Pro Installer April 2018 - Issue 61 | Page 17

APRIL 2018 | 17 News Read online at www.proinstaller.co.uk Optimise pricing It’s a common saying that even a bad sales person can sell a ten pound note for nine pounds. Your pricing should fairly reflect the work that you do, provide a margin of error to cover problems and then a decent profit on top. Price should be the last thing to com- pete on except when you are very first starting out. Funnily enough, you won’t be able to grow if you price too low because you will never have the resources to enable growth. Plan and be organised My business partner knows someone who used to be the marketing director at B&Q. Amazingly, he said that trade companies buy up to 30% of materials “on the day” from the likes of B&Q. That means that they miss out on trade prices and the credit that comes alongside. Plus it takes a minimum of an hour out of a job when you have to “pop out” to get materi- als. Being well organised should eliminate this. It means a lower cost of materials, a speedier job, less time wasted and better cash flow. All of this is great for growing your business. What’s not to like? The bottom line smartphone, tablet and PC based systems that are be- ing adopted very quickly. In a survey of our clients, the average time saved per week by the business own- er was around three hours. They also reported better cash flow, more orders won and a number of other benefits. The point is that this time saving can be used either to grow your business or have more time with family and friends. Have your own web site The age of yellow pages is long over. Although people continue to use personal experience or rec- ommendations from friends as their way of finding installers, around 30% still look around. A lot of those searching use Google. You should try searching for the services you provide in your geographic loca- tion. That will let you see what the web says about you as well as the local competition. It’s actually an obvious thing to have a web site. It enables you to control exactly what is said about you. It’s cheap, particularly using a service like wix. com. Your information won’t change much from year to year so your main- tenance cost should be low too. Only do what you do well It seems very natural to quote for every opportunity that arises. But it can pay to specialise or decide that you won’t do any of the special- isms. You have only started practising this when you start saying no to work. If you don’t do this, you will never get the full benefits. For instance, think of install- ing garage doors. A contrac- tor might specialise in these, but more likely decide not to do them at all, instead focussing on being a gener- alist. This takes discipline. Only doing what you do well should yield the follow- ing advantages, all of which will help you to grow: • Respect. When you know your trade really well, it makes customers feel more comfortable. Most people understand that it’s unlikely you can be good at everything. That’s why people use main dealers to get their cars serviced, even though they cost more. • You should be more ef- ficient. That is because you can do jobs faster at a lower cost. It means higher profits or lower prices or a bit of each. Practise makes perfect in terms of being faster and getting better vol- ume discounts. • You are much more likely to win business if customers are particu- larly looking for your speciality. For instance, you might only ever install Worcester Bosch boilers. Mark Goodchild of elec- tric-call.net puts it this way: “We don’t cover all types of electrical installation as it’s impossible to be good at everything. For instance, we don’t do solar. This decision came through experience.” I hope that many of the ideas here are obvious because doing complicated things can be the enemy of success. Ironically, getting around to doing the obvi- ous is often a challenge. Doing something exciting and less likely to succeed can be more appealing. In that light I hope that you find this article an encour- agement to get on with the simple stuff. Good luck! About the author Benjamin Dyer is CEO and co-founder of Pow- ered Now. P