Dear Friends,

I’ve been an entrepreneur all my life – well since I was four years old when I started trying to sell my crafts to my relatives! Over the years, and through the ups and downs, I have discovered a few things.

I know first hand the challenge of getting started, staying motivated and remaining competitive. After many years of trying to do everything myself, I finally learned to delegate so that I could focus on growth.

Outsourcing has been the main way I have kept the cost of delegation low. Full-time employees require training and ongoing overhead. It took time and energy to find and hire staff. It was hard to know everything myself or to find an assistant who knew everything. As a generalist, I soon realized that there are specialists who know much more than me. Project outsourcing was the perfect way to gain experience. In recent years, I have been fortunate to pull together the most amazing team of talented individuals for our family business. This allows New Earth Marketing to provide its clients with a pool of talent on demand.

Another challenge for small business is the high cost of marketing. One way to overcome this obstacle is to partner or work together with businesses in the same industry to share marketing costs. Cooperative marketing with my friends in the music, parenting and educational industries, brought forth the idea of Marketing Circles.

When I started my first business there was no internet – yikes! How did we survive? Now we have the luxury to outsource projects easily to anyone, anywhere through virtual outsourcing. Even small and medium sized businesses can take advantage of communication technology to keep in touch. This technology also affords us the opportunity to connect with other businesses in our industry, to share ideas and to take advantage of group marketing.

The recent growth in open source software and low cost programs allows smaller businesses to be able to integrate new technologies into their business model. We can now add innovative features to our websites and online communities as well as take advantage of database optimization, customer relationship management system tools and project management software to automate processes and gain efficiencies.

New Earth Marketing was inspired by my wonderful friends who have become part of our team and our community. Imran, a close friend in India and business partner, oversees our programming and design. Maureen keeps me organized, helps run local projects and keeps me organized.

We are fortunate to have ongoing advice and mentorship from our Advisory Committee.
Heather, in addition to many laughs, provides our team and community with updates on the latest sustainability practices. Nancy, our SEO Guru, known locally as the "Google Lady" provides input on SEO and online marketing. Gerry, with over 25 years experience in telecommunications and business development provides our clients with business trends and creative ideas.

Our team has grown in the last year to include a wonderful group of programmers, SEO specialists and designers. We are continually researching new and innovative ways for our clients to create effective websites and build their online presence. This year we have started offering a series of workshops- “Grow with Web 2.0”. I look forward to sharing our knowledge with the community.

For us, work is not work - well, except for taxes and contracts! For the most part, our work is a joyful experience learning with good friends and helping others achieve their goals.

Our goal, my friends and I, is to help you achieve your dreams with respect and compassion for our world and its people.

It is a new exciting era for small businesses and organizations. We look forward to sharing in your growth while we work together to develop more sustainable business practices.

Yours truly,

Susan Jarema, Founder