Serial entrepreneur Joe Grushkin today told the Westport Sunrise Rotary about a career that grew from door-to-door sales to virtual media consultant to his latest venture – www.inlineadz.com. 

He  talked about some of the things he didn't learn in college, advancing from star Cutco cutlery salesman to National Sales Manager for Canada to being enshrined in their Hall of Fame.  He described how he and his father bought a Unishippers franchise, built it, then sold it at just the right moment.  He explained how he became a virtual media consultant, hosting the first daily online talk show on joelive.tv, how that morphed into coaching independent business people to use the Internet as a local marketing tool, and then how this led him into his current venture.

Grushkin began coaching when he determined that the World Wide Web changed marketing, but small business had not adapted to it.  Independent business people "need to focus on what they want, learn to take action, act 'as if,' get out of their own way and allow it to happen," he said. 

He told the audience that as smart as small business owners may be about their own products and markets, they need to understand how the Internet leverages that knowledge, helps them move faster and better serve customers they may not even know they have.

He described his new venture as one that uses video screens in retail establishments to advertise "main street businesses with main street products for main street customers."

Grushkin started the business in December 2009 and has already placed five screens, two in Westport stores – one at Oscar's Deli, the other at Ace Hardware.  The screens rotate a sequence of ads for local retailers, along with time, weather, news, sports and a stock market ticker.  Merchants like the screens, Grushkin stated, because their products and services are exposed to 100,000 local consumers annually at a cost of less than a cup of coffee daily.  They are also a "positive distraction" that seem to shorten customer waiting time, and they become a catalyst for in-line referrals "That painter did a great job on my home."

Grushkin left the group with two valuable messages: First, "what you think about, you bring about," and, second, local merchants can use the Internet to reach many more of the customers they want in their local market for a very minimal expenditure.