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Contractors, Accounting & Marketing, Part 2

This is the second part of a guest post by Seth David at Nerd Enterprises, a Quickbooks specialist based in Burbank, CA. I asked Seth to do a few guest posts on the blog because of his expertise in Quickbooks, so he will be around for a while during tax season to help you guys out. You can also give him a shout if you really are in a jam at 866-945-8070.

I like to work backwards. So I start with the end. How much money do you want to make this year? $100,000? $500,000? $1,000,000. I need to ask this because I need to know how much marketing you will need to do. Let’s say you want to make $1,000,000. Good for you! Me Too! Let’s make a commitment to make $1,000,000 this year.

So the next question is, how many jobs do I need to complete in order to do that. We need an estimate. If the average job grosses $400,000 then we are talking about 3 jobs to complete this year and we gross 1.2 million. It’s January. This is a slow time of year for many contractors so what do we do? We get busy. We make ourselves busy. If we are not busy swinging hammers then we are busy working to bring in the work!

Who are your customers? Home owners? Business Owners? The best question to ask is really where can I go online to find the people who might have the work to refer to me. If you are a general contractor then you may want to get to know some electrical and plumbing contractors in your area. They may be bidding a job right now for someone who also needs a GC for the bigger job that requires the plumbing and electric.

The first place I would go is LinkedIn. I just did a search in “Groups” for “Contractors” and found some interesting results:

You may want to get to know some architects! After all the job they are finishing is the job you could be starting. Try searching “Architects” in LinkedIN Groups:

There are many more results. The idea here is to get involved in the discussions so people can get to know who you are. You build relationships with people so that over time they begin to make referrals.

There’s more. You should absolutely have a website and with the options that are available now I could personally have a website up and running for you in a day, once the hosting plan is in place. Visit www.Godaddy.com and for less than $10/month you can purchase a hosting plan. Then install a wordpress.org blog. Choose a template and start writing. You have a very visual product, so if you haven’t already start taking before and after pictures and video. Always have a camera on site and always get video testimonials from your clients when you can. Let them know you will be putting this on the web. Everything is about video on the web so start a YouTube Channel and start getting your job site videos up. Once in YouTube it is easy to embed the video into your wordpress.org blog turned website.

The web is a 24/7 networking group. In another segment I will talk about how to use Facebook and Twitter to build your community and get referrals.

Miss part 1? Read it here.

One response to “Contractors, Accounting & Marketing, Part 2”

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