Sorry about not getting a new blog posted earlier this week. Things have been crazy traveling first to Raleigh, NC this week and then on to DC. For four days in a row I met with four of the top 100 credit unions in the country, and all the meetings were very positive, and hopefully they will all be on board in 2006. Right now it’s looking like we could easily hit 200,000 readers by February, and over 100 credit unions, just over 1% of the industry.
I’ll be very proud when we can say we hit 1% market share. About three years ago when I was competing in business plan competitions to launch brass, everyone said, “never come into a presentation to an investor and say ‘if we just had 1% market share,’ because it shows you haven’t planned enough.” So with that, we’ll have 1%.
Two of the interesting meetings I had this week were with Navy Federal Credit Union, and Northwest Federal Credit Union, the credit union originally chartered to serve members of the CIA. Two interesting pieces of trivia about each. To work at Northwest, one must undergo extensive screening, including background checks, sometimes polygraphs and achieve secret clearance status. Some people there even have top secret status. The Navy FCU has an entire complex for their HQ just outside DC with around 3,500 employees just in the HQ, and approximately 48 employees in the Marketing & Business Development Department. They are bigger than some Fortune 500 companies.
Earlier in the week I spoke at a conference addressing all the employees of Coastal FCU in Raleigh, or about 430 people. It was the largest group to date, and it went very well. There were four big screens with projectors in each corner of the room for people to see the presentation. I started off talking about the importance of young adults and then talked about the launching of brass to Coastal’s young adult members. We watched videos from Miri Ben-Ari, our upcoming cover story, and let the audience choose which image they wanted for the cover. It was nearly a unanimous choice, so our November cover story should be pretty sick.
Now for a 14 hour night’s sleep.
