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Let’s take a look at three critical challenges to marketing your business effectively and how you can resolve them.
Business strategy is the conscience you need for effective decision-making as you wade through the ambiguous waters of entrepreneurship. You face a lot of uncertainty as a decorative concrete business owner, and having a coherent business strategy is fundamental to minimizing that uncertainty.
Marketing activities exist in multiple forms. In 1960, marketer E. Jerome McCarthy identified four distinctive types of marketing, often referred to as the “four P’s”: product, price, place and promotion. This marketing mix provides a standard framework for a decorative concrete professional to communicate and deliver lasting value to customers.
When business is slow and credit is tight, you must do all you can do to preserve working capital, also referred to as operating capital. It’s an important financial metric calculated as current assets minus current liabilities. It’s the difference between the money you’ve been paid and the cash you owe.
There’s a lot riding on your price. It’s a reflection of your brand value and the perceived quality of your work. Customers will even use heuristics to determine if your price per square foot is consistent with what they would expect to gain from hiring you.
In the free enterprise system, competition selects out businesses that don’t adapt to change or events they can’t plan on. To thrive within this system, your decorative concrete business must maintain a high degree of flexibility.
There is a big hairy monster lurking around your business. He’s not easy to detect and he has a real nasty habit of stealing from you. The monster I speak of is called “slack.”
Making sales is arguably the most fundamental function of business. Maintaining an effective and relevant sales strategy is absolutely critical since it directly impacts your top-line (gross sales) growth more than any other function. Here are seven actions you can implement today to win more decorative concrete jobs and increase sales.
Close your eyes. Think of your business. Imagine you operate in a world without competitors. Imagine you’re the only one that customers can hire to install decorative concrete. Visualize yourself winning bid after bid without anything or anyone to stand in your way. Now, open your eyes. Welcome back to reality.
The value to your business is best determined on a per-unit basis. However, many contractors don’t exactly make widgets for their customers. So if your primary business is something like concrete staining, polishing or stamping, I recommend you calculate your margins on a per-square-foot or per-project basis.
