>> a tale of two main streets in the same town. one was florishing, the other struggling. what small business owners are doing to help each other and bring customers to both sides of town coming up next on a special main street edition of "your business." >> small businesses are revitalizing the economy and american express open is here to help. that's why we are proud to present "your business" on msnbc.

hi there everyone. i'm jj ramberg and welcome to "your business." today's story started with an e-mail. we were invited to stewart, florida to see what life is like there on main street usa. as it turned out there's actually two main streets. this is a tale of two main streets that call stewart home. while the business districts are in different stages of development, the local community is dedicated to seeing them both succeed. >> they may be known as two business districts but i think they are still one. >> the owner of the stewart coffee company knows his city on the treasure coast is unique. >> years ago i think those districts were a little

different but now the lines are crossed. >> unlike most places, this community of about 16,000 residents has more than one main street. it actually has two. and they are not even a mile apart. >> when you give people more to come to, it expands that customer base which is good for all of us. >> both historic downtown stuart and the east stuart neighborhood are getting plenty of attention. >> you're seeing a spirit of partnership and seeing a full calendar of promotional events, long with a healthy dialogue between merchants how to create a business friendly environment. >> sandra manages the programs. she says that with its water front shops and restaurants downtown has been the local success story. it's a major draw for locals and tourists, making it an attractive place to do business. >> you see full occupancy downtown, you see that when there is a vacancy it's filled quickly. you see strong, strong

collaboration between our downtown business groups, our main street program and the city and cra. >> competition from malls has been an issue. once customers go downtown they don't forget it. >> this has natural feeling of community and inherent sense of closeness and familiarity. it's friendly, it's welcoming. we're finding all over the country that people crave that kind of environment. the appreciation for the importance of shopping local and people remember that. >> in east stuart the story is a bit different. there's talk of the past in hopes of creating a brighter future. >> we had halls, dance halls, we had more clothing stores, several restaurants, you name it was here. we had abundance of places. >> phillip harvey, the owner of harvey plaza is one of the driving forces behind making a positive change in the neighborhood. >> we want to bring all that back. and showing and educating and teaching our young people this is how a community works.

people working together. you have a dream, you can look forward to something. >> east stuart is an area born out of segregation. >> segregation led to this being a closed population with its own businesses, its own entertainment, its own schools, its own residences. it was completely self sustaining. >> once it ended many residents started shopping elsewhere or just moved away entirely. that led to a steady decline in business. >> today we've gone from over 70 stores at its heyday to about a dozen. >> one of the biggest challenges today is that the community has an image problem. >> i think it's a perception issue. i think the perception is you know, east stuart is not safe, east stuart may not be clean, don't invest there. >> sondra says those impressions couldn't be further from the truth. >> it's very clean, very safe and i think as you see here today welcoming. >> the city's done a lot of work through the community redevelopment agency to put in

place infrastructure with new roads, parking spaces, lighting, electric, there is internet access throughout the community. a lot of things that businesses are actually looking for are in place here. >> the city's public safety complex is nearby, as are local schools and athletic fields. they helped generate additional traffic. but attracting customers who don't normally stop there is hard. >> you are used to getting a cup of coffee near your home you might forget near your work. >> the hope is that east stuart will find its place in the larger community. >> do we want this a center for the arts do, we want to embrace history here. what kind of businesses do we want. more self sufficient business, do we want things that are organized around the services an needs of the periphery, do we want to be more after destination. >> it may be as easy or as difficult as trying to get some people to think bigger. >> the people who own the property are afraid of making a

change. turning loose their property. if they were able to come together and do that and sit down and talk, this community will blossom. >> east stuart still faces hurdles. but the community refuses to give up. patty o'connell says the businesses are better off working together. >> we want to bring everyone into our area. because it's a city of stuart. i don't think we're at that point yet where we're saying there is too much of anything. >> land has been developed on stuart's colorado avenue in an attempt to link both main streets. new speed limits, traffic patterns, sidewalks and landscaping make the area more inviting. >> we wanted to provide visual cues that said you're entering a small business district. >> in addition to main street board members working hand in hand, this city has plans to introduce tram service from downtown to east stuart. >> at one time i think it felt like all roads went past east

