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Here's how I would start my local business from scratch again
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The one question I get asked a lot is if I had to start my local business all over again, how would I do it...
And it's a good question because once you have been doing something long enough, you know how to do it better.
But here's the thing, from helping hundreds of local business owners, I've learned not only how I should start over, but how you should too.
So, I created a 30-day plan on exactly how I would launch my local business if I was starting FROM SCRATCH again.
Thought I'd drop it here for you guys.
Below is a MONSTER post that covers exactly how I would build a new local business if I Suddenly LOSE EVERYTHING and only had 30 days to start over from scratch.
You can always reach out to me with any questions or for advice and I will do my best to help you.
Ready?
Let’s jump in.
Day 1: Reflection
Ok! Day 1.
I want to take the time to make sure that this is what I want to do, and to set my commitment for it*
I know this will not be an easy journey the next few months, however, I am doing this to give myself true financial freedom and power over my future.
So, I will take two hours to write down my thoughts and hopes for this business into a journal. I will also write down what my long-term goals really are, and then work backwards to see if they are aligned with this business.
But most of all I will take time to kick back, relax, and get motivated. Because now that I’ve committed it is time to get down to business.
*This is an important day, even if you feel like you won’t be doing a lot. What you are really doing is gaining clarity on what you want to do. You do not want to commit to a business and then find out months or a year later that it is trapping you and not letting you do what you really want.
Day 2: Getting Down to Business
Today is where we start looking at all the amazing opportunities and different types of local businesses in our area to see what lights a spark in us.
Go for a walk for an hour or two in your town or city and really look around at all the businesses that you see. Look at the cars passing you by and you'll see plumbers, electricians, bathroom remodellers, or appliance installation services.
You probably never thought about this before, but all the businesses that just passed you by or you walked pass? The vast majority of those are 6 & 7 figure businesses. Run by people who have absolutely no business experience but are just good at what they do.
They are small operations, but they can bring in serious money. So, start taking notes on businesses that you pass by, just a giant list of every single one. Now when you get home, go through that list and pick the top 5 appealing ones, or the ones you've never thought about before that seem interesting.
And just start playing around, go on YouTube and learn about those five different niches. How they work, how much they charge, and so on. Lastly, take a moment to think of the possibilities. Because most of these businesses are being run the same way they were in 1980 and 1990, and you have access to some of the most amazing marketing and sales knowledge FOR FREE. Strategies that work in 2019. You need to realize the power at your fingertips.
Because tomorrow you're going to decide on your niche and get going for real.
*Really do this because it far more insightful than just visiting Yelp and looking at the different niches.
Day 3: Decide on Your Niche
Today is arguably the most important of the entire 30-day plan, because you are going to decide the niche that you will be working in for the next few years. Yesterday when you looked through your 5 chosen local niches, chances are one or two of them appealed to you more than the others. So now it's time to decide between your top 2.
A couple important qualities to help you narrow the choice down:
-Should have good profit margins (above 20%)
-No licensing required in your state (some industries, like painting in certain states require thousands in licensing fees and are a very real bottleneck)
-Do not require you to personally be in the field
-Already have companies in your area doing well in that niche (means there is plenty of business on the table)
Here's a very important tip: If you're really struggling between the top 2 and you just can't choose... Choose the one that will leave your options open for growth later.
For example, I run a cleaning company, which has allowed me to expand to window cleaning and carpet cleaning services as I have grown. Over the next couple of years, I can even start offering home organisation if I want to.
And if you are still unsure, shoot me or the community and message. I'll be happy to help you choose. Regardless, you really need to choose TODAY because this is one of those decisions that if you let it, will stall you forever.
Tomorrow is going to be interesting because we're going to look at your local competition and use their weaknesses as our strengths.
Day 4: Scout Out the Competition
Welcome back!
Today, we will be doing competitive research on your chosen local business niche. This will be a quick, but powerful lesson for you because it will set the foundation of your branding and marketing. For this lesson I will use the example of a cleaning company in Spokane, Washington. Just replace this term with your chosen niche and city.
You may have heard of a SWOT analysis in a marketing or business class, but I assure we will not be filling out any boring charts or tables. Rather, we will be doing a rudimentary and real-world analysis. A quick and dirty SWOT analysis, if you will.
Ready? Let’s Go.
Head on over to Yelp.com or Google.com and search “cleaning company Spokane wa” and “cleaner Spokane wa”. Now, open the top 10 companies that appear and grab a notebook. Go to their reviews section but ignore the 5* reviews for now. Instead, focus on their 1*, 2*, and 3* reviews.
Start taking notes on why the cleaning company got that bad review. You may find that some of the most common reasons are:
1.People don’t answer their phones
2.People show up late and don’t tell you
3.Their team rushed the job
4.There was poor communication before, during and after the cleaning job
5.They are unwilling to fix an issue the customer found
Notice something?
None of these reasons are related to the actual cleaning part of the job. They are all to do with the customer service side of the business.
Here’s the beauty in this – if you can do a better job than the competition on customer service your customers will always prefer to work with you. So many local businesses are run by amazing technicians who are great at what they do. The reality is they can’t be good at everything and often their weak spot is customer service.
What you can do is take the top 5 patterns of bad reviews you wrote down and turn them into your strengths. You can start branding yourself as having great customer care, easy to reach, and always willing to make an issue right. The fact is, you don’t need 20 years of cleaning experience to own a great cleaning company! You just need to hire the right people and provide a great experience to your customer.
Treat your customer onboarding like a 5* hotel check-in and make the entire experience flawless. All we are doing is finding out what annoys our future customers and just not doing that.
That’s it!
Day 5: Residential vs Commercial
Now that we've chosen our niche, for many of us the next step is to choose if you're going to be doing residential or commercial work from the get-go. This is a really important decision to make because if you try do to both at the same time, you'll find that the marketing and sales process for them is very different from one another.
