In Minnesota last week, over a two-day period, I had a total of 663 people in 5 classes. Granted, some of the attendees were in more than one class, but that is a large group of businesspeople in Minnesota who understand that education is the key to survival, both in today’s economy and long-term. The Central Minnesota Builders Association sponsored the 2008 Builders Expo and they did an outstanding job of organizing and running the event.
Most interesting to me were the people I talked with one-on-one about how they were weathering this market adjustment. Those that were doing a good job of advertising were as busy as they wanted to be. Their biggest problem is where to find enough good people to get the jobs built.
Those that were not advertising were struggling just to find leads. Their phones were not ringing and their prospects for new work were bleak.
Advertising is a 52-week-a-year process, no breaks, no rationalizing, no excuses. When the housing market tightens up, there are fewer people looking to buy your services or your work. Therefore you must advertise more, not less, to reach the people that want work done.
Don’t expect immediate results when you start advertising. It takes time, investment, and multiple exposures to make your company the one they call when they need help. If you want a quick fix, you need to go out and start knocking on doors. I mean that literally – start knocking on doors, or at least leaving door hangers. I talk about this in our book, “Profitable Sales, A Contractor’s Guide” (pages 30 and 145). All other types of advertising take time. The sooner you get started, the sooner the leads will appear.
As many people have said to me about my business, and my son about his business: “Gee. I see your trucks all over the place.” Subtle implication of their perception: “they must be good.”
The problem is that as sales start declining, any monies set aside for advertising and marketing is used up just to cover overhead and payroll. Mistake. One must learn to read the tea leaves about national business trends. One of they best way is to subscribe to Business Week. Being proactive is the key to survive economic down turns and flourish.
Awesome stuff! Thanks you so much for sharing! Being that I’m a new contractor…I can use all the help I can get! Thanks again!
God Bless!
Theo
Related to jump starting new leads, in addition to advertising, is to get your sub contractors to refer. Most subs are delighted to be assigned to one of our projects but I have to constantly remind them that this process is a two-way effort. I encourage them to look for opportunities for us when they visit their own customers. After all, if we can help their customers, it makes them look good and certainly helps us with a flow of work. I believe this is one of the most direct and positive ways to stir up new leads.
After years of NOT advertising I bit the bullet and started advertising on a local radio station. I have been doing so for several years and yes it is rather expensive, however it comes out to be about 3% of our gross sales. All I need to do is bring in one additional job per year to justify this expense. This advertising brings in more than one job per year so I will NEVER eliminate this method for reaching new clients.
Also we have several other avenues that bring us work. They are as follows:
1. We belong to the local Homebuilders Association- This is good for about one good job per year.
2. We work with a couple of designers/Architects- This is also good for about one good job per year.
3. We make our presence known at the local Home show- avg one job per year.
4. We usually participate in one remodelors show, in our case The “Tour of Remodeled homes”. This is good for two to three jobs per year
5. In our location we present a Remodeling 101 Seminar twice a year and we participate in this forum- This throws off two to three jobs per year
6. And finally we get the usual referrals from happy clients. This is good for two to three jobs per year
So you can see that by diversifying our lead program we can usually have an easy time filling our yearly schedule.
Advertising year round is the basis for a healthy busisness.
Tracy
yes, what Michael says is the absolute gospel truth. Like farming, one can’t plant, grow and harvest overnight, and it’s the same with generating leads from marketing.