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Will The Real Entrepreneur Please Stand Up?
Ad agency hopes contest approach yields right person to take over online counseling service
HOUSTON, TX February 12, 2004--A Texas advertising agency is using an essay contest to determine the next owner of its "experimental" online counseling service. TC Concepts, an ad agency in Conroe (just north of Houston) has opted for the creative approach in an effort to obtain some level of assurance that the new owner of iCounsel.org will use the website to provide a bona fide service. The owners admit that this assurance is somewhat shaky. An essay, after all, can be total fiction. But TC Concepts president Fred Watt is optimistic.
According to Watt, the problem with an outright sale stems from the fact that the website already pulls well on the major Internet search engines and in fact gets a fair amount of traffic. These two factors have value in and of themselves, and some would-be buyers might attempt to purchase the project for these reasons alone. At stake is the more than 7000 monthly visitors who come to the site looking for help in areas as diverse as auto repair, health concerns, financial, debt and mortgage counseling, pet care tips, adolescent behavior, cooking advice, computer troubleshooting and marriage problems.
One cant help but wonder, however, about the viability of a site that hasnt been fully operational in about a year. Watt claims to understand this question and offers an explanation:
When we first launched the project, it was a lot of work and we were only getting a handful of signups. At the time, we thought it was the model. In retrospect, it may have simply been that the site wasnt getting anywhere near the kind of traffic that it does now. In any case, we had other priorities and the last thing we wanted was for more people to sign up. To protect the integrity of the site, we just turned off the signup process.
Apparently, that hasnt stopped the visitors. Or, for that matter, the counseling inquiries.
Yeah, its a bit weird, says Watt. We still get inquiries for just about everything. People just use our contact form and submit their questions that way, completely ignoring the fact that the proper method has been disabled. The only thing we can figure is that theres just a lot of desperate people out there who need help.
One of the dilemmas facing a new owner will be how to convert the traffic (and inquiries) into a profitable, and sustainable, web venture. And this is precisely the question that the current owners hope to have answered ahead of time via the contest approach. It is in fact the question posed however vaguely on the contest home page (http://icounsel.org/contest/). If nothing else, Watts company is hoping that the contest will act as a sort of sifting device by which the right person will emerge to give iCounsel.org the attention it deserves.
Anyone who feels he may be that person will need to pay a $99 contest registration fee and write a 500-word essay entitled My Vision for iCounsel.org. Implicit in this is the idea that the essay will have something to do with running the site in a manner that is at least theoretically beneficial to its visitors. The winner will get the domain name, the website, a year of hosting and, possibly, a large sum of cash. We added the cash feature in there to distinguish it from other contests, says Watt. And it just made sense. Were not trying to become millionaires here. If the turnout is that positive, we might as well share the wealth. If positive enough, the cash feature alone could be rather substantial.
But is it worth it? We obviously think so, says Watt. In truth, the essay contests weve seen are usually for a home or car or brick-and-mortar business; something where the value is a bit more tangible. Weve never seen an essay contest used for selling an online business. On the other hand, the winner doesnt have to worry about termites, bad debts, or toxic waste, either.
Just visitors. Lots of visitors . . . looking for help.
Company: President, TC Concepts
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