I want you to concentrate on one at least the first year, so you can allow yourself to build a level of competency within your niche and your focus. Take painting – residential exterior and interior painting are a whole different ball game then commercial painting, or new construction painting. They have different marketing, different profit margins, different expected turnaround times, and different scales. To the point that you can have a painting company for 20 years and never explored other types of painting.
It's the same with cleaning. My cleaning company does primarily residential and vacation rental cleanings. We have never done a single commercial or office job in years because we need to hire a different type of cleaner, on a different schedule, with different pricing. Far better to double down on what is already working until you need to add services to grow.
Take some time to think about which one you want to start with, but here's what I will say. If you are a new business owner, I would recommend residential at first. Commercial can scale larger more quickly than residential but residential is a much better starting option because the marketing and sales process tends to be a lot easier. And there is less risk of having all your eggs in one basket with a big commercial client (who pays you two months late and causes payroll issues...).
This is a really short-day guys so I don't want you to spend all day consumed by worrying about making the wrong decision but do give it some serious thought today and commit to one or the other.
Day 6 & 7: Create Your Website & Online Presence
Welcome Back!
The next two days are very important ones, because you will be making the first real step in starting your local business. We will be setting up our online presence to make our business easy to discover and convenient to book.
So, first off what online presence is essential for us to have?
Here is what you need to have:
Website – there are three parts to your website that you will need to include, at a minimum.
The first is to buy your domain name and hosting once you have chosen a name for your local business. I recommend Namecheap (I personally have dozens of domain names through them). Their support is phenomenal whenever you have a problem, which is almost unheard of in that industry.
The second is to buy a good-looking website theme. Chances are, somebody has already made a beautiful theme for your niche that you can buy for less than $50. There are dozens of great cleaning themes for $27-$47 and I am sure there will be for yours too. Do not pay a professional at first, instead use that money for marketing later.
The third and final part you will need on your website is a convenient booking form so that customers can book without any hassle. Nowadays, so many potential customers expect to be able to book online and don’t want to be forced to call...so you best make sure you make it as easy as possible for them! See if there is a specific booking form for your business first – if not then use a more general one.
Please don’t spend a week on your website trying to make it look perfect, it should just be professional and convenient!
As well as a website, you will need to claim all your social profiles immediately. That includes Facebook, Next Door, Alignable, and any well-known local social sites in your area. If relevant to your industry Twitter, Instagram, or YouTube may all be worth including.
I won’t lecture you on why you need to claim your social media profiles...at this point I think we all know just how powerful social media can be for any business.
Finally, once you have claimed your social profiles and built your website, the last step to take is to build your profiles on relevant marketing channels.
Across industries the most impactful ones currently are:
Google My Business (very important)
Yelp
Thumbtack
HomeAdvisor
AngiesList
And if you are in the UK Bark has been making a big splash lately.
It is worth spending considerable time on your profiles and templates for these websites because for the first year most of your customers are likely to come from them. One way you can make sure you do it right is by finding the top pros in your area and in major cities. Study their profiles on these sites and see what they are doing to promote themselves.
“Absorb what is useful, Discard what is not, Add what is uniquely your own.” – Bruce Lee
I bet you didn’t expect to find a Bruce Lee quote in a plan about building a business, did you?
One last points – make sure you build your profile on smaller region-specific marketing platforms too. Most people don’t bother, and you can turn this to your advantage. Often just having a couple good reviews on smaller platforms is enough to propel you to the top and claim all the jobs that come through. You can dominate these small marketing channels with little effort and a worthwhile reward.
At this point, do not start spending money on advertising platforms yet, we will get to that soon.
That’s it for today!
Good work.
Day 8: Choose A Booking Software, Payment Processor & Phone System
Day 8 is very close related day's 6 and 7 and is an integral part of how you will do business every single day.
I touched on the booking software briefly yesterday, but I wanted to give you a little more insight into that. There are great general booking softwares/CRMS out there like MindBody or Jobber, but if you can see if you can find one specific to your niche. There are booking softwares that only do cleaning companies for example, and their forms and structure are optimized with cleaning companies in mind. If you have chosen pressure washing, painting, appliance repair or whatever...see if there's a booking form specifically for those if you can.
The second thing is your payment processor. I'm just going to go out and say it 99% of the time you should use stripe. I haven't used Square myself but I do know about people who have you swearing than happy with it so I think that's a fine option as well, particularly if you take card payments on location.
A good virtual phone system is also crucial. Now, my VA business runs over 50 local businesses for the owners, so we have great insight into pretty much every virtual phone system out there. The two that...while not perfect and they have their own flaws, I would recommend are Grasshopper and RingCentral.
This is very important. Do not use you personal cell phone number. I cannot tell you the number of times I have talked to business owners who used their personal phone number in the beginning and have had to change their personal phone number or get a new one.
Get a separate number for your business. This is not negotiable.
If you've read this far, we're now on week 2. I know there's been some fluff at the start but a lot of this is very important to set the groundwork correctly for your business. But from here on out, we're starting to get into the nitty gritty and launch this baby by figuring out pricing, hiring our first team, starting marketing and getting our first few customers.
See you tomorrow!
Day 9: Figure Out Your Pricing
Pricing is something you can spend a lot of time optimizing, but I recommend you use a simple pricing method your first year so you can get on with building the business.
Look at your top five competitors (have the best reviews and a good customer base), and either copy their pricing or add 20% on top of their pricing at first.
What you are going to do when you start with 0 reviews is tell people your price, then discount their first booking. This gives them an incentive to book with you. I know, I know, everyone says to avoid price shoppers, but guess what? When you have no reputation or reviews that is who you are stuck with, so get on with it and make them happy. This is how as a new company I was able to get hired hundreds of times off of thumbtack over the course of a few months, outranking companies who have been around for years with impeccable reviews (we also followed up like crazy).
