I had an answering service...

HATTIE: So the old adage about a small-business owner is--works 24 hours a day, seven days a week was really true with you.

VICKIE: Most definitely.

HATTIE: Where did you get the money to buy the first ambulance?

VICKIE: I bought a trade magazine. I was looking for something used. I really didn't know whether it was gonna take off or if it was gonna work. I actually put it on my credit card.

HATTIE: Really?

VICKIE: It was only $1,500 back then. I started in '78.

HATTIE: When do you feel like you had a breakthrough where you could hire people and not do the 24-hour thing yourself?

VICKIE: It probably took me at least a year, because there was no other women in the business, and they really didn't trust a woman in the business. And at the time I think I weighed like 90-some pounds, and I'm out there picking up patients, and it was like--I had to be visible and I had to do it constantly. Even though I hired people after the first year, I still did all the calls, as many as I could, for the first four years, until I really got moving and then I would go out and do PR as well as doing the calls. But definitely you have to be out there 24 hours to let them know that the owner is there, working.

I guess it was about three years into the business and about four ambulances I had developed, and I guess the neighbors kind of thought, you know, `This is four. How many more is she gonna do?' and kind of politely said, `Don't you think enough is enough?'

HATTIE: You had four ambulances parked in front of your house.

VICKIE: All around the side of the house.

HATTIE: Vickie, you told me there are 44 other ambulance companies in Baltimore. How do you distinguish yourself so that you stay ahead of the game?

VICKIE: I don't really believe that they try the same tactics. Not to categorize anybody, but they don't believe in small talk and sitting around and developing relationships. They want to go right to the president of the hospital and try to cut deals, whereas I think I go to the meat of the things where the patients are actually interacting with the social workers, with the nurses in the ER, who are responsible for the patient care. They don't want to spend their time doing that. And I know they won't spend their time riding the ambulance and giving that extra special care.

HATTIE: Tell me what you're looking for when you hire someone.

VICKIE: Someone with integrity, honesty, that cares about patients, that'll treat every patient that they put in the back of that ambulance like it's their own grandmother, their own mother, someone in their own family.

HATTIE: Do you have a way that you have, a system you've developed to try to find that out about this person you're interviewing?

VICKIE: Well, they always--when they're hired, they do ride as trainees for at least three to four days. If we feel at that point that they're not really ready or they don't fit into our method of doing things, we continue to train them. I have a lot of little quirks, like you put the patient in head first in an elevator. A lot of patients will get sick if you put them in the other way. The little personal things that really help.

And if you see someone not really caring and just kind of moving them like they're moving furniture, you know they're not for this company. That's not what we're about.

HATTIE: You have to find trained people. Are there plenty for you to choose from?

VICKIE: No, not at all. Especially since AIDS hit our medical scene. There's not the availability of too many people that want to deal on a daily basis with people that have very contagious and deathly diagnoses.

My mother taught me that women are made to grow up, have children, get married, can, freeze, sew, stay at home and be there for their husbands. Take care of yourself? No. You know, you're always supposed to be in a situation where you're taking care of. What I've taught Kelly, my daughter, is definitely to take care of herself, be on her own, be self-sufficient.

HATTIE: Well, Kelly, aren't you gonna go to lunch?

KELLY ROSELLINI (Vickie Rosellini's Daughter): No, we're gonna stay in today. We don't normally go in, we eat here.

HATTIE: You don't normally go to lunch?

KELLY: No.

HATTIE: You just stay the nose to the grindstone. That's what happens when your mother's the boss.

KELLY: I can't say anything. No, I'm teasing.

HATTIE: Did you ever want to quit?

VICKIE: Sometimes I still do. When I go in the shower and I really have had it, and I come back out of the shower and it's gone. I go in the shower and scream, cry or--whatever it is, and konk back out, and in the morning it's all over.

