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Contractor Marketing Plan: You MUST Sell Through Your Monthly Capacity Or Else!

 

I hope you and yours had a spectacular 4th of July with lots of fireworks and barbecues. It’s Monday morning and time to strap on the tool belt and hunker down for another hard week. Before you do, I want you to play a little math game with me that I use with clients before your proposal or estimate.

I know, everyone hates math, but this one can REALLY help you!

OK, here’s how it goes:

1. I want you to total the number of jobs you can do a month. Let’s say you are a remodeler, I want you to sit down and write down how many kitchens you can do a month, then on a separate line how many bathrooms, on another line, how many additions, then basements. Include all the business lines you have.

1a. Now, I DON’T want you to total all of them together. I just want you to keep each total for each business line separate. Again, don’t total.

2. Now ask yourself how many more of each of these jobs can you comfortably add each month? When I say comfortable, I mean without having to add new staff or equipment or any major overhead.

3. Now I want you to add an average job amount, I know they are all different, but what’s the average? For example, if your average kitchen customer is worth $30,000, that’s what I want you to write down.

4. Now, take the total number of jobs you want to do a month and subtract the amount of jobs you are doing, that’s your spread.

Almost done…

5. I want you to take the spread amount and times that by the customer average worth. So let’s say your average kitchen client is worth $30k, and you can do 3 more kitchens a month.

You are leaving ninety grand a month, or a million dollars a year on the table…JUST ON THAT ONE BUSINESS LINE. But we aren’t done.

I want you do that math on each of your business lines, come up with a total, then ask yourself this question:

How much do I plan to spend on marketing my business?

If your total doesn’t come to somewhere between 7%-15% of the total you want to get at, you have NO SHOT to getting to it, regardless of your referral business. YOU HAVE TO PROMOTE YOUR BUSINESS. Where and how is another story, but this was about getting you to open your eyes and see what kind of dollars you are leaving behind every month.

As a business owner, your job is to sell through your capacity each month. That’s is your number one goal because that extends the life of your business above all else. So sell your capacity and stay in business…pretty simple.