The strategy goes a little something like this, regardless of the platform: The first 10 people receive a 35% discount and you really push them for a review, when you have 10 reviews you drop it down to 30% discount, when you have 20 drop down to 25%, when you have 30 down to 20, and so until your typical charging your normal price or giving them a small discount as a first-time customer.
Day 10: Take A Break
Seriously, take one. You’re doing a LOT in a short amount of time, even if it feels manageable right now. We want to build good momentum, not bad momentum that heads us towards a crash because we never take a break.
Day 11: Put Together A Budget ($500, If I can)
Ahhh budgeting, how fun! This is another one of the most important days, especially if you are a student or you don't have a lot in savings. Putting together your budget is a necessary part of starting a business. You can start a service business incredibly cheaply and do the labour yourself the first few weeks to build up some cash reserves, but in my experience if you can it is better to start with teams from the beginning. I know many owners who get trapped being the tech in their own business and it can take years to transition out of that mindset and role.
You could buy a window cleaning kit for $50 and start knocking door to door...this still works brilliantly in 2019, by the way. But if you want to build a real service business then we need a bit of money for your website and marketing.
If you can swing it, I recommend $1000 for everything to start. you can't I strongly advise $500 minimum, because that would be very tight as it is. The truth is you are not going to know where your money is best spent at first, so you need some time and money to figure out what marketing is working best for you.
So, put together your budget with as much as you can set aside (there are always small unexpected costs).
Day 12: Create Your First Job Post
Let’s jump straight into it today and create our first job post!
Go on craigslist and indeed.com, see what job posts are doing well in your niche start to craft your own in a similar style. Here’s one I use for cleaning that I tweaked from one I found (funny enough, on reddit!) years ago that has always worked well:
Subject Line: Looking for Two Person Cleaning Teams (Washington)
Looking for Two Person Cleaning Teams ({Washington DC} & Surrounding Areas)
We're a cleaning company that expects a rush of clients as the summer winds down and we need a few teams to help us out.
This is for residential cleaning. We pay per cleaning.
**Residential Cleanings**
*Studio Apartment - $75
*1 Bed 1 Bath - $85
*2 Bed 1 Bath - $95
*3 Bed 2 Bath - $125
*4 Bed 2 Bath - $135
**With Extra Services Tacked On (Example: Inside Fridge, Cabinets, and Interior Windows)**
*Studio Apartment - $90
*1 Bed 1 Bath - $105
*2 Bed 1 Bath - $115
*3 Bed 2 Bath - $155
*4 Bed 2 Bath - $185
We typically send two-person teams, so extra points if you
A) Have a cleaning partner you can work with
B) One of you has a car
If you're interested, please fill out our application here to begin the application process -
yourwebsite.com
Thank you very much. We'll respond quickly.
Try not to spend more than 3 hours searching and creating your job posts. To start, create two totally different ones and post them on both craigslist and Indeed.
Day 13: Interview Potential Teams
Most of the stuff you're going to read about hiring doesn't really apply to you. A lot of it is about corporate recruiting, tech recruiting, and review processes that are too in-depth and cost a boatload of money.
Unfortunately, there are not that many good resources recruiting for local businesses, but here is an excellent one to get you started: https://academy.getjobber.com/tags/hiring/
They have job posts and descriptions for all kinds of niches, along with hiring tips and questions. I wish I knew about them when I was getting started. Go through their hiring vault and start drawing up a list of questions to ask your potential candidates. If feasible, have them do a trial service at your place so you can get an idea of if they can do what they say they can.
Straight up make sure they are polite, have reliable transportation, are citizens, can submit to a background check, and already have years of experience. Remind them the day before the interview, AND the morning of the interview.
At first, aim to bring on two good contractors even if you don’t have any work at first. As contractors, they already have other work to keep them busy, so they are not solely relying on you for income. The other reason you want two teams is if one of them decides to no-show the first couple of jobs, you could reschedule with the backup team.
Day 14: Hire My First Team
We have our first job ads up, candidates are applying, and you think you’ve found a couple winners!
There is a few important things you have to do to formally bring them on as an employee or contractor. I'm going to assume you're going to use independent contractors for now.
Non-negotiables:
-Have them fill out a W9 BEFORE doing their first job. You will need this at the end of the year to issue them a 1099.
-Draw up a subcontractor agreement for working together.
-Background check them using a service like Onfido.
-Make sure they have insurance
With those done, you are going pay close attention to the first three jobs. The first few jobs you want an outstanding experience, because this is the Foundation of your business' reputation that you are building in the early days.
If you have all of those pieces sorted, start to walk through expectations of working together. How much they will get paid, how you will send them jobs, and so on.
With those done, you are going pay close attention to the first three jobs. The first few jobs you want an outstanding experience, because this is the foundation of your business' reputation that you are building in the early days.
Day 15: Start Organic Marketing
While everyone is talking about optimizing Google Adwords campaigns, Facebook Ads/Clickfunnels, and the latest paid service, you can get a ton of business completely free.
Here are four quick ways we get several bookings per week consistently for years, without spending a dime:
Local Facebook groups:
Go join local mum groups, discount groups, flea market groups, student groups and local networking groups on Facebook.
People love to interact, get helpful advice from each other, and recommend each other.
If you have a slow booking day where your schedule is just not filling up, you can offer a crazy discount to flea market/garage sale groups and often get some bookings. The goal is not to make a profit on the discounted clean, but to have them become a regular at your normal price.
Do this 2-3x a week in various groups and you will start building authority and bookings from that group. When you post make sure you include a screenshot of some 5* reviews of your business so they know you are legit and let them know you are the owner.
Next Door:
Next door is such a wonderfully underrated platform, and it's the way Facebook groups should be. You have your neighbours in a discussion board just for them, and recommendations feature that you can get other members to recommend your business. Our cleaning company has gotten a lot of business from Next Door, simple by asking our customers already on there to recommend us. We also provide a neighbour discount exclusively for them.