It's frustrating, and it's a changing business. Every day it's something new, it's something--you think you know what you're doing, and they change it. And there's like 36 agencies, I think, total, that govern everything that I do every day. And a lot of them aren't in sync. One tells you to do this, one tells you to do that. It's hard to do what's right, and you just don't know where to turn. And sometimes I feel like saying, `Oh, well, let's just go into--be a hair salon, or let's do something else.'

HATTIE: Something that's not so highly regulated.

VICKIE: Right.

HATTIE: So what is it that someone needs to have inside of themselves to be successful at running their own business?

VICKIE: Something has to drive them, I believe. There has to be something, whether it be self-confidence, or a need, a passion for a particular, maybe, business. I mean, I was determined that I was gonna make it, I was gonna take care of my family and myself and my mom, and that we were gonna have a decent life.

HATTIE: Here's what I learned from Vickie:

• Home grown is better. The kitchen table is a good place to start a business.
• MBA not required. You don't need an MBA to build a multi-million dollar company.
• Word-of-mouth is worth $$$.

Quote: "The average small business owner spends more time with his venture than with his family... It makes sense to be at least as careful about choosing your endeavor as you are about picking your mate." - Mike McKeever "How to Write a Business Plan"

HOST: Small-business owners with children might pay attention to this next segment. Child care expenses are falling under a changing area of the law, as John Patrick Dolan explains.

JOHN PATRICK DOLAN (Attorney): Small-business owners used to use baby-sitters. We would hire somebody for 50 cents or a dollar an hour to take care of our kids while we went down and toiled at our business location. Well, then baby-sitters got together and put together a day-care center, made their own small business, but they still paid each other less than minimum wage. The Department of Labor recently, however, passed down a ruling which said, `Day-care centers need to pay minimum wage for all their employees.' And if they don't, the employer, or the owner of the day-care center, could be liable for all the back pay. I think what's gonna happen is that increase in what has to be paid to the people who take care of our children is gonna be passed along to us. And so, again, the small-business owner is going to pay.

HATTIE: If you think the law is confusing, what about telecommunications service? I don't know about you, but I get calls all the time from companies offering different calling plans. How do you decide what's right for you? Let's visit Cliff Holtz in this week's You're Wired.

As a small-business owner, I am so confused. There are so many plans, so many choices, so many people calling me, `We want to do your long-distance service.' How do I decide?

CLIFF HOLTZ (Telecommunications Expert): First of all, you're not alone. I think that in the marketplace it's become reasonably complex, which, in fact, has helped us to come out with what I would call our newest products and services, which are designed to be simple. We can now take for you, and put on one bill for you, all of your outbound calls for your business, outbound calls from your residence, your international calls if that's appropriate for you, your 800 service if you have one, and your credit card calls. We can put them all onto one bill, we can aggregate all of that uses together to give you the best discount available, and make reading your bill and managing your telecommunications simple and easy so you can go on and run the rest of your business.

HATTIE: Should I just get down on my hands and knees and say, `Thank you, thank you, thank you?'

CLIFF: That would be nice, but you don't need to do that.

HATTIE: So what you're gonna do is put the home phone and the business phone all on one bill so I can -- I can separate the checks because of my business--but it's all coming in one envelope.

CLIFF: That's exactly correct. You can see the residence billing part of your bill separately from the business part of your bill, but you get to aggregate the usage from the two together to give you the maximum amount of discounting, which is what I think our folks are telling us that they enjoy the most.

HATTIE: If you'd like free information on starting or growing a business, come to our website, SmallBusinessToday.org. Click on "Send me Hattie's tips, and we'll send it to you. If you can't write all this down, don't worry, we'll repeat this information at the end of the show.

Write: SMALL BUSINESS TODAY, Suite 508, San Diego 92101 619-232-4270

HOST: Are you on the lookout for new customers or clients? How do you get them? Well, one way is to buy them. That's right, buy them, as Jim Rhode tells us in this week's Smart Practice.

JIM RHODE (Business Owner): One of the best ways to grow your practice or grow your client base is to buy new clients or new patients.

HOST: Buy them?

