Piggybank’s generosity helps us all win!

Put a hand out. Extend it to help someone else make the climb. That’s the caring philosophy that brought Scott and Jennifer Gingrich to develop their quarterly Website Giveaway.

The couple, owners of Piggybank Technology and a couple of other web-based businesses, got tired of listening to the doom and gloom that blasts into our homes and vehicles through news media. They decided to combat it with positive action. Every quarter, they are selecting one winner to receive a Piggybank website.

Relative newcomers to Barrie after driving through it for years, the Gingrich family is a solid unit and young Gingrich’s pay close attention and contribution to the family business. In fact, it was the youngest, Tyler, who gave the business its name. Driving through Thornbury with his parents, he watched drivers pull up to a self serve car wash, deposit their money and wash their vehicles. “It’s like a piggybank,” he squealed. And Piggybank Technology was born.

As Scott says, “that car wash is somebody’s piggybank. Every business is somebody’s piggybank. People put money into your business, if you let them do it.”

Scott and Jennifer help businesses do just that. They design websites and web marketing projects. They consider whether a business wants to sell online, or develop a database, or take email inquiries, or do all of those things. They build their sites around their customers’ needs.

[They also own www.ladyben.com… a site for classic, vintage wooden boats and www.crmcoach.com which is a customer relationship management site that helps to automate sales and marketing projects.

Scott recalls the moment when their Website Giveaway was born. It was last November when they were walking with the kids home from school. News media were ‘awfulizing’ about everything, confusing the Canadian economy with the US economy. “From our neck of the woods, life looks pretty good. My clients were still doing business and being successful. We were still successful. We decided there’s good news happening too and there’s a lot of opportunity in change,” says Scott.

In an effort to leverage beliefs and doom and gloom, they decided to pay it forward and give away one website every quarter to a new business. Entrepreneurs are brave people, brave enough to buck the doom and gloom and they ignore the statistics and make a go of it. They first considered a percentage reduction in the cost of a site but abandoned that for a totally free site along with marketing mentorship to help that new business succeed.

Their first giveaway attracted 100 applicants. Using criteria which included no or poor website, financial need, their ability to work with the Gingrich team, the potential impact… Scott and Jennifer narrowed down their applicants to three and then involved virtual assistant Jean Oostrom in the final decision.

Photographer Chantal Sirois was the lucky winner. A current member of the provincial government’s Self Employment Assistance program, Chantal has been steadily learning business techniques all year and this website gift is the icing on the cake. Living Edge Photographer is about to get a dynamic site.

Scott says the site will have a blog component, a picture gallery, marketing message, be fully optimized, around 20 pages in size..

Scott and Jennifer hope their project will stimulate other business owners to explore how they could help someone else by giving away a service.

Thanks, Scott. Thanks, Jennifer. And congratulations, Chantal!