Does Your Contracting Company Suffer From a Hidden Problem?

Millions of contractors share a problem. It's so common that many contractors feel that they just have to live with it and no longer even think about it. So, it hides in the shadows of their business preventing them from making a good profit.

What is this problem? NOT ENOUGH CUSTOMERS.

How do I know this? I've been a contractor in Los Angeles since 1979, for over 30 years. We've been through several recessions where some of my competitors have gone belly up. I'm not saying that my business has always thrived, but it's survived. For me, the saving grace that has allowed me to build a 25-person electrical contracting company has been having enough customers.

If you're a contractor, let me ask you: What would happen if you had two or three times as many customers waiting for bids? Wouldn't you bid your jobs higher, sell more jobs, and make more profit? For most contractors, the answer is yes. But why is the answer yes? After all, contractors need to do a lot of things right to make a profit, not just find customers.

There are a lot of steps in contracting -- and a lot of things that can go wrong. From the moment a customer first calls you to the moment you're paid in full on a completed job, you must handle each step and many details skillfully. You must bid the job, sell the job, schedule the work, purchase material, organize all the aspects of the work, complete each aspect satisfactorily, and finally, get paid.

Fortunately, most contractors do well enough at these steps that if they could just get enough customers, they could take it from there and make a fine profit. The one thing most contractors agree they have a problem with is not enough customers.

Getting customers is done in two steps. The first is promotion. Promotion is getting the word out so that you get calls or e-mails from customers. Contractors have typically done this with Yellow Pages, flyers, telemarketing, and even radio and TV ads. Today, of course, a lot of promotion is done on the Internet. When Internet promotion is done properly a contractor can expect a large percentage of qualified customers looking for their specific services to find the contractor's website and then call or e-mails them.

Once your promotion has gotten the customer to call, the second step is sales -- bidding the job and selling the customer on your doing the job