JIM: Buy them, you bet. You see, look in the Yellow Pages of how many of what you ever are in that market area. If you're a dentist, there might be 100. If you're a veterinarian, there might be 60. If you're an architect, there might be 40. And every year, one of those is gonna retire. Some people retire early, some prematurely, some go out of business for whatever reason. And when they go out of business, there is equipment left over, there is a facility left over, but what's most important, and sometimes accountants don't really catch this if they're the adviser, is the patients, is the clients. And you can often pick them up for a very fair fee, a very low fee, much cheaper than perhaps other forms of marketing, per patient. It works. And I would like to urge our listeners that want to grow their business, to consider the concept of buying a similar business and bringing them together, particularly if the current proprietor is getting on in years. It's a wonderful, wonderful tip, worth lots of money.

HATTIE: Next, we'll introduce you to someone, in all likelihood, you couldn't afford to hire. George Campbell is one of the top direct mail copywriters in the business. He does work for the big Fortune 500 companies from Temerlin McClain Advertising in Dallas. But he shares with us what's an effective way to Deliver Your Message.

GEORGE CAMPBELL (Direct Mail Copywriter): What we have here on the table are two days' worth of mailings to my home. And it's kind of interesting to see all of the different direct mail formats that we've got here. As a matter of fact, there are a lot of people who say for a small-business owner or anybody else who's involved, there's a university inside your mail box that you can just learn all kinds of things about direct mail.

Here the five basic formats are actually represented here.

(1) What we've got are some copy-oriented mailings, which are basically just letters in envelopes, very simple, letters that can be read, with a little response device on the bottom that you can bring back in.

(2) Then we've got visually oriented envelope mailings that have lots of different interesting pictures on the outsides of them. And interesting, here, look at all the color and graphics all over this, its structured selling message right on the outside of its own software package, for instance. Another interesting mailing that we've got here is one from Apple Computer, which has an interesting use of the envelope, and one that I would say, before you ever did an envelope like this, check with your local postmaster to make sure that you can mail something like this, OK? Because the address is in kind of an unusual place. And notice they've done something unusual with the window on this particular envelope. They've actually used it to hide part of the picture, and they've used the headline on the envelope, `What to do when you're on a screaming deadline.' `Scream back.'

(3) The third type of format that we have are the legendary self-mailers. This is becoming a more popular way of mailing things out. Getting a postcard in the mail is kind of like getting an advertisement in the mail. We've got a variety of them that are coming out at some point in time. Here's a small-business owner, obviously an insurance agent, who wants my business for Nationwide Insurance. He's asking me to get a second opinion.

(4) Another area that we've got are catalogs. Everybody loves catalogs, and do you know why everybody loves catalogs?

HATTIE: They're free.

GEORGE: That's one reason.

But just think, we always go back to our Christmas wishbooks and think about those special moments -- lasting memories, one of the great things about the holidays. And so we all have a positive place and we always have positive thoughts about them, and we've all got an honored place in our home. It's usually a wicker basket somewhere near the reading room, if you will, so that you can look and browse through the catalogs. Kind of a surprising one on the new Lands' End catalog, wow, it stopped me. See, there's stopping power in that particular visual and I wanted to find out more about it, and I kind of dug through the catalog, looked at a lot of merchandise to find out what this story was all about, and it is actually a story about a trip to the North Pole on a Russian icebreaker.

Now just to review, we've talked about copy-oriented envelope mailings, visual-oriented envelope mailings, self-mailers, catalogs. But there's one more type of mailing that everybody loves to get.

(5) It's a dimensional mailing. When we say dimensional, what do we mean? We mean a lumpy envelope. Whenever we get an envelope that's got something in it, `What is this?'

HATTIE: (Looking at the envelope) What is it?

GEORGE: And you want to find out. Any time you can put a lump in an envelope mailing, it makes it into a dimensional mailing, and people will quickly open...

HATTIE: Even if it's just a rock.

