With offices in Chicago, Dubai, and Riyadh, Gulf Care Group consists of three organizations bridging services between the Middle East and the US.

• Gulf Group Ventures assists businesses interested in expanding into Middle East markets. Gulf Group Ventures brings the critical in-depth business and cultural knowledge and maintains key relationships in the region.
• It’s sister company, Gulf Care International links individuals from the Middle East with healthcare providers in the U.S.
• Finally, Gulf Care Mobile Systems maintains a fleet of mobile surgical centers - state of the art medical centers housed on 18 wheels.

Dissatisfied with their minimal web presence, Gulf Care Group came to Giddyup with a challenge to better represent their brands to their international audience using the web. Giddyup worked with Gulf Care’s internal marketing team to develop four distinct web sites - one for the core holding company, and one for each of three component company brands. Each site was built on top of its own autonomous content management system, however common brand elements were shared across all sites. The CMS chosen was quick to implement, simple to maintain, and easy to extend. Great care was made to keep the site architecture simple to maintain, clear and informative to site visitors, and highly visible to search engines.

Though the engagement was strictly for web and CMS development, Giddyup included the installation and training of advanced tracking and analytics platforms, and sites were indexed with search engines, and book marked on top social media sites for additional exposure.

Giddyup was recently tasked by FotoStick’s owners to increase significantly its revenue.

The Product

FotoStick offers a very cool product and service where a customer can log into FotoStick’s web site, upload photos, and order those photos printed on a tacky backed vinyl material. The prints come as small as 4" x 6" and as large as seven feet by four and a half feet! The material allows the customer to place the photo on any dry flat surface just like a regular sticker. What’s different from a sticker is that FotoSticks can be removed without harming or staining walls, and then reapplied to another surface. It can be reapplied dozens of times without losing its ability to stick - quite remarkable. FotoStick really has a very cool product and they have done a good job describing the different uses of a FotoStick on the FotoStick blog. We believe that there is huge market potential for FotoStick and are thrilled to be involved in making it a success.

The Challenge

What we found was that people we talk to are interested in the product when the product is describes, but their face lights up when they actually see it in action. For this reason our strategy includes some marketing efforts that will put an actual sample in the hands of thousands of people.

Giddyup’s Action Plan

We are currently reworking the web site for better conversion, rolling out a multi-strategy multi-medium guerrilla marketing campaigns to drive massive online traffic, and developing a lucrative new sales channel for the product offline. It’s too soon to say what our results will be, and we can’t provide details on this forum for obvious competitive reasons, but we will keep you up to date with our results, successes, and tribulations.

Give it a Try

In the mean time, give FotoStick a try. You won’t be disappointed, and feel free to use Giddyup’s discount code "GIDDYUP" during the checkout process to receive 10% off of your order. Thoughts? Questions? Post a response to this entry or contact us directly.

One of my favorite business authors is Jim Collins most famous for classics Built to Last, and Good to Great. Most recently I was reading an article on a concept called Catalytic Mechanisms which explains elegantly a key component of Giddyup’s business development philosophy.

Catalytic Mechanisms are initiatives that help align day-to-day activities around long-term goals. This is not some new fad out of business schools or the McKinseys of the world, it is a concept that has been around for a very long time, but was just recently named and discussed by Collins.

Other managerial controls such as TQM, Workouts, and Balanced Scorecard are all valuable, but in contrast, Catalytic Mechanisms are a light-weight, non-bureaucratic tool that aligns every decision with the long term goals of the company. According to Jim Collins, a catalytic mechanism shares the following characteristics:

1. A catalytic mechanism produces desired results in unpredictable ways
2. A catalytic mechanism distributes power for the overall system’s benefit, often to the discomfort of those who traditionally hold power.
3. A catalytic mechanism has teeth.
4. A catalytic mechanism ejects viruses.
5. A catalytic mechanism produces an ongoing effect.