stuart. today all roads lead to east stuart so it becomes important to fill that last piece of connectivity. >> with opportunities like these patty says now is the time to work even harder. >> it hasn't had the opportunity to have the kind of redevelopment for many different reasons. that it truly deserves. businesses will come and they will invest in that community. >> bernie dickens in east stuart agrees. >> this is business is great here. >> he says stuart can only get better. >> it's great potential. god knows it's great potential. sky's the limit. remember we visited stuart because of an e-mail we received. so if you think we should come to main street in your town, write us and tell us why. our e-mail is your business@msnbc.com. simple changes to your practices can make a big impact on your company's finances. so here now are five areas where

you can start reducing your business expenses courtesy of under 30 ceo.com. one, energy use. turn off computers and machinery when you're done using them and replace light bulbs with fluorescent lamps. two, furniture and equipment. instead of buying everything new, go to local auction houses and purchase items at liquidation sales or off of sites like craigslist or ebay. three, advertising. if you are spending a lot on hard copy advertising consider internet options that help keep costs down. launch a company blog, ele mail your news letter instead of printing it and look into whether or not paper click search is a better investment. four, outsourcing. you can hire freelancers on an as needed basis for jobs that don't require constant attention. and five, telephone costs. consider changing your work

phones to cell phones. many contracts are more cost effective than land lines. also continually comparison shop to make sure you're getting the best deal. we have all no doubt like i just did, posed for a selfie before. those one arm photos taken with the clear intention of posting to facebook or instagram. well, what if we could harness the power of the selfie in a new way to better connect with customers? it turns out user generated content like selfies are an effective tool in converting friends in your network to purchase a product. how can a selfie help fuel sales for your business? kevin is vice president of marketing at offer puff, the company helps businesses create social marketing campaigns by cure rating user generated content. good to see you. >> thank you. >> there is nothing better, right i see my friend take a picture drinking something, wearing something and i want to get it. >> people love it. it's a hot topic now the selfie

topic. and marketers are figuring out how who use it. big companies, and small companies and seeing interesting results. >> you gave us examples here. tj max is getting people to post themselves wearing their clothes. >> does a number ever things. they have a loyal brand following. people want to participate with a brand. they want to experience it. so with the simple promotion and making it easy for you to upload photos, their biggest fans are uploading photos of what they are wearing that they bought from tj max and displaying that across their websites. >> it's basically getting people to post something that their friends will all see. >> uh-huh. >> how does -- we'll get to it about how they get to do it. there must be some legal issues around this. i post something, i'm wearing tj

max but not necessarily giving permission to the company to use my image or am i? >> you can. so laurel and their campaign which is a great example. they have a text book example of how to get permission from consumers. they ask their consumers to upload a photo of themselves, then quickly ask them to claim that content, is that you in that photo, can we use it for marketing purposes. they can use these on the website and e-mail marketing campaigns, and even in promotions. once you get that claim from the consumer, you can use that content elsewhere. then the last piece that laurel did which was effective is using having their folks that submitted the content click through a terms and conditions to say yes, it's mine, used for promotional purposes and it's a great way to make sure you are compliant. >> incredibly important for companies to understand. it's easy to say send me pictures doing whatever with my product. you can't use those. unless you get permission.

>> exactly. >> so two questions then. how do i get people to actually do this? i want their pictures but how do i get them to take them and send them or post them or something? then two, how do i actually turn that into sales? >> great question. so two easy ways to get people to submit content. one is promotions. we love promotions, we love 25% off our maybe an item in our wish list, a gift card. people find that to be effective. two, make it easy to do that. a direct upload on your website is a great way. and then branded hash tags are important. so be extraordinary example, good ways of using branded hash tags. once you use that on twitter or instagram, then you can automatically pull that content into your gallery or feed of photos. >> how does that translate into sales or are you not worrying about sales? is this brand awareness?