GEORGE: It's a rock, that's a great thing to put in a mailing if your subject is rocks and you can relate it to what the needs of the customer or the prospect are. You can keep them very simple. A feather inside the letter is kind of an interesting thing. When you open the letter and a feather falls out, if it had something to do with a particular benefit of your product, being very light or something like that. The whole idea of any one of these things is to get someone inside the envelope when you're sending out an envelope mailing. So that's what you want those teasers to do.

HOST: Each week we bring you a different business basic, a how-to segment ranging from how to start your business to how you can raise money. Jeff Slutsky also joins us each week with insightful and entertaining advice on improving your sales and marketing the street fighter way, by out-thinking rather than out-spending the competition. Well, Jeff runs a sales and marketing business in Columbus, Ohio, and one of the things he does is advise clients on how to increase their business. This week Jeff talks with us on how to develop a marketing plan.

OK, Jeff, I've got this small business that I need to begin to do some marketing. I don't have a clue as to where to begin. Where do I start?

JEFF SLUTSKY (Streetfighter Marketing): Well, how much money do you have?

HOST: How much money? I don't have any money.

JEFF: You're just like all my clients. OK, we're gonna start from the very beginning.

HOST: That's why I picked you. You'll work with people like me.

JEFF: The first thing we're gonna do is look at our neighborhood. Instead of trying to spend a fortune on all the traditional forms of advertising, let's focus on the neighborhood where we can get other people to advertise for us for free, which is right in your budget, right?

JEFF: OK. So you look at a map of the neighborhood. Now here's a map of one here I want you to take a look at. Look at this. OK, typical neighborhood. Now this happens to be my neighborhood, OK. This is the one I use in my seminar. This is Gahanna, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, a little town of 30,000 people, right? Gahanna, which happens to be the Hebrew word for `hell,' and Ohio is the word in Japanese for `good morning,' so it's actually `Good morning, hell' in two different languages, but that's not part of this, so anyway--so you look at this here, and you see all these different opportunities. We have a hospital down here, schools, city government, we have all kinds of retail businesses, a car dealership, a major employer, everything that you would have and each one of these is an opportunity for you in your business to get free distribution of your message and get people into your store at no cost to you.

The first step I would do is find out what's going on in your neighborhood, so you got to go look at it. Get in your car, drive around, take a different way to work, to and from, and just take a look at all the opportunities there and start planning out what you're gonna do over the next 12 months, because your goal, over 12 months, is to dominate that neighborhood. Do 30 or 40 individual kinds of promotions that will allow customers to come in. And after that plan is put into place, then you have to execute it with specific tactics that don't cost a lot of money.

HOST: Well, let's say we're partners in this venture.

JEFF: OK.

HOST: What can we do in the next three or four months to get this thing off the ground?

JEFF: OK. Well, what kind of business are we in?

HOST: How about a restaurant? JEFF: Yuck. Do you like to wash dishes? HOST: No.

JEFF: Because you're gonna be doing a lot of that. OK. Here's the first thing I would do. Number one technique, a cross-promotion. You're trying to build up some business at dinner time. So I would approach another retail business somewhere in the neighborhood. Let's say it's a video rental store or a car wash, it makes no difference.

I approach the manager, have them do what we call a cross-promotion. You hand out my certificates good for free dessert with an entree, and I'll hand out yours for rent two videos, get the third one free or whatever they need, and this way we're working together. We both advertise for each other, we recommend each other, and push customers back and forth. The cost is very little except for a little bit of quick printing.

Next, I'm gonna look at some other promotions. Let's say--community involvement's a big area that we teach in street fighting. Very important. But with community involvement street fighter style, we just don't want to give money away to a worthy cause. That's gonna be part of it, but we want customers in the front door, trying us for the first time. Very important. So let's say you're the Gahanna Marching Band, the high school down the street, right? And they want to raise money for uniforms because they're getting a little shoddy. OK. So they come to us and they want a donation. We set up a promotion for them. OK? So here's what we do. We say, `We're gonna give you a Wednesday, four weeks from today. We're gonna take that day, and every person who comes in, whatever they spend past my break-even--maybe my break-even's 500 bucks, so past that--50 cents of every dollar is gonna be donated to the charity, to the cause. Now it's their job, those 50 band members, to go out into the community and pass out flyers, get free radio, free ads in the newspaper, which they can do because they're non-profit, and get the word out, hand out flyers door-to-door, whatever it is, and get everybody to my restaurant on that day. So now we have 50 salespeople literally going out to the marketplace and bringing them in.

