9 Steps to Improve Your Business

Want to improve your business? Want to get more business, hire more and better people? Want to protect your assets? Everyone does, but not everyone takes the necessary steps. Here are nine steps you should take to improve your company. Hopefully, you are already doing some, if not most of them.

1.     Reconsider direct mail. The digital space is crowded. Rates are being bid up. At the same time, fewer marketers are using direct mail. Just remember that direct mail is a campaign. It must be sent over time. You do not want to stop one drop before the phone is about to ring.

2.     Use radius marketing. When you complete a service call or install a water heater, chances are good that a number of the 50 to 100 homes surrounding your customer are in a similar situation. There are mail houses who will mail your marketing material to surrounding homes based on an address.

3.     Partner with a charity. This is called affinity marketing. The charity promotes you to its patrons and you make a donation for every service call where the customer mentions the charity.

4.     Join a service club. Service clubs like Rotary, Kiwanis, Lion’s, Optimists, and Civitan are populated by community centers of influence. These are the people others turn to for recommendations about plumbers. If you are going to eat lunch, eat it with community centers of influence once a week. The business from the club members alone will make it worth it.

5.     Create or update your unique selling proposition (USP). A USP is a short phrase that communicates why you are different and unique from other plumbers in your market. What is yours?

6.     Create a company brochure. This builds your brand in the mind of prospects, lists what products and services you offer, lets you crow about your accomplishments and superlatives, and allows you to reinforce your USP, stressing why you are different and better than other plumbing companies, how you give back to the community, and so on. Use testimonials with pictures of smiling happy employees and smiling happy customers to emphasize how great your company is. Use these at home shows. Hand them out with invoices. Give them out with service club talks.

7.     Create a recruiting brochure. Prospective employees frequently walk away from interviews and forget many of the selling points of working for a company, even if they take away some warm fuzzy feelings. This means they are unable to communicate the advantages of a job change with their spouses. A recruiting brochure is similar to a company brochure, but designed to attract employees and their spouses. In addition to the items in a company brochure, note benefits, company outings, time off, training, career paths, and so on. Of course, this implies that you have career paths, a training program, and so on.

8.     Hire for attitude. It doesn’t matter how good a plumber is, how much revenue he brings home, if his attitude is bad. This includes grumpy plumbers and prima donnas. If someone has the attitude and aptitude, you can teach the rest. If someone has the wrong attitude, he’ll drag down everyone around him.

9.     Conduct a fraud review. Every year, plumbing contractors fall victim to fraud. It happens far more than anyone thinks because people do not talk about it. Hire a local certified fraud examiner to review your operation and offer recommendations for fraud prevention. No one knows more about this in the plumbing industry than Mike Bohinc at KeepingScoreCPA.com.

Want an inspirational, fun read about improving a service business? Buy Matt Michel’s “Contractor Stories” on Amazon. See Matt speak at the ServiceWorldExpo.com in October where he is a keynote.