>> some companies do really interesting innovative work around the brand engagement piece. one of thele examples is the iron man. they ask people training for iron mans, people that are actually completing the race or celebrating post race, to submit photos of themselves. if you go to the website and you look at the photos it's really engaging and really authentic marketing. frankly, it's inspirational. people love it. they see these people doing incredible things going through incredible training programs and it's allowing somebody like iron man to elevate their brand and build other connections. >> so this is just more about building your brand and a connection with people than hey, i see that dress, i want to buy it right now. >> so we're seeing very innovative small business companies an large brands do this as well. so lily pulitzer is a great example. great e-commerce retailer. they have a campaign that they run called summer in lily. and what they do is ask

consumers who are passioned about the brand to share photos of themselves wearing lily pulitzer clothing. they take the content, put it on the website and find what you're wearing. >> so i can buy it. >> that's interesting to me. especially when you see your friends. this is the great. it's cheap, it's free, it's pretty oozy marketing and it's incredibly powerful. thank you so much for sharing with us. >> great to be here. we just talked about how you can use instagram. that is one of many that entrepreneurs are using whether it's for marketing, productivity or efficiency our small business viewers have a keen eye for what works. that's why we asked them to share with us their favorite online resources. >> there is actually another service that i really loved when i was first starting out. it's called wicks. it's an online website loading tool. it's a great resource for people

who don't have any resources for hdml or website building or don't have idea how to do coding. it's a great drag and drop resource to build a great looking website. >> the app i love right now is ifttt. it's ifttt this then that. one of the easy ones it's built on recipes. there is a recipe you can use to deliver the weather to your phone every day. but i'm telling you you got to play around with it. there are so many things. it's amazing. >> we have pick play post. what it does allows us to make a collage of several photos as well as video, and what we found is in sharing these photos via social media it stands out and has a much higher rate of people responding to it. because of the video and because of the multiple pictures to be able to share and sell our story. >> i use follow-up.cc, it's a

little known application to start up and basically it allows me to bring my in box to zero every day. by forwarding e-mails to a specific address, for example, if i want to follow up on a project tomorrow at 10:00 a.m., i just write saturday, 10:00 a.m.@follow-up cc then archive that and it comes back to me tomorrow or saturday at 10:00 a.m. >> the program that we use has an app called snap. what i do when i'm at a networking event or meet someone i take a picture of their card and it automatically puts it in the system so i can follow up. so when i've met someone and i have a sequence created, what it does is it triggers when i apply a certain tag it triggers so that they start to receive the follow-up sequences and the messages that i want them to receive. >> what we love to use is free

conference call.com. it's a terrific app where we're able to get all of our conference calls recorded and then have them dictated so we don't have to re-invent that wheel. >> coming up, our small business experts answer your questions on choosing the right investor and how women can succeed in a historically male dominated business. and when you open another location near the original one, how do you keep both profitable? the owners of a pet resort business tell us how they did it. if i can impart one lesson to a new business owner, it would be one thing i've learned is my philosophy is real simple american express open forum is an on-line community, that helps our members connect and share ideas to make smart business decisions.

if you mess up, fess up. be your partners best partner. we built it for our members, but it's open for everyone. there's not one way to do something. no details too small. american express open forum. this is what membership is. this is what membership does. >> you got to be light on your feet. you got to change quick. i have one saying i love, the big don't eat the small. the fast eat the slow. and in a tough time, when the economy is difficult, you can't sit in some office and talk about something you're going to change. you got to change it today. the old adage about locationing everything has a lot of truth to. especially when you are a small business and you are deciding to expand. you have a challenge when you're opening a second location close to the one that you're running.

for the owners of a virginia-based pet resort the question was could the community sustain two canine businesses. >> a swimming pool, luxury suites with tvs, birthday parties. rooming services and multiple walks a day. those are just a few of the amenities that you and your pet will find at the old town pet resort. leah and her late father mark base their business model on passion for pets. >> my father shared his love of dogs with me and at the time i didn't have children. i wasn't married and my dog always needed baby-sitting. and my father said there's no place good enough for your dog and for my granddog, and there have to be other people like you. >> and that's how the real estate development firm the fried companies turned this doggy dream into an old town reality.