So we get customers in the front door, we could spend 10 times that money that we're giving away in advertising and not have the same impact, plus we have a good-guy image in the community. That's a real simplified version, it would take hours to go through all the details but that gives you a rough idea because I don't want you to panic, but there's a lot of dishes there you've gotta clean. Now the other thing I would do in my restaurant, is I'd have some sort of up-sell contest with my wait staff. I mean, you know, you always want to sell that one extra item, an appetizer, run a contest like that. So I look for something to increase my average check--that's real important--or average invoice for other types of businesses.

HOST: How are you gonna do that?

JEFF: Well, you make it fun. You have some sort of fun contest where for the next month the person who sells the most desserts is gonna win a prize. The other contest I'd like to run with all my employees, not just servers, is get them to hand out our certificates. Let's say, like a cross-promotion, the free dessert with an entree thing, we give 50 of these certificates to each employee and we run a contest for the fun of it. They don't have to do it if they don't want to. And they go out on their own time, way beyond the parking lot of the restaurant, that's the only two rules, and hand these things out. They sign them, to authorize it, OK?

And then when they're redeemed, when their friends or neighbors, the postman or whatever, comes in with that certificate, we count the redemptions, and the person with the most redemptions at the end of the month wins the prize.

HOST: What's the prize?

JEFF: Well, you know, you can give them a dinner for two, but I've tried your pasta and I don't think that's gonna work. So here's what we got to do, we've got to come up with something. Now the ones I've used in the past are like boom boxes or color TVs. But I'll tell you, since we have a low budget, the best grand prize I've ever used, that cost the least amount of money, is a day off with pay. OK? It costs the least, and they'll do anything for a day off with pay.

And the funny thing is, on their day off, they come in and say, `Hey, I got my day off with pay.' `Oh, help me over here, would you?' So they end up working anyway. So it's a great prize.

Another thing I would do that most restaurants don't do is some form of database marketing. I want to start gathering information about my good regular customers, like their birthdays and their anniversaries, special events, so when these things come up, I put them in a tickler file, you can even do it on a computer if you want. And let's say it's three weeks before somebody's anniversary. I call up the husband and say, `How would you like to be a hero at home?' We're gonna plan an anniversary dinner like you wouldn't believe. Champagne, pearls, flowers, I can get all the vendors together, charge him five grand, at a 50 percent markup which covers a lot of dishes, right? So we put together that, call him up, we do it on a credit card over the phone, and now we have reservations where we're proactively going after that stuff. We could probably line up a half a dozen of those every month if we had that information.

Now we have to start gathering now. It may not come into play until further down the road, but the more information we have about our customers and the more we take advantage of it, whether we call them on the phone or send them a postcard or some form of a letter, for special events or other promotions, we can start bringing our people back, because there's only three ways to increase business, and most type of retail businesses are a restaurant like what we have, one is to increase the average check, which I mentioned before. Right? We want to get more out of every person who walks in. Increase frequency--we got a customer, get him to come in more often. They come in now once a week, get them to come in five times a month. And the third ways is just get more customers. And if you don't have any of those three, you're in real trouble. So all the street fighting we do is designed to accomplish all three of those goals in the neighborhood without spending money. That's your budget.

HOST: Each week we bring you Business Basics. We have a complete one-hour video of all of these segments for $29.95 plus shipping and handling. If you'd like the video, call us at area code, 619-232-4270.

HOST: Next week our Business Basics segment focuses on how to do business with the government, and we'll profile an artist--a pianist, who found a business partner to turn his musical vision into a successful enterprise.

The Closing of the Show.