E-Commerce Case Studies: How Entrepreneurs Use the Internet in Their Business
By Beth E. Koch
Traveling Across the Internet to Access the North Woods
Sawbill Outfitters is a long way from the Twin Cities. The air is crisp and clean in Tofte, Minnesota, where Bill Hansen has been a part of his family’s business since he was three. People come here to the remote northeast corner of the state to get away, to escape the city, their work, and their email. And that exactly is the problem with running a business in Tofte. There are few conventional telephones this far north and that makes communication a challenge--that is, unless you are Bill Hansen.
Hansen is not comfortable with the status quo. When the phone company told him he couldn’t get Internet service, Hansen became a pioneer. Along with a few local businesses, he helped organize and form a cooperative that provides Internet Service to area businesses. Hansen was able to get funding, share costs, and establish a collective Internet Service Provider (ISP) where none had been available before. Now as a result of this Internet connection and his growing web site, Sawbill Outfitters is enjoying phenomenal growth.
From the comfort of far away homes and offices, Sawbill Outfitter’s customers can monitor shifts in North Shore weather patterns, look at photos from the region, read about the local color of Tofte and imagine themselves surrounded by the beauty of the deep north woods country, all through their web site. And Sawbill makes it easy for customers to plan a trip online too. Through Bill Hansen’s radiotelephone uplink, he monitors email customer requests and leaves a trail of breadcrumbs for his customers to follow via his popular daily blog. But it wasn’t easy.
“Well, the worst thing for us to publish the website was just getting Internet access. Because we’re remote so we don’t have a telephone connection here, so at the time we had a sort of antique and difficult to use radio telephone system, and we ended up getting connected over that. It took quite a bit of effort; in fact it took a huge amount of effort. It took about six months of working on it, …struggling to get the right equipment and get the right things so it would work. (We) finally got it working at very slow speeds, but it worked.”
What’s so attractive about living so far away from civilization? Well, it must be in the blood. Bill Hansen is the second-generation owner of Sawbill. Years before, when Bill had been in college and his family had been running the expedition business part-time from the city, an unfortunate event drew him into the business full time.
During the winter of 1982, Sawbill Outfitters suffered an insurance loss due to a break-in. The insurance company strongly suggested that someone stay with the business year round to protect the assets. The lot fell to Bill and he gladly obliged. As a young college student, Hansen’s dream of a career as a television reporter soon became supplanted with the challenge of running the family business. Later he would take over the business to become its second-generation owner.
Sawbill Outfitters just celebrated 47 years in the travel business, and in the last six years the business has transitioned almost completely to the Internet. Today Hansen estimates that over 80% of their business is computer-based. And since communication and information are key components of trip planning, using the Internet to manage customer inquiries is a significant time-saver. “Typically, customers respond to us from our web site by email—and they usually have questions. Our business is service oriented and complicated enough that almost everybody has some questions, and or needs some kind of feedback to get their trip planned. So we do the trip planning by email. Its really nice for both parties. Typical people on the phone say, oh I know there was something else I wanted to ask you but I can’t remember. (But) on email its just sort of one question at a time back and forth... so you can get this dialog going when its convenient for both parties—especially in our business where people are planning and a lot of it is in advance where there’s no pressure for immediate feedback. I don’t mind going back and forth a couple times a day to get things straightened out.”
One additional benefit of this two-way communication is that it helps Hansen to refine and further develop content on the web site. “If people are calling consistently and saying, “well I’m looking at your web site and I don’t understand ‘X’,” well that cues me to change ‘X.’ You know, they’re not understanding--if its one common question that pops up over and over again.”
Entrepreneurs confirm it over and over again; the Internet has revolutionized the way they do business. “We do almost no business by mail anymore… it’s probably ten percent or less for customer interactions by mail. And it used to be almost a hundred percent. …We would interact…often by phone first and then by mail. And now, even when people call on the phone, almost invariably when they’re talking to me on the phone, they’re looking at our web site at the same time.” Hansen says he’s virtually eliminated other forms of advertising and promotion as a result of having a web site, although he admits that these days travel plans are almost always conducted via the Internet.
