A quote from Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State came to us this morning via Brian Tracy. The quote said:
“Education is of no value and talent is worthless – unless you have an unwavering aim. Never find yourself without a compass.”
Are you focused on promoting your company and sales? If you want to get through this crunch, your focus has to be on sales. That is where your compass needle should be pointing.
More importantly, you should narrow down what you do. Don’t take any job that comes along, if it isn’t profitable and it’s not what you do best, don’t do it.
If your workload is slow, it is probably due to cutting back your advertising budget or advertising in the wrong place. You must increase your advertising when the economy slows down. You should also focus your advertising on the one or two things you do best. If you do, you will soon find your business getting the lion’s share of the calls for that type of work in your area. That is where you want to be.
You can be the best mechanic in the world and you can be the best educated contractor in town, but unless and until you get focused, with your compass needle pointing at good profitable jobs, you will struggle just to make ends meet.
I couldn’t agree more. I’ve never spent so much on advertising as I have in the past 5 months and it has been well worth it….$900 per month is advertising has led to over $150,000 in sales over that same period of time. And specializing in deck and screened porch construction was also the right way to go for me. I refer all other work to other reputable contractors and just focus on my deck building. I still get word of mouth business but advertising is a must.
Along with the continuation of clear focused advertising we take more time and focus on defining the “who” are customer really are so when the advertising brings them in we can easily decide if we actually want them as one of our clients.