Hell, we even hire cleaners from Next Door sometimes by asking others if they have a good cleaner they know looking for more work.
This is a great avenue, if you authentically engage and be helpful, instead of just being salesy. Spend 5-10 minutes a day on there commenting and giving your own recommendations. I often see handymen recommended on there and know they get a ton of referral business from it.
Alignable:
Alignable is useful because it allows you to connect with other local business owners without having to pay BNI or your chamber of commerce a bunch of money every year. This is a fantastic platform to refer each other business and create interesting service partnerships. As an example, what we do is every spring season get together with window cleaners and home organisers to specials where people can get 2-in-1 or 3-in-1 services done at the same day, with us taking a chunk of the profits.
Door-To-Door:
I'm not going to say too much about door to door, but it is still very powerful method in 2019 for getting a lot of business, particularly for high-ticket seasonal services like painting and pressure washing.
There are a dozen wonderful organic marketing methods I could talk about, but here are just a few to get you started and thinking. Set a goal to be doing some sort of organic marketing every single day consistently. Because once you start getting more bookings from organic marketing it starts to speed up and referrals start coming in naturally. This is a key advantage over paid marketing.
Day 16: Choose Your Top 2 Paid Marketing Channels To Test
You do not want to try out 10 different paid marketing channels your first few months, you will go broke and waste your money getting no bookings. Instead, focus on two great ones in your area and become an expert at them.
Here is my recommended list for new service businesses to explore. Keep in mind EVERY CITY is different and certain ones will perform better than others:
Google Local Ads – this is Google’s new service, and it is performing far better than Adwords across most of the country. Get in while it is hot since most competitors aren’t using it yet.
Yelp – sorry, I know their management sucks, but they can get you a lot of business. If you do go with yelp, make sure you build up 10-15 positive reviews before paying for ads.
Google Adwords – don’t do this at the start unless you already have experience or a big enough budget to pay an expert to do it for you. I recommend not paying someone for Adwords help until you hit around $10,000/mo in revenue.
Thumbtack – Still a fantastic platform to get hired through, but follow-up is key (it always is, but even more so for thumbtack). Send a quote, then follow-up when they see it, follow-up end of day, the next day, two days later, and three days later with a final message. Revisit them 6 months later and ask them if they need service.
Facebook Ads/Funnels – don’t play around with these yet. Facebook marketers will tell you these work for every niche, but they don’t.
Craigslist – placing ads is still cheap and can get you a lot of inquiries, so this is very worth it at the start.
Amazon Seller Central – they take a cut of each job, but they WILL get you jobs. This is great the first few months when you are doing discounts, because even if you don’t make money on the front-end you can push to have them become regulars.
HomeAdvisor – it CAN work, but your leads are not exclusively sent to you and they charge a really high cost per call. If you have a big budget try it out, if not try others on this list at first.
Day 17: Rapid Fire Testing
Rapid Fire Testing is a crucial and painfully overlooked part of every business owners marketing strategies. Often, we just throw more money at a marketing campaign we THINK is working, without going through to calculate our ROI or optimize them.
Here is a quick way to rapid fire test the marking platforms you are already using.
Let us pretend we are trying to decide between 2 different marketing channels.
For example, if you use Thumbtack with a $150 monthly budget. Assume this gets you 10 quotes, and of those 10 quotes (assuming you have a tight follow-up system in place), you close 4. Your other marketing channel is HomeAdvisor, also with a $150 monthly budget. But HomeAdvisor only brings in 8 quotes, of which you closed two.
Essentially, we are comparing our customer acquisition costs.
For Thumbtack, we get one quote for $15 on average, and 1 sale per $37.50 on average. Whereas for HomeAdvisor we get one quote for $18.75 on average and get a sale for $75 on average.
From this very simplistic comparison we can see that Thumbtack would do far better for you, and it would be worth taking the $150 that you're currently spending on HomeAdvisor and doubling your Thumbtack budget instead.
This is what we want to do regularly from the get-go. Later on, you also want to compare the average ticket sizes that we get for each platform, because as you dial things in more it becomes more important. For example, exterior painting the ticket sizes are often larger than interior painting, and if you're using porch and thumbtack, you may find that the average exterior painting jobs that you close are higher on porch than on thumbtack.
This is a rapid-fire test that should be done at least quarterly.
Having said that, do not over complicate, it's just a quick marketing health check and asset reallocation. So do your rapid-fire test and stick with just the top 1-2 performing marketing channels.
Day 18: Soft Launch
Your soft launch is just an announcement that you are open for business and is a commitment to yourself to really do this.
This can be a good way to get your first few customers, and I see people recommend that often, but to be perfectly honest it can also be really annoying to push your friends and family to buy your business services.
The important thing here is the mental aspect that this is now a real business that you own. It is more for yourself than anyone else and is a safe way to start without being fully ready to go yet (otherwise you may fall prey to perfectionism). Just let people know you are trying this new side hustle out and are excited to see where it leads.
Day 19: Learn How To Pitch & Close
The first in golden rule that I tell people is to treat your potential customers like a hotel reception does when checking-in new customers. Treat them like they're going through the checking process already booked and you are just gathering their information. Assume the sale and walk them through your booking form step by step, answering their questions along the way but making sure that you return to the next step.
There are so many books about sales and so many sales tactics, but to be completely honest with you, if someone is calling you because need their lawn trimmed, or their fridge installed, they just want it over with and are already committed to just getting on with it. Some people price shop, but it is a surprisingly small number of people who do.
Now, as a new business with no reputation, I do recommend offering a discount at first if they resist. I see a lot of business owners say that you should not discount service or devalue yourself, but I think the mindset is so wrong.
What you're doing is offering them peace of mind that you're willing to work with them this first job. Sure, a few people may try and take advantage of you but the vast majority of people do respect you and only ask for a discount the first time.
