CHAPTER IX
PUTTING IT ON THE MARKET
Long before you get your shop into running condition and you are able to fill orders, you and your associates will have talked over the best way that should be adopted to put your article or machine on the market so that it will bring in the largest returns in the shortest time.
Here again the method you will choose and use will depend on what you have to sell and the backing you have to sell it with. Just as there are only seven original jokes and all the others that you see and hear are worked over and out of them so, too, there are only a few basic principles in the art of selling goods but these are modified into a thousand and one schemes.
How Best to Do It.—How? Aye, that’s the question! But even as you have had the genius to invent a new and useful time, labor and money saving device—there will, among the men you have surrounded yourself with, rise up one whose brains teems with schemes of ways and means to dispose of the factory’s output at the greatest profit and you may have a few stray ideas too as to how the thing can best be done.
In every business however small or large there should be frequent conferences of the partners, or of the heads of departments, and to save time and to conserve energy it is better that these meetings should be held at certain times each week, or oftener, when all of the matters of the office and shop can be discussed freely and threshed out. Indeed it is the common practice of every business concern where there are a number of departments for the heads of them to get together every day in conference to learn the viewpoints of the others.
Fig. 98. FROM THE MANUFACTURER TO THE CANVASSER, THENCE TO THE CONSUMER
By this method every one knows exactly where the business stands for that day not only in his own department but in the other fellow’s as well and he conducts his part of it accordingly. This welds the whole business into an efficient unit instead of having it made up of a bunch of straggling ends. If the business can’t be put on a paying basis under such favorable conditions then you had better get a new partner, hire a new manager or call in the old sheriff.
Agents Wanted.—Hundreds of small patented inventions as, for instance broom hangers, pinless clothes lines and burglar alarm traps are sold by the manufacturers of them directly to small agents all over the country and who, in turn, sell them by making a house to house canvass. See Fig. 98.