Name of your website?CorNu Enterprises
Your name?
Graeme Robertson
Your Location (city, etc)
Victoria
Please give us a short summary of your website?
The CorNu Enterprises web site offers practical business management educational products.They are organized in bite sized chunks so busy people can absorb the information and apply the ideas immediately. All products may be downloaded from the web site.
What inspired you to launch your own website?
After doing consulting projects for small and medium size business for over 30 years I realized that my body of work would be an excellent basis for business educational products. However, as all the knowledge was in a 'project' format' I knew I needed to partner with someone to assist in presenting the materials as an educational tool. I was fortunate to find my business partner Dr. Shirley Chapman. She is Doctor of Education with a specialty in curriculum development and course design. It has been an excellent collaboration. Even though I had most of the knowledge in already in project form it still took us approximately 2 1/2 years to adapt and develop that knowledge base into the finished products we have today.
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
Our web site was launched in the Fall of 2005. We contracted the development of the site to a technology company in Victoria, BC, Canada who had used our educational products in their company.
How did you decide on a name for your website?
Our web site name is our company name, CorNu Enterprises. The word CorNu was selected intially as Corno as sort of a corruptio of the phrase 'core knowledge'. Then, that idea morphed into the latin word Cornu as in plentiful, bountiful e.g. the horn of plenty.
On our web site you will see a bit on this history. You will also note that our prodcuts are marketed under the 'BizBite Consulting Group' brand name. It has always been our intent to eventually have various groups of knowledge based products marketed on our web site. The business products happen to be the first. It is intended that CorNu Enterprises will really be an electronic publishing company.
What makes your website different from other, similar offerings?
The products are of high quality and in-depth treatment of their subject matter, but not written in an academic style intended to impress the reader with how much the author knows. Rather, they approach the subject matter in a very practical, hands-on way that anybody can understand. Also, the emphasis is not on telling people the answers to various common business problems, but rather, through asking questions of the reader, lead them towards discovering the answers themselves.
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
On our web site you will see a bit on the history of our company. You will also note that our prodcuts are marketed under the 'BizBite Consulting Group' brand name. It has always been our intent to eventually have various groups of knowledge based products marketed on our web site. The business products happen to be the first. It is intended that CorNu Enterprises will really be an electronic publishing company. To that end we have prepared a publisher/author agreement and have interviewed a few prospects capable of contributing a separate knowledge group of products.
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
I would describe our success as modest but steadily progressing. From the outset our products have been so well received by users that word of mouth in our local market has allowed us to sustain our business totally through sales without any investment from my partner or myself. As we are both semi-retired we do not have the same pressure to generate personal income that others might have.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
With sufficient financail resources we would certainly 'roll out' a comprehensive marketing campaign designed to raise awareness of businesses in other regions and direct them to our web site.
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
Our web site has been designed to automatically handle all transactions. The expense of designing the site was not what you see on the pages, but in the database behind the scene that tracks all the activity for direct sales and sales through Distributors and produce monthly reporting. Our company requires very little time to mage now and that would change very little even if sales volume were to increase a hundredfold.
What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?
There have no unexpected costs or headaches. It comes down to sound busienss planning and experience.
What has been your biggest challenge?
Finding the right strategic partners to advance the project.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
The products and the web site are designed specifically with educators and trade associations in mind. In fact trade associations find our site an excellent way to deliver quality business training to their members and in doing so generate the funds needed to sustain their overall training initiatives. We have also recently partnered with a company that will deliver webinars on-line based on our products. These webinars are intended to direct potential users to our web site and to support our Distributors who refer clients to our web site to purchase products.
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
It is pretty much as I expected. There really have been no surprises.
How long have you run the site already, and how long will you continue to keep it up if you don't enjoy big gains in traffic, income or popularity?
There is enough on our plate right now to keep us busy for several years. Beyond that--who knows what will happen.
What does the future hold for the company?
Given the age of my partner and myself our original intent was that at some point, in a few years we would bring in a partner to gradually take over the enterprise and we would take a step back or even sell the company.
What is your website address?
CorNu Enterprises
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