This is smart to do, because when you discount you increase your sales conversion rate, which allows you to do a stellar job and then makes it 10 times easier to sell them on a recurring service afterwards. So, I typically treat the first booking like a loss leader similar to how a supermarket gets you in the store with cheap milk and bread, because they know you're going to want other stuff or services (which is where the profit is).
If you think about it this is exactly how paid marketing works too. You have a conversion cost when you run an Adwords campaign, and you typically only make a little bit of money or even no money on that first booking (if you have a lower priced service), but your hope is to convert them to a recurring customer and keep them week after week, month after month, where the profit really kicks in. You are doing the exact same thing at the start before you have reviews by offering them a discount. Just sweetening the deal a little bit for them.
One cool thing that has been effective for me, is offer them $25 off their first 3 bookings because it gives them an incentive to come back and still profitable for me at each booking. Find a reasonable amount you can discount that you are slightly uncomfortable with, but you can still make work and try that.
Lastly, do not do not do not get them on the phone.... then tell them to book online. When you do this, you are doing it because it is more convenient for you. It is more inconvenient for them, and you're giving them a chance to slip away and check out a competitor’s website and maybe book there. Walk them through and book them while you have them on the phone because your chance of closing that sale once you're off the phone with them drops dramatically.
Obviously, this is just a super brief tip of the sales iceberg overview, but this is a good first framework to use for the first 50-100 bookings.
Day 20: Take A Break
Yes, really.
That’s all today folks, check back in tomorrow after taking a nice walk and chilling.
Day 21: Create A Follow-Up Sheet
If this is your first business, then you probably suck at follow up, and if this is not your first business you may have an overly complicated system that you don’t use consistently. Totally normal, but it’s time to use a simple system that does work.
Below you can see my two-follow-up sheet that I use for my cleaning company, as well as my virtual assistant agency. It is very simple, but very powerful when followed with consistency. I will be releasing a download of the sheets as well for you soon.
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Hopefully, it is mostly self-explanatory. But here is in brief explanation of how to use it just in case:
For follow-up calls, start using this google sheet and fill out the two follow-up sheets with a) Customers after their service and b) Leads who contact you but don’t book immediately.
Page 1 is for new leads, and Page 2 are for people who just had their first service that you want to convert into a regular.
Here is a process to follow-up with each person (we basically stop when we get a NO):
Day 1 - Call the lead at 3 different times of the day (only leave a voicemail on the third call). Shoot them a text after the first call to let them know who you are and why you are calling.
Example: "Hey this is Sara from ABC Clean. I was just calling regarding your request for the discounted deep cleaning you want this week. Is this a good time to call?"
So, Day 1:
Call
Text (asking for permission and a time to call)
Call
Call
Voicemail Left On Last Call
Day 2:
Call
Call
Final Text Asking Them To Confirm Interest
Day 3 and beyond:
Shoot them a call or text once a day for the next week, beyond that you can let the lead rest a week then try again. It’s always worth trying old leads again in the future.
As a rule, ONLY CALL AND TEXT. No emailing unless you are responding to them. I recommend setting a specific block of time in the evening or lunch to get these done, whenever you think your customers will be available.
Basically, you want a written and categorized track record of every leads that comes to your business from every source. This will not only dramatically increase the number of bookings you get over time, but it will also be helpful when we go back and do our next rapid-fire test. You can visually see over time what sources you get the most new business from.
Day 22: Create A List of Sales KPIs
Ok this is the last big day on sales, then we're going to move on to the last few important things.
Last thing you need to do is get a sales structure in place by creating a list of key performance indicators (KPIs) that you will regularly update and follow. I think most of us at this point know what KPIs are, but most of us are probably not actually using them because we just think of them as this boring idea from a business class or a YouTube video.
They are Lifesavers. Here are the KPIs I recommend you start out using. Put them into Google sheet and track them once a week. If a KPI is way off target see how you can get it back on target. If one is performing particularly well see if you can do even more of that:
-Number of leads (eg phone calls in a week)
-% of leads that turn into a sale
-% of one-time customers that convert into a recurring customer
-Total adspend
-Average booking price
-Hottest upsell services
If you do this, you will be way ahead of people who've been in business for years and you will find yourself growing far more quickly than someone in the same business who isn’t tracking KPIs.
Day 23: Form A Legal Entity
This is not legal advice, but just a friendly opinion of mine. Please talk to your accountant or business advisor about incorporating and have them tell you their professional opinion.
If it were me starting over from scratch again, I would personally form an LLC right away, and get a separate business bank account from day 1. I know people who have been in business for 15 years and do not still have an LLC. I cannot tell you how nervous that makes me for them because it only takes one big accident for them to be completely screwed.
Forming an LLC only costs a couple $100 maximum and is worth the extra protection it gives you. For me personally, I would file this as soon as I possibly can. Again, this is not legal advice, this is just what I would do if I decide to start another local service business. Remember, this is what I would do if I had to start over from scratch.
Day 24: Figure Out Your Profit Margins
Knowing your profit margins is essential because this is going to be the key that will help you decide how much to pay your teams, how to price your services, how much you can afford to put into marketing and operations, and finally how much to pay yourself out of every $100 that you bring in.
Typically, local service businesses have a much lower profit margin than software or digital marketing businesses. Sorry, just what it is. What we have more consistent revenue and long-term customers than they do (often 10-20 year long customers!)
Brick and mortar is almost always at the bottom here because you have to pay for the physical storefront, products, equipment, rent and other necessities. Your profit margins are usually in the range of 5 at the lower end to 20% at the very high end.
A good business friend of mine used to run a very tight ship at his day spa, where they did almost a million dollars per year in revenue. Let me just say the guy is really good at business he knew how to run his day spa far better than most did, and he was still only able to get about 10 to 12% profit when he (honestly) factored in all expenses.
