Entrepreneur: How To Make A Mobile, Distributed Business Work Really Well
Entrepreneur magazine profiles HALO Business Advisors, a distributed consulting firm with no headquarters location whose principals spend most of their time on the road. It can be done.
“HALO Business Advisors–aka Team HALO–is an organization whose principals travel around the United States teaching hospitality-based businesses how to find success, with a special focus on new media and social media tools. Marianna Hayes and her husband, Andy Chapman, may be working with clients in Michigan one day and holding a seminar in Arkansas the next. While they’re on the road, other members of Team HALO are providing support from locations around the country.
The business: For more than 10 years, Team HALO has been assisting restaurants, hotels and main street business districts while teaching them how to target, engage, convert and retain customers. While many local businesses have a sense of how they should promote their activities to local customers, Team HALO helps them think beyond local and ‘business as usual.’ ‘I’m not always in the place where I live,’ says Hayes, the founder of Team HALO. ‘I am always moving, yet wherever I am I want to know where the locally owned businesses are. I want to encourage people to shop the local businesses, even when they’re not in a place they’re familiar with.'”