But its just not the way that small business owners interact with customers that’s changed as a result of the Internet, suddenly it is easier to keep an eye on the competition and conduct research to find information on supplies and equipment, vendors, production, manufacturing, and distribution—all of which helps to contain costs.
“I look at everybody else’s website, see what they’re doing. Look at their prices. See what they’re supplying. What equipment they’re using. That sort of thing.”
Staying In TouchRemoteness is one of the benefits that customers who shop for natural getaways are looking for, but it can also be a challenge to run a business in a remote region. On the other hand Hansen says, “I use the Internet everyday because we’re so remote, we can’t even buy a newspaper. The Internet is probably the prime source of news. We listen to public radio a lot too. We get National and International news for sure, and financial news from the Internet. (It has) revolutionized our lives up here. The only drawback is that we don’t have fast Internet here yet and that’s a problem, but I’m assuming that’ll get solved relatively soon here.”
“When we started in ‘97, it was just a huge hassle to get online, but we got it working.” Even the newest technology has limitations. “A few years later in ‘99, we put in a new radio system that was a microwave link-- it’s basically phone line quality radio link—very expensive. It’s pretty reliable…and that allowed us to get faster connection, more up to like a 28K connection…. So then a year and a half ago we got this two way satellite Internet connection… where it’s much faster than a phone line but we’re not getting the speeds we’re supposed to.”
But even with the problems brought on by running a business from a rural location, Hansen has built a community of customers who follow his every move, keep coming back year after year, and keep spreading the word about Sawbill Outfitters. How does he do it?
Engaging Customer Relations“What we do that I think is unique, that has worked fairly well for us is that we have a newsletter that –if you can call it a newsletter—it’s really a blog—although blog hadn’t been invented when we started doing it. We have this blog that we do, that we keep up. We try to do it every two or three days at a minimum. Sometimes we do it every day, although sometimes it goes a week (although we start getting email from people if we let it go too long). It’s kind of a simple thing. We just talk about what’s going on around here at the moment—everything from pictures of the dogs to the things that are actually really interesting. …Mainly it’s just to give the flavor of the place and the flavor of us. Keep people updated. We’ve got hundreds of ex-employees out there, so some of it is geared toward them. People just love it and its gotten tons of traffic. It’s our best advertising effort—essentially free except for the time (it takes to keep it current and updated). …People at work read it and then show it to their co-workers and (they) get excited about it. During the season we try to put lots of pictures and stories about customers on there and then all their friends and relatives come. It’s getting to the point now where we’re getting about 20,000 distinct hosts or different computers coming to it (hits) each month. …About once a month I get email somebody says, “I’ve never been to Minnesota, I’ve never been to your place, I know nothing about the Boundary Waters—but I love your newsletter!” (I think) because it’s just something different and there’s a lot of pictures on it. They get engaged.”
Research has shown that getting people so involved in looking at a web site that they lose track of time is a good way to increase the amount of time they spend as well as an optimal method to reinforce company identity. An example is that people like a good book. They like stories. “And we try… any story that comes up, you know like you hear somebody finds an injured hawk, a baby hawk on the road and brought it in, we ended up arranging for it to go to the raptor center and then we kept up with the progress (on the web site) and we brought the hawk back up and released it. Stories like that. We had a customer (who had an) incredible encounter—watched a pack of wolves kill a calf moose. So he actually wrote a piece and we put it on there. You know anything you find that’s interesting that gives flavor to the area. It’s just been a huge success.”
“As an aside, although I think a fairly important one, I think it makes a nice historical record. We have the whole thing posted all the way back to 1997. That’s a lot now. I think its 100 pages. Its fun for me now to go back…and I notice from tracking the hits on the pages, that a lot of people do go back. …We’re going to have that record now. Interesting and significant I think.”
Keeping customer coming back is important to Sawbill Outfitters, and keeping their company in the forefront of customer’s minds is the method Bill Hansen uses to keep his customers. “The trick to keeping people engaged on the web, is to have content that changes all the time, that people find entertaining. … I just went through all my competitor’s web sites, and most of them are really static. Some of them are really beautiful you know, but they’re like a brochure. And so you would go there once, read through it, learn different facts. And our philosophy basically is to keep people coming back. And it’s working.”