>> we consider dogs and cats our family. >> during the initial conversations mark told his daughter that high end pet care was an untapped market. old town has been caring for people's pets ever since. now about 10 years later the business has grown to two locations. but that expansion didn't happen on the fly. >> we're a privately held company and we didn't have to grow to return money to investors so we wanted to do it the right way and we did it slowly but surely. >> the first facility was built in springfield, virginia on land that the fried company owned. when it came time to talk expansion there was concern about old town competing against itself. with additional concerns about diluting the brand old town looked to put space between its facilities. our first choice may have been montgomery county, maryland, which even though it's not any further, it's in another state. >> when that location was too difficult to secure they weighed options. and chose sterling, virginia

mere dulles airport. >> high traffic, high population, high incomes. we put a lot of home work in before we pick a site. >> that home work has been important to old town's success. when you look at a map you can see that the two locations are only about 30 miles apart, and that's why old town really relied on the research. >> in the region that is beset by the worst traffic in the country and where time is money, and everyone seems to be in a rush, 30 miles can -- is a big difference. >> we felt we had enough distance from our springfield facility we wouldn't cannibalize the business. >> that wouldn't stop the staff finding out as much as possible about the clients. >> we did zip code studies, break down as much information as possible. we find out as much as we can about every customer, why they chose the location, and where they live. >> there was definitely some overlap among the customer base but there was no way to tell what they would ultimately

decide to do. >> we did see maybe 200, 300 people or maybe more that we thought were in a sort of gray zone that could go either way. depending on the traffic patterns. >> despite the uncertainty it became clear that geography would work in the old town's favor. having two facilities fairly close together proved to be beneficial for customers dropping off pets for daycare or overnight stays. >> some may live closer to one or work closer to another facility. so when they go on vacation they might take them to one, and when they go to doggy day camp on the way to work they take them to the other location. >> research proved that the sterling resort would be a good fit, that hasn't always been the case for every potential location. when it comes down to the numbers old town has had to take a pass. >> we did a full market study for the charlottesville, virginia market and made the decision that the market didn't have the population density. >> decisions like that won't stop old town from eyeing the future. they are taking their time because they know the importance

of weighing their options. >> if you are an entrepreneur and you're in control of your own business, and you are doing it slowly and successfully, i think that's a lesson you learn. i was anxious for a while but we weren't opening five a year. and we might or we might only open one every five years. time to answer some of your business questions. let's get our board of directors in to help us. denise is a founding partner and ceo of the s 3 agency, an ad agency with a special focus on social media. and renee is one of the largest platforms in the world. good to see you. >> great to be here. >> to the first question it's about a potential challenge of being a woman-owned business. >> i'm wondering what women can do to thrive in businesses

dominated by men. >> perfect question for this panel. i'm going to start with you. you are a woman-owned business in tech. while there are more of you it's still not the majority. what kind of advice do you have? >> yes. i have a lot of advice. the first thing is to relax. we all know when we walk into a room and sudden will i we notice we're the only woman in the room our guard tends to go up and we want to think about how everyone is looking at us as the only woman. so what i say to women is relax, forget about that. don't spend mental energy and mental cycles thinking about how you're the only woman because that takes you away from the matter at hand whether it's negotiation you're about to walk into, whether it's an executive team decision making process, whether it's speaking in front of your team or even at a networking event. so the first is just to relax. the second is once you are relaxed, own it. and what the it is, your opinion, your assessment, whatever you are thinking, own it because your perspective matters. one of the things that we see in