Most local service businesses are going to be in the 15 to 35% profit margin rate. Think of house cleaning, roofing, window washing and so on. Labour is almost always your biggest expense for this type of business.
At the higher end, certain services like exterior house painting you can get up to 50 or 55% profit margins, and I know dozens of painters who do between 45 and 55% profit margins regularly, but this is not common across niches.
You should do some serious research to find out average profit margins for your industry. I want you to join a couple Facebook groups and communities for business owners in your niche and talk to them about it, because you really need this information to know if you're doing it right to make this business worth your while.
-CONTINUED IN COMMENTS.
Where to go from here?
Hit me up with any questions, or if you're looking to join a dedicated group of local business owners and we can get something really cool going.
Top Comment:
Day 25: Start Asking for Reviews
Now that we have created the foundational structure for our business, started marketing, soft launched, and have a sales structure in place, it is time start building our reputation in our community as a premium service.
This is where reviews come in.
I think I speak for all business owners when I say we know the dread of our very first 1* review, whether it was deserved or not it just ruined our entire week.
This is exactly what I don't want to happen to you from the start. Instead of letting reviews happen to us, we are going to take the initiative to go and get our reviews after every single service we do. After every single booking we want to be in contact with the customer so we can either make them a regular customer or catch any issue right after the fact so we can fix it.
Here's the plan.
Block off a time of day every business day and call all the customers you serviced the before to talk to them about how satisfied they were with it. This also gives you an opportunity to sell them on a recurring service. But before that we want to ask them for a review, if they had a good experience.
Ask them for a review on the phone, and then right after text them a direct link to review you. Not email, but text because text has a higher response rate, and review sites don't care if you asked via text, whereas they sometimes do if they click through from an email.
You should be doing this until you have between 50 and 100 reviews across your main platforms, and even then, you should never stop doing this.
Usually you will need the most reviews on Google My Business, Yelp and Thumbtack.
After you have 100 reviews you can create a text-automation which automatically asks them for a review after the service. This is a little bit more complicated and you can message me about that if you're interested in it, but for now the first 100 you need to just be talking to the customer.
I cannot overstate the importance of reviews even in 2019....these are crucial to your business!
Day 26: Create A Daily Workflow
We're in the home stretch now, but there a couple last important things to do.
One of those things is creating a daily workflow that you can maintain consistently whether you have your whole day free, whether you are a college student, or whether already you have a full-time job and you're doing this in your spare time.
I recommend against complicate productivity systems such as Getting Things Done. Instead, I advocate a very simplistic system that I've refined and used over the past few years.
It really consists of 3 parts, but for right now we're just going to focus on the first two.
The first is the ABCDE method.
Essentially all you must do is rank order all of your tasks onto a piece of paper or to-do list and give them a letter grade corresponding to the level of importance. ‘A’ tasks are obviously the most essential, followed by ‘B’ tasks, all the way down to ‘E’ tasks. You want to do this because you want to always be working on your A & B tasks. These are the ones that consistent with your business forward and that you must be doing every single day.
Now you've done that, you will always know what you should be working because when you finish a task, you simply move on to the next task of importance. Whenever a new task comes in assign it the correct letter grade and put it into the list.
This alone is very helpful. But we are going to combine this with a technique called "batching".
Batching is when you take all of your small tasks throughout the day that you need to do and instead of letting them control your day you assign them to 1, 2 or 3 specific windows throughout the day. This is paramount because you will never be able to do your A/B if you are always doing the small tasks whenever they come up.
Here's how to do that:
Take all your ‘C’, ‘D’, ‘E’ tasks and assign them to a window of time like 9-10am or 12-1pm. You only do those tasks during those times. Once the window is over you get back to your important tasks.
The other thing is all the little things that crop up throughout the day, like an email you need to respond to, or a Facebook message you need to reply to, heck even a phone call you have to answer. Either batch them into another period, or if you have a team delegate them to someone who can attend to them as soon as they appear.
When you are a new business owner you are not going have a team or a manager who can do this because you're going to be running the office. But this still important because you can batch most of your tasks, particularly if you have a full-time job and you can only do this part-time.
Having said that, the first year you are likely to not be able to afford a manager and there will be certain tasks you just have to handle as they come. If a team gets lost, a potential customer calls to make a booking, or an emergency happens. You are just going to have to deal with the reality that you cannot batch these, and you just have to handle them as they come. That is OK, just focus on batching as much as you can.
You can use your own productivity system, but I strongly recommend you give this ago the first couple months, so you don’t overcomplicate it. I run several businesses at the same time and use this method exclusively. The whole goal of this to maintain clarity on your most important tasks at all times.
If you want a good read, I recommend Essentialism by Greg McKeown on this topic. While he espouses a slightly different system it is philosophically similar.
The last thing I want to say here is that you should set aside a specific time every day to do a) Follow-up and b) Marketing. These are always important tasks.
Day 27: Double Down on Your Top 2 Free Marketing Channels
Remember when we originally decided on the paid marketing channels that we wanted to use and then we rapid fire tested them?
We will now do this again with our free marketing channels. Stop trying to do two dozens platforms at once. Do the same thing for your free channels so you have your top 2 free and your top 2 paid channels that are actively bringing in bookings for you and actually have the potential to bring in a lot more. Calculate how much time you spend on them, how often you post, and how many bookings/referrals you receive from each other.
Because you are going to spend time on all four of these platforms every single freaking day. Tweaking your templates, following up with people, optimizing everything and really working your ass off to get bookings.
These are the same sites that you want to be building your reviews on as well. The only exception is Google My Business. No matter what local business you are in you should always get reviews on Google My Business.
Overtime as you accumulate dozens and hundreds of reviews on these 4 sites you will have a powerful sales machine working for you, much more powerful than if you have 10 reviews on it a dozen different sites.
How are you supposed to support local business when everything is overpriced?
