Proposal

What? What am I doing?
I have started a small catering and personal chef business with a partner in Anderson. I am using the visual aids associated with advertising a small business as my visual project.

Why? Why am I doing this?
Visual aids are the best form of advertising! We advertise to attract customers because customers=income and we need income to keep our business going!

How? and How will I achieve my goal?

• We are writing a business plan (which requires a lot of research, more than I'd initially thought) to establish exactly what we want, who our customers are, where to find our customers and what to give our customers to ensure repeat business.
• We have also written our menu, a brief 'press release' to attract attention which we can also use as an intro when we address church groups that we hope will use us to feed their members during events, and other groups that meet so we can address larger numbers of people at once.
• We have pictures of our first event and purchased a camera to take pictures of each menu item the first time we make it for presentation purposes as well as to add pictures by the item on our menu to entice customers.
• My sister works in graphics and has offered to make two car magnets with our name, logo and contact info to advertise while we deliver.
• Printing our menus has, so far, been rather cost prohibitive in great quantities so we're rather behind schedule on that. But when we do get them printed, several locations in Anderson have offered to allow us to place our menus with them.

I'm covering the visual aids associated with the start-up of a small business. The question my project will answer is: How do I attract customers? How do I get people to use my services? We are in the process of writing a business plan to determine where we expect our customer base, who will use our services, and pictures to explain why we're better than our competition. Catering is a cut-throat profession, but there aren't many personal chef services so we had some difficulty finding a close competitor.
We chose the Bagel Shop in Anderson because they offer "Tuesday night take-home" where customers pre-order meals to pick up on Tuesdays. They got a write-up in the newspaper for the take-home idea, so we're also looking for a way to get Coriander & Cloves in the Anderson Independent, too, to get our name out there to attract business to us as well.
The business plan template we chose to use requests two competitors, so we're using the personal chef service my aunt and uncle use in California called Precious Thyme (.com) because I like their website and my aunt and uncle love their food and service.

I'm working on our .com site, corianderandcloves.com but I don't know a lot about web design so I have done more work on our myspace page, myspace.com/corianderandcloves as well as our printed materials. I've completed the printed materials, just looking for a better price to print it, so now I will be working on the website, trying to get an actual site built while I work on our myspace page. I'm keeping a blog on the myspace page, too.