MARKETING

Your business plan should include an estimate of your planned spending for marketing your services. It is typical for a new or growing business to spend anywhere from 6% - 15% for Marketing. In the beginning, much more spending is needed to establish top-of-mind awareness in your area. Over time, it is common for even a well-established business to spend as much as 8% every month to promote their services.

We recommend that contractors earmark at least 6% of their expected sales to market their businesses – if not more. There are a number of ways to do this effectively. If you are an established contractor, the most cost effective method is to promote your house washing service to your existing clients as an additional service.  If you are new to the power washing industry, however, you will need to start out with the basics.  Successfully marketing a company is a skill that takes time and practice to find out what methods work in your area.

The first step in making a good Marketing Plan is to ask yourself the basic questions: Who are you marketing to? What are you marketing? When are you going to market your company? Where are you going to market? How are you planning to execute your Marketing Plan?

Your target customer is likely an intelligent white-collar worker or some other reasonably affluent segment of society. Your challenge is to reach the right person with the right message at the right time, in order to encourage them to buy – while operating with a limited budget. Remember that no matter how skilled you are at the job you do, without customers you have no business. 

What are you planning to market? Your services, your specialty, your qualifications, and your results are all potential answers to that question. Trying to tell someone everything about you and your company could fill a book, and you don’t have that kind of space or budget. Your customer doesn’t have that long of an attention span either. You would be wise to settle on one or two key points that differentiate your company from others, and drive that point home over and over again. That’s what successful companies do. 

When do you plan to do your marketing? If there is seasonality to consumer demand, you might want to capitalize on that during your early years. Once your company has “matured” it might be more appropriate to market during the slow times to even out your sales over the year as much as possible.

Where and when the message is seen actually determines who sees the message. If your target is a family in which mom and dad work, then a message sent through the mail that arrives during the week might be seen first by the teenage daughter who arrives home hours before mom or dad and brings in the mail. If she looks at your mail as an advertisement, she might toss it away before mom or dad can see it. In that case, a perfect message directed at mom is wasted because mom never saw it. 

The HOW question is really a decision on what medium to use to deliver the message. The choice of what medium to use is driven by your decision about whom you are trying to get the message to and how much money you can spend to get that message to them.

As you plan your new business, don’t scrimp on this extremely important line item. Inexperienced business owners sometimes look at spending on marketing as “optional”. After all, you can’t work without gasoline and telephone and tools, but you can work without marketing. This is flawed thinking, and often fatal for a business.

One final word about discounts and pricing: Don’t use pricing as a marketing tool. Any customer you “steal” with a low price will be stolen from you by the next hungry contractor. That is a losing battle for the cheapest customers. Instead, be proud of your knowledge and education, and stand firm on your prices. Sell your professionalism instead.

Potential marketing tools:

Flyers                                                              

Yard Signs

Free Cokes on Saturday morning to potential customers mowing their lawn

Image - Wearing your company logo or uniform everywhere

Newspaper display ads

Direct Mail – postcards, letters

Shared Mail

Radio

TV

Billboards 

Cold Calls

Magnets

Community newsletters

Postcards

Referral programs

Writing articles in newspapers about proper methods of power washing.

Being recognized as the local expert in the power washing industry.

Donating your services to a charity or community project

Yellow Pages

Service Directory

Web Page

Refigerator magnets

Business Cards

Vehicle Identity

Premium items

Business cards  -  three foot rule

For more in-depth marketing information and tips to making your company more successful, pick up your

complete guide to marketing from Alliance Training or The Power Washers of North America.

BIDDING AND ESTIMATING

This is where you either make money or lose money. This is an area of the business that requires a dedicated effort. There are many ways to estimate potential work. To create any bidding formula, the key is for you to identify exactly what a job will cost. In addition, you have to fully understand what your soft costs are (costs that cannot be attributed to any one job but must be borne by all jobs, such as utilities). Items to consider include:

·         Supplies

·         Time (not only time on the job but drive time, phone time, estimating time, etc.)

·         Office Supplies (proposal forms, receipts, business cards)

·         Insurances

·         Materials

·         Truck payment

·         Equipment payment

·         Health benefits

·         Mortgage/Rent

·         Utilities

·         Vehicle fuel, equipment fuel

·         Entertainment (Dinner, movies, etc.)

·         ...and many more!

This list can be changed to fit any person’s or company’s profile. The point of this list is that it is important to understand everything that a job needs to pay for. If you were working for someone for a wage, that wage would pay for what is listed above. Your company needs to pay for the same things for you and your employees. The only way this happens is for each job to help pay for these costs. Giving discounts or taking money off of a job is "profit" you are losing so be careful how much you take from you or your company’s pockets to give to a customer.

If you are just going into business for the first time, you might make a fatal mistake by simply trying to replace the paycheck you used to get from your last job. $25 per hour might sound like an adequate wage, but you have business expenses beyond wages (such as telephone, advertising, etc.). Most successful contractors target earning about $100 hourly while striving to increase that amount whenever possible.  

                                                                                  Insurance