How to Start, or Grow Any Local Service Business

ow to create, grow, and promote any service business on a budget.

The first thing that you want to do is establish what service industry you wish to join and then gather all of the appropriate information and business licensing. This will be the most costly of the startup expenses. Business or commercial insurance will be the second.

In order to justify the expenditure for all of the official stuff you are going to have to start making money with your service business almost immediately. This is not as hard as it sounds however, it does take some ingenuity and a bit of personal flair but you can promote and "create" your business from the ground up once you have received the appropriate city, state, and or county licensing and commercial liability insurance.

Promoting on a shoestring of less than 100 dollars for the first 4-6 months.

Create an "online presence". For many service people and craftsmen this is a step that is very often either initially overlooked, put off until some future date, or the business person hires a webmaster to do it for them. You do not want to hire someone to do this unless you absolutely have to! Most web hosting companies offer an "Easy site creator" and it really is easy. Learning sitebuilding software is one of the easiest of softwares to learn in a short period of time. Of course I am not suggesting that you'll be an overnight HTML, Javascript, and C++ specialist overnight, but that is the beauty of the site software, you don't have to be a specialist or even especially gifted in order to create a web site for your business free of charge.

If you opt to use a free network such as AOL Hometown or Lycos ' Tripod or Angelfire builders, know that you are going to have an ad supported site. What ad supported means is that the provider network is going to meta tag your site or the contents for keywords and then they will run Optimized Search Ads (which allows them to tailor the advertisements that run on your site in the border or the header of the site to ensure that the ads are related to what your site is intended to advertise). Example: If you have a pool service the ads that will automatically run in accompaniment with your site will be ads for pool chemicals and accessories, directories of pool services, etcetera. You can avoid this type of advertising on your site or you may choose to set up your own Google adwords or other Search engine listings account on a paid site and have the same types of ads on your page only now you are generating a small secondary income stream. Depending upon how popular your site becomes this can run from less than the monthly cost of site ownership (>hosting fees) to a sizable secondary income stream.

There are numerous low cost web hosting companies like GoDadddy and Lycos Tripod site plans start at around $3.99 per month, which is an average annual cost of around $48. When you first start planning your site you will have a number of options that will need to be considered. What services and service plans do you offer, what to say and/or include in your promotional homepage statement that will reflect competency, knowledge of the business or customer base that you serve, and most importantly your own personality or personalized touch. These are some the reasons why it is important to choose whether or not to use a free host or a paid host. Often free hosts will include their domain in the domain name of your site. There are two main reasons why they do this. (1) by changing the extension that proceeds ".com" all sitenames that may be taken in the www.-.com arena are then free again so that you can give your site a name that either reflects you business or has the name of your specific business in it. (2) advertising for the host site.

One of the things that your site should have, is a picture of the proprietor. The best idea is to place two or three photos in a small box either in the upper right hand corner of your page or on the lower left hand corner of your page. These photos should be one of you at your desk, ostensibly "Taking care of the books", and at least one of you on the job, not facing the camera but actually working, if you have happy satisfied customers ask them if they would mind having you put a photo of the two of you together on the site. This will also get more people to go and visit your site because people will mention that they are on your site, thus offering a personal reference to your business.

Placing a photo of yourself on your site is not arrogant or ostentatious. Quite the opposite, by putting a friendly face to the business and the business owner name you are showing that you have nothing to hide from and that you are proud to offer the services that you offer.. By exposing your face on your site this tends to build familiarity and adds color and content to your site. It also makes people feel much more comfortable with a service person if you normally work in peoples homes or businesses, when the face that is on your site shows up at their front door for your initial appointment. For women and older people this helps them to feel confident that you are neither a scam artist nor that the person that is knocking on their door is a stranger. Believe it or not this one touch will open a lot more doors on a yes from prospective customers. Also if you design your own business card online or have an e-card ( an electronic copy of your business card ) then this should be placed in which ever corner that you did not choose for the display of your photos.

Example

SITE NAME

BUSINESS NAME (if different than SN)

CONTACT PHONE NUMBERS

WELCOME AND INTRODUCTION TO SVCS. OFFERED OR MISSION STMT.

BULLETED LIST OF SERVICES OR HIGH PROFILE & WELL KNOWN ACCOUNTS THAT HAVE AUTHORIZED USE OF THEIR NAME OR LOGO FOR THIS PURPOSE

PHOTO GALLERY

E BUSINESS CARD

RATE CARD OF SERVICES OFFERED AND RATES AND/OR RATE RANGE

Your site doesn't have to follow this template exactly but this format will give you a full and attractive site in less than an hour. Once you have uploaded your site to the web you will definitely want to include the site address on your business cards. This way people can easily refer friends or acquaintances to the site for contact information or often they will give them the web address because they are easier to remember than phone numbers. Having a website is not expensive. It can be as low maintenance as you want to make it. And it gives your business the cache or air of being hip, in the know, and of course, online which gives your business the look and feel of a professional business. Even if it is a home based sole proprietorship or one man operation.

