Lab Alternative – US Gov Grants to keep you rolling

To all our valued clients,

I wanted to do a quick follow up during this difficult time and provide some links to small business stimulus options in the US. Things are pretty crazy right now, but It is important to stay abreast of government programs and assistance that may be available to you. Its also important to maintain your website and be responsive to clients needs. We will get through this and how we conduct ourselves at this time may play a powerful role on how our clients interact with us in the future.

The labs are currently not shipping orders, so you should be setting up self fulfill or digital download options.

It is important to make this switch now, as the labs are currently not able to remain active due to virus concerns and we are not sure when they will be able to start shipping physical products again. If you need help changing price groups or setting up a self fulfillment line please reach back to me. It's pretty straight forward to setup a new pricing group in the admin section with the "Pricing" link in the blue left menu when logged in and then "Album Pricing" and switch to the new price group. Note that we do have bulk pricing for multi image downloads and this is a great way to incentivize larger digital download orders.

We are continuing to explore marketing opportunities Many of our clients are running discount mailers for old digital files and seeing a flow of orders coming in. Right now people are home and are still engaging online. There is still money to be made. You can easily export emails from our backend in order to run mass mailers with companies like Mail chimp. They actually run free programs for list of under 2000 names. It's also a great time to work on marketing, design updates, social media, website text, automated email follow up strategies etc. I'll be sending more emails to elaborate on these ideas.

You need to plant seeds and continue your marketing On our side we are working on an internal mass mailer program that we hope to be able to complete so you don't need to outsource your mass mailing down the road. It will have some really cool integrated functions that will make marketing a breeze.

US Government loans and grants to look at:

Paycheck Protection Program
Independent Photographers and small businesses - The pay check protection program probably applies to you. Make sure you take advantage of it. The loan will be fully forgiven if the funds are used for payroll costs, interest on mortgages, rent, and utilities (due to likely high subscription, at least 75% of the forgiven amount must have been used for payroll). Loan payments will also be deferred for six months. No collateral or personal guarantees are required. Neither the government nor lenders will charge small businesses any fees.

$10,000 emergency grant
No obligation to repay the grant In general, all of the following entities that have suffered substantial economic injury caused by a disaster provided they were in existence on January 31, 2020: Businesses with fewer than 500 employees, Cooperatives, ESOPs, and tribal small businesses with fewer than 500 employees, Sole proprietors, independent contractors, Most private nonprofits

- Update the grant very quickly announced it was a max of $1000 per employee with a max of $10,000

Please feel free to email me back to share any ideas, opportunities or concerns that we can address.