One of the highlights of my BJU MBA e-commerce class is to have the students take a tour of Worthwhile. I just get out of the way and let several members of the Worthwhile Team (several of whom are products of the BJU MBA program) present our business. They do an outstanding job! Here are some of the comments and lessons learned from this year’s group of 23 bit business up and comings!

• The Worthwhile trip opened my eyes to the nuts and bolts of website development.
• I learned to love the industry more when I met the employees
• I was taken aback by the level of professionalism
• I never imagined a setting staffed with well dressed office workers, a high-end presentation area, and complimented by a hostess that would greet potential clients and communicate with existing customers.
• the tour helped me learn the importance of the bit business and just how valuable the bits and data are to consumers and local firms.
• Worthwhile demonstrated the need for and value of attractive office space, in which significant investment was obvious.
• Encouraging community involvement by the employees was something I had not seen modeled before.
• This seems like a great way to generate leads and generally engender goodwill.
• Chris’s description of Worthwhile’s web strategy process was very enlightening; it provided some concrete, useful concepts to replace a fussy sense of “that should work” or “that looks cheesy.”
• Chris’s Chick-fil-a example was particularly insightful.  He was right when he said, “Chick-fil-a gets it!”
• Sick Amount of Testing:  Although I have enough first hand experience (much of it less than pleasant) to know the importance of testing—and that “enough” testing is never actually enough—I had never heard this phrase before.  I love it.
• my first impression was that of a highly professional, friendly, and knowledgeable company
• It was easy to see how Worthwhile integrates its talents to take raw information from a business and turn it into a state-of-the-art website that provides attraction, functionality, and marketability in a secured and reliable setting.
• I found out what SEO was and did
• The two biggest lessons I learned during the tour was about knowing your customers and doing your best.
• the amount of excitement they had over every customer they told us about was amazing!
• “Do your best” is something we have heard since we were young, but the employees at Worthwhile showed me this applies all through life and is a good business policy to follow.
• The Worthwhile tour coupled with our homework exercise of making our own website, reiterated to me the importance of outsourcing web hosting and design.
• From search engine optimization to drive viewers to your website, to the aesthetic design and practical functionality to keep viewers at your website, to the hosting to keep your website running, outsourcing your website is by far the best, and in most cases, the only way to go.
• Probably one of the more key items that I learned was that the clients tend to want a trip to the moon for the cost of a subway fare.
• The presentation was top-notch, and so the discussion of the first impression team was also very important. If I ever own a company or am a partner in one, I think a first impression team will be something I want to set up as soon as possible because that team can really make the difference for clients’ willingness to go with one team above another.
• The Worthwhile tour was informative, but it was more than a discussion of technology. The Worthwhile team is a unit that works together to implement a successful website or service to every client that they serve.
• One of the best discussions our group had was during the Search Engine Optimization presentation which was lead by Leslie Ciesielski. As she gave her presentation she outlined how she had driven traffic to a company that sold windows in the upstate. I could not believe that SEO was important to a window company, but the traffic statistics which she gave to our group were amazing.
  they desired to pass on and teach us the basics of an e-business and the importance of customer service and implementing SEO with our e-business.
• I could tell they loved what they did and loved partnering with businesses in this way.
• Leslie explained SEO very clearly to us, something I had never really thought about before. I always thought that companies just paid Google a higher fee for having their site ranked higher, but in reality doing things such as targeting key words, linking to other sites, and having relevant information will all boost search engine rankings.
• The tour of Worthwhile greatly enhanced my understanding of what a bit business really does. There is a lot more that goes into web designing than just the creation of the website. People need to be focused on not just creating the product but giving a packaged service of support and design to the customer.