>>The downside of our business is seeing work that's
been done left to decay.<<
Why leave your good work to decay? Just because the building belongs to
someone else? That's no excuse. By the mid-1980s I too got tired of
seeing this. So, I started doing maintenance programming for my
customers. When I finish a job I give them written maintenance
recommendations. Then I would schedule a call to them in five years, or
whenever I knew the maintenance would be needed. When that year came up
and I needed work to fill in my schedule I would call them, and get the
work doing the maintenance. I routinely get a 95% closing rate on those
calls.
So, downside becomes upside. If you can't turn downsides into upsides
it's not really "business." This works especially well during economic
downturns. Building owners are canceling major projects that would cost
hundreds of thousands or millions. The same day I call talking about
their peeling paint (which they noticed just last month and are
surprised I know about it too) and talking about doing some measly
maintenance for them that they already know needs to be done, and a
contract for two or three thousand, or ten or eleven thousand looks
pretty good to them, compared to the millions they just decided to not
spend.
In marketing this is called "perception management," and it really
works. I begin influencing their perception of the cost and value of my
work five years in advance when I hand them that maintenance
recommendation. That recommendation has been ticking away in their
subconscious mind all that time, building up, building up. Then I call
them right when they have a need (the peeling paint), and when my dollar
numbers are going to look small and easy to approve when compared to
other bigger dollar numbers they cannot approve.
It doesn't take too many calls to fill in a slack work schedule.
By the late 1980s a couple of my customers noticed what I was doing and
simply hired me to manage their maintenance. Nice clean work compared to
scraping paint.
The idea here is to not play the construction industry's game of big
project, deterioration, big project, deterioration... My game is a
little work, a little work, a little work, a little work..., which
adds up to enough work.
John (sneaks in there and grabs his apple back from the big boys) Leeke
www.HistoricHomeWorks.com
--
**Please remember to trim posts, as requested in the Terms of Service**
To terminate puerile preservation prattling among pals and the
uncoffee-ed, or to change your settings, go to:
<http://listserv.icors.org/archives/bullamanka-pinheads.html>
|