I trust that everyone had a great holiday.

I kept pretty busy for the last few weeks. I filed the yearly Business and Occupation tax for cavnessHR. But since we did not have a certain amount of revenue. We were exempt from paying this for 2017.

I was interviewed for a book which will be titled either "Micro-Businesses & Side Hustles"

or "Business Experiments: The Scientific Approach to Micro-Businesses" The book is due to be published in June. So that was very exciting.

I took part in a seminar on E-Verify. This is the voluntary federal government program that assists businesses in determining if the people they hire are eligible to work in the U.S. This was very informative and a great way for small businesses to take care of this business requirement.

We attended the Business Impact NW holiday party. As you know they are our current customers. We were able to network with them and learn more about them. We also learned they help a great number of businesses. Way more than we thought they did. One thing we talked about with BINW is having cavnessHR provide HR classes to these businesses. That will be a great way for cavnessHR to learn more about what small businesses need from HR.

On the last blog, we talked about how we were deciding which industry to focus on and target to be potential customers. We decided to focus on the construction industry in the state of Washington. To help us with this we are doing several things.

One is we joined an organization called MBA Pierce https://www.mbapierce.com/ established in 1945, the Master Builders Association of Pierce County (MBA Pierce) is a trade association representing housing and the residential construction industry. MBA Pierce is the leading voice for the residential building industry, representing more than 650 builders, remodelers and industry professionals employing over 10,000 people in Pierce County.

MBA Pierce works on behalf of the industry to promote and protect the local building industry by providing benefit programs, networking opportunities and government representation to builders, developers, subcontractors, suppliers and industry service providers. To further our members’ goals, MBA Pierce is affiliated with the Building Industry Association of Washington (BIAW) and the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB).

We believe by joining and becoming an active member it will help to spread the word about cavnessHR to the companies that belong to this organization. We have also volunteered to help out at the Tacoma Home and Garden show where MBA Pierce will have a booth. We are going to volunteer at this booth. This way we can network with everyone who is attending the Tacoma Home and Garden show.

For the Twitter Promote Mode, we are using. We changed it to only be focused on the state of Washington instead of the five previous cities we had selected. According to Twitter, our tweets on cavnessHR have reached 7779 people for an increase of 32%. We have gained 7 followers and had 552 profile visits. This is for the time period of January 1 to January 8.

We continue to use FB ads for now. At first, we were targeting the five industries we were considering before we selected the construction industry. So now we have our FB ads targeted on construction companies in the Tacoma area. At the end of the month, we will look at our results and decide if we want to expand the ads to the whole state of Washington. For January 1 to 8 we have reached 6640 people, 7621 impressions and 10 link clicks.

We also signed up for LinkedIn Sales navigator as another method to target construction companies. It lets you select companies and people that you can follow without connecting with them. You receive an update whenever one of the people or companies post or share something. You can then comment or like. You also receive 20 inmails per month. That way you can engage with people who are currently not your connections. The intent is to do this for a couple of months, build up a relationship and then ask to connect. Then from there continue to build a relationship until the time is right to ask them for a sale.

During this time we reached out to colleges in the local area to find out about how to post internships and how to participate in any future job networking events.We were finally approved to post jobs on the JBLM job site. The intent here is to target both Veterans and military spouses.

We are becoming more proficient with Snapchat over the holidays. Don Wesley of https://www.linkedin.com/in/donwesley/ and https://dutchypay.com and http://www.papyrux.com helped me build some Snapchat filters for cavnessHR.
We then figured out how to make a geofence.

We gave a job search seminar at the University of Washington and we were able to make a cavnessHR geofilter for the event. We then made a geofence over most of the University of Washington. So people at the event and/or within the geofence radius could use the cavnessHR geofilter when taking snaps during this time period.

Here is a good article from Gary Vee on Snapchat. https://www.likeabossgirls.com/the-hustle-how-to-create-and-use-snapchats-new-custom-geofilters/ If you are interested in using Snapchat or want me to show you how to make a geofilter or a geofence just let me know.

I was also hosted by Don Wesley at We Works in Seattle. He gave me a tour of the co-working place and we had a great talk about various subjects. It is always great to exchange ideas and best practices with Don.