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I really do try to shop local but sometimes it's impossible. I can't justify spending twice as much on something when I can buy it online. Local bookstore is like 150% more than a online retailer. Local appliance guy same thing. How are people expected to do this?
Top Comment: I struggle with this as well. Life will be miserable if local businesses cease to exist, because who will sponsor local events? We will lose those too....but...I just don't have enough money. It feels like a luxury to have capacity to choose to buy local.
I Refuse to blindly support local business'
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As someone who has worked for quite a few mom and pop business' in and around my area, I have a hard time always supporting local. I also spent a few years working at a high traffic bank where many SMB owners would bring their deposits and get change for their tills.
The worst I've ever been treated as an employee has always been at these local shops. I've had an iPad thrown at me. I've been made to purchase my own work shirts and had to return them after I quit. I've been made to come in sick because the owner couldn't do my job. I've been sworn at, pressured into drinking on the job by an owner (I am sober and he knew that).
While working at the bank, I would get to see the true colors of some of these local biz owners. Quite a few of them treated us like utter garbage. Rushing us through their deposits, speaking down to us, yelling at us if we were out of quarters, and overall just being unpleasant and/or rude.
All this being said, the BEST I've ever been treated has been by larger corporations. I've worked places that had bring your dog to work day, bagel fridays, lots of PTO and paid holidays, unlimited sick time, catered lunch once a month.
I refuse to blindly support local after all of this. I am sure that there are many local shops who are good to their employees, but all these experiences have left a bad taste in my mouth.
Top Comment: I feel like a lot of local businesses have forgotten that special service or unique products are the only things keeping them in business. I mean there's almost nothing that you can't buy online cheaper. So if I'm going to support you as a local business, you better do something more: but sometimes I have gone into a local business I want to support and been treated indifferently AND offered mediocre product. No, thank you. Two quick examples of different kinds: I walk into a new bakery. I mean this just opened up. It is staffed by one bored teenager on their phone. Where is the owner, you just opened up, you should be building community relations? By the way, the teenager doesn't even know who the owner is so it's not like the owner just stepped out. Worse, I ask for a muffin and I find out it's a store bought muffin that is just going to be microwaved. You don't deserve to survive as a "local" business. Next one, there is a new non-chain family hamburger place that opens. It advertises its artisanal, homemade difference on sauce and bun and meat and so on. Again, I want to be supportive so I go in and it's a mediocre burger with mediocre side fries. I also noticed that a delivery truck from one of those giant companies that delivers to everybody, including the American burger chains is pulled up around back. So here you are trying to compete with McDonald's and you don't even bother to try to have a better product that stands out. Shameful and stupid. Both of them were out of business within six months!
[ON] Problem I see with most local businesses - A Rant
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Hey I am an agency owner from Toronto, I work with a lot of local companies and online businesses. Every time I work with a local business it's so surprising to me that they spend no effort toward getting more customers but complain about "not getting enough clients" or "too much competition". But they are doing literally nothing to get more customers. I have noticed most of these businesses are ran by middle-aged people who overall think it's 1990s and they can just get customers by opening a store or posting flyers at bus stops.
I can give you an example I was working with this local landscaping company that I cold called for a free website offer (I offer free websites to all local businesses in Ontario), they took it and then told me that they were struggling with getting more customers. So I asked them some simple questions that any online business owner would be aware of like following -
- Do you follow up with your previous customers when you know their grass is probably grown by now? - No they don't
- Since they don't have a website I asked do you have social media that you post on daily or run ads (I don't recommend this usually) - They have social media but posts never
I mean at this point I had nothing more to ask, they were doing nothing to get more customers. So I asked them how come I had to cold call you for a website, you should already be looking for one since you have no actual way to get clients. He agreed but said he wasn't sure if a website would ever help him, since last time he got one made he spent thousands but it got no traffic.
I asked if he did SEO, but he didn't know if that was something he paid for since this was 4 years ago. Now I obviously knew the solution so I pitched him a free website (he pays for hosting) and $800/m for SEO optimization (includes like blogs, back links, on-page and regular A/B testing). Now to me this seems like a no-brainer offer, I mean he would solve his "not getting any customers" problem. But he said "I will think about it" (he got back to me later and got started but many don't).
Now here is the thing, local business owners are not the brightest they don't understand $1000 a month can be made back with just 3-4 customers and that's like the most basic form of marketing. They fall for running ads on facebook but it really isn't the best way to grow your local business since your target audience is so small. If you rank high for you local keywords like "plumber in Toronto" you will get calls daily for quotes.
An average buyer would make few of these calls to maybe first 5 people that show up on Google and decide who to work with a schedule the service. And then after that's done they will see ads on Facebook for plumbers. Now do you see the problem? Facebook needs some info to even know they need plumbing. But Google doesn't, that's where people go as soon as they need something and make decisions after a few quotes. So to grow you need to invest some $$ and time into getting in front of these buyers. Also, social media (organic not ads) is a very strong tool, you should post all your work on daily basis. Reels are a cheat code at this point to target people who have already got your service once and to remind them they need your service again.
I hope that was very helpful to anyone reading. I am bad at explaining stuff of reddit threads, feel free to send me a message if you want to really ask questions about your specific local business or want a free website (no joke I make them for free).
Top Comment:
Yes, finally.
Yes seo for local business is always a game changer, just like for agencies like mine I do social media marketing and cold emails.
Every business has its own best marketing channel but for every local business seo is a great base.
Really happy to hear that bro, keep crushing it.
Small business ideas?
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Hey guys, hope you're having a good day.
I'm currently unemployed and broke asf. I have a business idea that I want to make reality but I do not have the budget to start it up.
Maybe some of you have ideas on how to make money by starting a small business with very low starting budget (preferably less than $500) that I can use to rack up the money I need to start the business I really want. You can share how you started as well as that might be helpful.
Currently, the only thing I can think of is supplying small local grocery stores with food or drinks that I can get from elsewhere. This will help the small businesses to sell more of their product as it will reach more people. Just an idea.
