The more I've read in the Ducttape Marketing series, and the more in general I discover about small business marketing, I continue to be struck by how important relationships are. Makes sense - they're important in just about everything in life, I suppose.

But every aspect of marketing involves building relationships. With your current customers (so they will refer their friends to you, increasing your conversion rate due to the intro), with your vendors (so they can recommend you to other people who might benefit from your business), even to reporters who write on business in local papers, so they will eventually look to you as a source for information that is reliable, besides being a potential story in their paper for the ultimate in high ROI marketing.

With that in mind, my GM, Clay, and I met with Dr. Steve Palazzo, a chiropractor I've mentioned before. Some of you might wonder if a chiropractor and an orthopaedic surgeon will fight like cats and dogs, but I don't think that's true (see here). There are good chiropractors and bad ones, just like there are good orthopaedists and bad ones (what do they call the person who finishes last in every medical school class? Doctor). I really like Dr. Steve, though, and I think we have the ability to help each other in a lot of ways. Its relationships like that that can lead to benefits you can't even predict right now. We're such a small gym that a couple of good referrals from anyone, let alone an individual's chiropractor, can be huge for us. And our customers sure will develop back and neck problems and require the kind attentions of the good Dr. Palazzo. So good stuff, I think.

A request - I promised dog pictures in the past if the blog sucks. I don't know if it sucks or not, but I'm looking for any good ones from anyone. Send them to me at kurte@athleticnation.com and I'll post them on this blog at some point.