>>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

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