To Make More Money This Year, Here Are 3 Things You Should Be Doing BEFORE Your Busy Season

For many contractors, there’s a brief lull in work between winter and spring but now that spring is here (or will be shortly, depending on where you live), the work will start picking up.

Before you know it, it will be your “busy season” again. Things will be hectic. Papers will pile up on your desk while you deal with the massive influx of projects and customers.

During this time, a lot of contractors go into the season with hope that they will be busy enough to hit their goals; but the truth is, they’re going in with only hope and nothing more.

If you want to make more money—this season and for the entire year—you need a plan. And that plan needs to be built before your busy season. You need to do it now. Fortunately, there are just 3 simple things you need to do to help you make more money this season (and for the rest of 2018). Use this article as a simple checklist to remind yourself this year, and every year following, to do more of these things just before your busy season.

#1. Build Systems.

Systems are one of the most underrated strategies that every Contracting Business owner should be using. When I say “systems” some people assume I mean costly and complicated software, but that’s not true at all. Rather, a system can be as simple and inexpensive as a checklist or flow-chart.

Identify some of the biggest challenges in your business (especially the challenges that are magnified when things get busy) and build a simple checklist around those.

• Do you have team members who get sloppy and look increasingly less professional as they race from job to job? Create a checklist for what they need in their truck before they leave for the first job of the morning (i.e. maybe a clothes brush and a clean shirt).
• Do you have team members who accept checks from customers but miss “obvious” things like checking the date or getting the customer to sign the check? Create a checklist that they have to go through when accepting a check. Include all the steps.

 Build these simple systems now, while it’s quiet, and train your team on how to use them.

#2. 1+1 Sales

When is the best time to sell? When you’re in front of a customer and they’ve just bought something else. The customer trusts you and is primed to buy.

Most Contracting Business owners waste this opportunity by only closing the deal on the first item they sold. If you want to generate more sales for your Contracting Business during this busy season then use this 1+1 sales method.

The 1+1 sales method works like this: for every product or service that you sell, you have one other product or service “up your sleeve” that you can add on at the end of the sale as an additional offer.

Simply make a list of your products and services. Then, beside each product or service, write down a related product or service. Then when the customer buys one of the products or services on the list, offer the one that you wrote down beside it.

• When you sell an HVAC system, say to a client, “many customers who have bought our HVAC system also invest in our annual duct-cleaning service so they don’t have to remember to call us for duct-cleaning; we just come out each year automatically.”
• When you sell a new roof, say to a client, “many customers who have bought a new roof have also invested in gutter replacement.”
• When you sell a deck-building package, say to a client, “many customers who have bought a new deck have also wanted a matching fence.”

See how it works? You make a sale and you make a related offer. 1+1.

#3. Put Your Marketing Together For The Fall

You’ve probably put your marketing together for the busy season and that marketing will feed more clients for your busy season. But what about when things slow down?

A lot of Contracting Business Owners find that they are too busy in the busy season to prep their marketing for when things slow down… so, when things slow down, they really slow down.

You can solve that now by strategically building marketing that is ready-to-go throughout your busy season so that all you need to do is start it up at the right time. You’ll save stress and headaches and long nights during your busy season by doing it now!

Summary

Can it get more complicated than that? Sure. There are many other strategies that you could implement. But start with this simple approach and build these 3 things in your Contracting Business right now. You’ll see a massive difference for the rest of the year as you run your efficiently (from systems), sell more in front of a customer (from 1+1 sales), and minimize downtime when things slow down (from putting your fall marketing in place now).