The next thing you want to do to promote your business is create a post card and or a flyer. Flyers are quite a bit less expensive than post cards, like post cards they can be sent to potential customers in a mailing, and they provide ever more exposure to your potential client base. An easy flyer for your business is to take home page of your site, copy it to your word processor and then remove the photo gallery. Replace the photos with a piece of clipart or simple to reproduce logo art (this will keep your printing costs down whether you have them reproduced by a commercial printer, an office store, or you choose to print the flyer at home. The simpler the picture panel is the less ink it will use to print.) Post cards fulfill the same purpose as your flyer and if you don't have a lot to put on a flyer then the post card is ideal. Blank postcard stock can now be bought at any office supply store on the stationary isle if you choose to cut costs by printing them yourself.

Note: If you truly wish to save money on the printing costs for hard copy promotional items like business cards, postcards, and fliers printing them yourself is never the way to save money. After you add up the costs in paper, time, ink refills or replacement cartridges, and depreciable wear and tear on a printer that is not designed to print out large numbers of copies the cost is a lot higher than it first appears. Using a quality printer either at a mail station or business supply chain store will deliver much better results in both the quality and cost effectiveness of the print job for your promotional campaign. Post cards are also less expensive to mail so if you are sending out a large amount of promo mails you may wish to consider Post Card mailing campaigns in order to keep the postage costs to a minimum.

When preparing for the mailing promotional campaign you should also seek out the avenues to best promote the services that you have to offer. Such as a child care/private school could advertise on bulletin boards at Laundromats, fast food restaraunts, local business directories (with a scaled down ad that displays either the owner photo that is suggested above or the same clipart "logo" artwork that you placed on your fliers and/or postcards. Basically you want to sit down and think about whom you are trying to reach with your campaign and then list the places that they often frequent that have a bulletin board for public notices and business cards. You may even want to take an informal survey of the commonly read free or mailing campaign publications such as The Penny Saver, your hometown newspaper (if your city has more than one you may wish to advertise with the smaller of these papers initially in order to keep your advertising costs as low as possible.)if they run promotions for advertisers periodically a very good idea is to wait until their next discount or free additional posting promotional periods. Also run searches online for targeted mailing lists. (Example: If you own a pool and spa service often you can go to the city or county courthouse, or website, and search for addresses of people who have pools on their property in the area that you want to serve.) Targeting your efforts in every step and medium is fairly important to the success of your promotional endeavors. You can have the best flyer in the world for your business but if you don't send them to people that need the service that you offer then that venue is a waste of money. If you service pools you don't wanna send a general mailing to people who either don't own pools, or to small residential communities that do not have pools.

Networking is the key to the safe deposit box for service industry business owners. When people need to start or change a service contract normally they have an immediate or short time frame need that it is necessary to see to immediately or they rarely think about or seek out the service. Someone who needs a plumber or contractor is going to see their need, make some inquiries either online or in the Yellow Pages of the local phone book, or they ask among their friends and neighbors for references. A good avenue for free promotion is also telemarketing your service to potential customers that are in the territory that you serve. Telemarketing or tele-promotion is one venue that will cost little or nothing to do and can be done by the business owner or spouse in the "slack times" that every fledgling business experiences. In order to choose your focal point follow the following suggestions. You take a pen and paper, or even use your word processor on your computer. What you want to do is brainstorm these topics to help you to find the focal points or areas for your efforts.

Ø Who are my customers?

Ø Where do they live or where is there a concentration of people who could potentially need what I am offering?

Ø What is a good low to median price for the service that I offer, for the area that I serve? (for use as a promotional "introductory" rate in your advertising campaigns.)

Ø Is or when is there a time of year or month that is better for my potential customers to be starting or to consider changing a service contract?

Ø Are there common places that these potential customers frequent that I could possibly leave a few stacks of my flyers or business cards?

Ø What kind of incentive could I offer my existing customers for referring me to new contracts?

Once you have finished your brainstorming list you should have a fairly good idea of who or what area you might want to focus more of your promotional efforts for best result. Normally from the answers to these questions you may get an idea of a way in which to sort those that may have a need and those who definitely do not from you campaign efforts. So far you now have your professional looking website, flyers and mail campaign material, possible incentive offers for existing customers who refer you customers, what more do you need to promote that business? And 1 on 1 telephone promotion to insure that you are getting exposure for your business and the name. Repetitious

Signs.

When you are performing your service calls or sales meetings it is always a good idea to have the name and contact info for your service advertised on both your vehicle and if it is affordable, on you. On a t-shirt, or promo ink pens, or refrigerator magnets that each customer gets either when you are performing you contract obligations or you can put them in with the monthly account statement that you mail to them.

Whether you are just starting your business or are trying to increase your business advertising is key to your success. You want to get your name and the name of the business out there. Promote, promote, promote, it is good for your business but don't think that just placing a listing in the yellow pages is promotion. In order to grow a business must take on as many accounts as they can handle in order to be successful. In order to grow you must promote, it is as simple as that.