research is data that shows that companies that have diverse perspectives at the table do better. the profitability is better, retention rate of employees is better. know the fact that you have an opinion that matters. if you are thinking about what everybody thinks of that you won't share it. if you own it, it will come through. >> denise, you work with a lot of car companies also male dominated. do you think about it? >> i never think about it. that's the first question i ask women who ask me that question. and i say to them, are you your own hurd snl do you think that either you deserve to have business because you're a woman or you don't deserve to have business because you're a woman. think about yourself as a business person, not a business woman. there are differences but if you focus on your business, then you're going to do the best business job you can and if you're not worrying about other people won't either. the other thing is also take advantage of the things that we have as women. there are national certifications like wbenc,

getture business certified as women owned and some kate tear women owned businesses. >> it hasn't stopped either of you guys. let's move on to the next question about finding investors. >> what is the best way to determine the best angel investors? i have a couple of investors that i'm choosing from and i'd like to feel better equipped with knowing who to go with. >> great question. it does not just come down to money and valuation. you have to have a good relationship with these people. >> you do. and i always look for the value add. so if you have a couple of angel investors you consider, one against the other who can do more for you. does one have an expertise in a field where you're weak. someone have great branding ability. maybe that's a good person to have that you can get them to do more for your business that you don't necessarily have to pay extra for. to me it's much more than

numbers. >> you have gone through this as well. this woman is in a good position, people to choose from. some are just getting whatever they can. how did you make your decisions? >> the number one thing i tell people to look for is look for advisers and investors that share your long term vision. the analogy we use is that as an entrepreneur you are the pilot flying the plane and your investors are just passengers buying a ticket. what you don't want is back seat drivers telling you with way to go. you want people there who are willing to help when you have questions but you're in charge and you're driving and if they are trying to make steer you in different directions it's going to be a disaster. look for people who share your long term vision and a great way to test that is give them home work before they invest. ask them for help, for adds vice on an important business decision you're making and see if their advice and feedback helps you charge toward your long term vision. >> great idea. so great to talk to you both and pick your brains. thank you for coming on the program. >> thank you so much for having me. >> thank you.

this is fun. >> we are regularly on social media here to check out what people have to say. some pieces of wisdom we picked up. small biz marketing tweets marketing rules, use strong direct language and clearly instruct what your prospect or lead should do next. there is this from sam atman. one tweet management advice, hire the best, praise often, set clear expectations, don't micro manage. don't let conflict fester. and this from one of our favorite guests. the only thing worse than starting something and failing is not starting something. thank you everyone so much for joining us today. hope you learned a thing or two that will help your small business. to learn more about today's show click on our website, it's open forum.com/your business. you'll find all of today's segments and web exclusive content with a lot more information to help your

business grow. you can follow us on twit every. @msnbc your biz and facebook and instagram as well. coming up next week, when thousands are stolen by your pay roll service you're in deep trouble. how these frustrated small business owners tried to get government officials to help them and what you can do to prevent this form of theft from happening to you. till then i'm jj ramberg and remember, we make your business our business. if i can impart one lesson to a new business owner, it would be one thing i've learned is my philosophy is real simple american express open forum is an on-line community, that helps our members connect and share ideas to make smart business decisions. if you mess up, fess up. be your partners best partner. we built it for our members, but it's open for everyone.

there's not one way to do something. no details too small. american express open forum. this is what membership is. this is what membership does. good evening. i'm chris matthews. in washington let me start with the possible collapse of baghdad. collapse. how many times have we heard that word in history, the collapse of the chinese nationalists in the face of the advancing red army, the collapse of the soviet union in the early 1990ed? how many times have we seen the armored personnel carriers racing down the streets of a capitol, men waiving and firing their weapons into the air, the hotels and other symbols