Top Comment:
What kind Reddit discussions do you look for?
What are some small local based business's that always seem to succeed?
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Things like coffee shops, supermarkets, mechanics etc.
Small town business's that seem to do well?
Top Comment:
Here in the UK it is drive thru tea shops
Failed small business owners of Reddit, what went wrong?
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Edit: So far this is somewhat depressing, but let's see if we can learn something.
Also, one could also replace "failed" with "former"
Edit 2: per u/somesexyguy, thank you for the serious replies
Edit 3: Don't open an ice cream store
Top Comment: My grandmother and grandfather ran a photography studio. 30 years later, when my grandfather was gone and my parents were kinda running it my mom's sister got jealous and took over. She fired my dad because "anyone could be a photographer" and then sued him when he took every single picture of me down off the walls (I was 16, so I was a minor and my dad was my guardian, obviously. The judge laughed her out of court.). They relied on using my grandmother and grandfather's name for awhile. Didn't pay any of their photographers and ended up closing down. This was right when digital photography was a thing, and when my parents were "running" the business, it was making money for the first time in 10 years. My aunt didn't want to convert to digital and...well... We actually got contacted by Judge Judy's people but my mom would have been heartbroken to do that to her sister. I personally do not speak to my aunt, and my dad and I think it would have been a good laugh.
Small Business Owners of Reddit, what were the top 3 most painful parts of starting and/or running your small business?
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Hi Reddit!
I graduated college almost 5 years ago and have been working in the private sector for a large company. I have always been interested in owning and operating my own business and now that I have built a small financial cushion, the idea is popping into my head with more frequency.
I would love to learn form your wisdom and experience and would find it super helpful if you could share:
- 1). What business do you own / operate (for context on the below questions)?
- 2). What were the top 3 most painful parts of starting and/or running your business?
- 3). How did you solve or overcome those challenges (or do they remain, today)?
Thanks in advance for your feedback!
Dare2Poke
Update: Thank you for all of your feedback so far! I am currently at work, but will review every comment when I get home. I am really looking forward it :)
Top Comment: I've been running my own business now for over 14 years and I've seen and helped a lot of people over those years. If you want the brutal honesty, it really comes down to 5 parts. So much so in fact that these days I limit how much I help people until they've at least completed those 5 parts. 1- The novelty and excitement wears off within 3 weeks to 3 months. The first is pretty much the same reason why most gyms have huge membership surges around new years. Tons of people decide they will start going to the gym, get very excited at first, go almost every day if not every day, then over a period of a few weeks to a few months stop altogether. How is that related to starting a business? It's simple, everyone has excited when they first want to start a company. That's the fun part. Generating ideas, thinking what you'll do, etc. It's a lot of fun and very exciting. In fact it's probably the most fun. Just like going to gym. And at first you tend to go very hard. You spend a ton of time starting your business. But just like the gym, after the novelty and excitement wear off, most people start to work less and less until they stop working. This is why I generally offer limited assistance at first, too many people quite too quickly. Generally if you're 6-12 months into your business you'll stick with it, much like going to the gym. 2- Most people just don't like to work. By this I mean the fun part is imaging and planning your business. This is a LOT of fun. Even doing a business plan can be fun. Ever notice how many books, seminars, etc. there are to creating a business plan and then how quickly it drops off after? This is because they know most people will never get past that point. That's when the hard work starts and when most people start to lose interest and move onto their next idea. 3- Most people stop once they hit a bigger roadblock It doesn't have to be that big, just big enough. It's different for different people. I've seen people quit at all levels of difficulties. If starting and succeeding at business was easy everyone would be doing it. The question is can you get past the hurdles or will you stop? There will be a lot of hurdles of differing levels when you run a business, but almost all of them are surmountable, you just have to be willing to get past them. Some will honestly suck, but that's part of it. You hear a lot of stories about overnight successes, well the reality is that 99.999% are not overnight successes, you just saw the last part. They had to spend tons of time learning how to master their craft. Which leads me to the last part: 4- Most people are not willing to do the boring or hard work Every business has boring or annoying things you need to do. Sadly this is very similar to going to the gym, it can be a lot of work and boring to do everything that needs to be done, which is why so many people get stuck on either the idea phase or business plan phase. It's fun. 5- Most people are not willing to go outside of their comfort zone Not only will some parts be tedious and boring, but there will be work that needs to be done that's outside of your comfort zone. For example many people do not like marketing and advertising but if you don't learn and do it then there's no point in starting a business. You need to be willing to do the things you don't like doing because they have to be done. You may not be good at them, but you still need to learn and do them. I personally didn't like marketing and advertising when I started, and I'm still not that interested in it, but I now understand it and can do it quite effectively. 6- Bonus: You have to be willing to bet on yourself Although it's not a pain point it's one of the reasons I see many people fail. Basically they aren't willing to put any money behind their ideas. You often see this with people looking for investor funding but not willing to spend their own money to invest in their company. Most investors will not be interested if you yourself aren't willing to spend any money on your business. In other words if you don't even have the confidence to invest in your business then why should they? But more to the point, I've had people ask me how to start and so on and as soon as there are any costs over a few hundred in total they start to quickly back down and lose interest. Most people are not willing to start a business if they have to invest $1000 or more. That's usually a big cutoff. If you're not willing to spend at least that much to start your business then it's very likely it won't succeed. You're basically saying that you don't believe enough in your business to spend $1000. You can say you don't have that money, but if you then go ahead and go on a trip, etc then I'm sorry but you have the money you're just saying you don't believe the business will succeed enough to warrant trading your trip for your business, or whatever it is you spend money on (big screen tv, gaming console, etc.). I see this very very often. This doesn't mean that if you're willing to spend money on your business that it will succeed, just that if you're not then it's very unlikely to succeed is all. Update: Thank you for my first gold!!