By their very nature catalytic mechanisms have a ripple effect—they tend to trigger further actions, often unexpectedly. Since they spread responsibility and accountability over a large part of the organization, catalytic mechanisms are powerful tools for sweeping people into a change effort.

The first example given by Collins is a sand and gravel company called Granite Rock of Watsonille California. Though Granite Rock uses several catalytic mechanisms, their most noteworthy is a policy called short pay allowing their customers to revise their own invoices. If a customer is dissatisfied for any reason, they can adjust the amount due simply by writing in a new amount, and providing a reason for the adjustment. Clearly this particular policy would not work for all organizations, but for Granite Rock’s customer base it provides a direct and meaningful way to communicate any service problems. What it does for the organization is to produce immediate and real pain around anything that interferes with the customer’s satisfaction. What better way to assure that customers are fully satisfied.

Catalytic Mechanisms are not unique to corporations. Consider the US Constitution, a system to distribute power to multiple forms of representation with checks and balances to prevent concentrations of power. An even greater example is the entire free enterprise system, a system that rewards those who innovate and improve and economize.

Collins provided another example of a government agency that saw dramatic changes by instituting a Catalytic Mechanism allowing lower level managers to assume approval of change initiative unless denied by the head of the agency. This may seem trivial, but previous to this policy it took action from the top people to make improvements, with the new policy change happened unless they took action to prevent it - a policy we business people would like to see more of in our government.

More on the subject of Catalytic Mechanisms:

• Turning Goals Into Results: The Power of Catalytic Mechanisms, by Jim Collins
• Jim Collins web site
• Catalytic Mechanisms in a government setting (pdf)
• Harvard Business Review on Turnarounds (Collins’ article in a collection of turnaround articles)

We couldn’t resist a trip to the Simpsonize Me transmogrifier, to create custom portraits of Giddyup’s founders, Simon Baier and Bill Broadbent.

Simon Baier

Simon brings to Giddyup a breadth of entrepreneurial experience with twenty years in technology, finance, entertainment, and business development. Prior to founding Giddyup, he has consulted as technical strategist and technical project manager working primarily with Chicago and New York based marketing agencies. He has worked on dozens of small and medium sized companies as well a few internet icons including eBay, and Orbitz.

Simon is a member of the American Marketing Association and the Institute of Management Consultants.

Simon holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the University of Southern Maine and plans to pursue an executive MBA, concurrent with his work schedule as soon as his work schedule permits.

Bill Broadbent

Bill is a seasoned entrepreneur and a recognized industry expert with a track record of success in ecommerce. He began in the apparel industry printing t-shirts for rock bands in the late 70’s while still in college. By the mid 80’s, Bill was printing t-shirts for many bands and retail accounts nationwide. In 1998, he started T-ShirtKing.com which quickly grew to become a top-100 retailer on Amazon.com and won Internet Retailer Magazine’s Top 50 eCommerce sites in 2004.

Bill is a sought after speaker on the subject of entrepreneurship, apparel, and online retailing. He has given over a hundred interviews and has been featured on CNN, MSNBC, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The BBC World News, CBC National Network, The Times (London), and The Moscow Times.

Bill sold his company to Art.com in 2006, and in 2007 moved with his family from New Mexico to Maine. Working with Giddyup is an exciting new challenge that Bill enjoys. Ecommerce is changing all the time and Giddyup has targeted some new opportunities that have developed efficiencies that can be leveraged as a great benefit to Maine’s retailers, manufacturers, and service providers.

Join us

The most important ingredient to building sustained growth is the quality of the people on your team. Giddyup is actively networking to build relationships with new employees, contractors, and third-party vendors. Above all we are looking for contributors who share our passion for delivering value to our customers, and who have the flexibility needed to work with an upstart business. Giddyup is guaranteed to offer its people excitement, challenge, but above all, purpose. If you are entrepreneurial and are looking for a early stage opportunity, we’d love to speak with you.