Career News 24/7: INSTANT MBA: Turn Your Community And Your Clients Into Stakeholders

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

INSTANT MBA: Turn Your Community And Your Clients Into Stakeholders

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Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Today's advice comes from our interview with Stuart Constantine, co-founder of Coroflot, an employment and career site for design and creative professionals:

"We had a list of schools, a list of design firms, a list of material suppliers, examples of projects. And soon after starting that, the project took off and became popular quickly and that was something we weren’t expecting.

We started getting content submitted from the audience. People would write in and say can you add my company to your list or can you include my project in your lists of projects...We soon realized that there wasn’t any resource like that for the creative community—an employment and career opportunity resource."

Constantine started the company in 1997 as a continuation of a school project he had started years before at Pratt Institute. The project was to create a website, but turned into a resource oriented project in an effort to gather and provide information about industrial design.

Because there was no such resource at the time, and it started from genuine interest in the design community, the site flourished, with requests from businesses to post job openings and projects they were working on. Constantine says that by keeping the community as a key component in his business, he keeps his audience and clients consistently return to Coroflot for its services.

"Make your community and clients stakeholders in your operation. And try to stay true to the things that motivated you in the beginning to start your business. If you are true and sincere in that, your audience will remember and reward you."

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