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Business Development for Painting Contractors
- Placing advertisement in local newspaper
- Yellow page ad
- Buying sports tickets to give to customers
- Joining the local Chamber of Commerce
- Speaking at your trade association's monthly breakfast
- Creating new "point of sell" materials
- Sending out direct mail pieces on your business
If you selected all of the above then you are right. Business development engages all of the items listed above. However, if this is the extent to your business development effort then you need to grab an entirely new perspective on business development.
Business development is not just marketing, sales, or advertisements. Business development is the strategic approach that you need to take that sets out a plan on how you are going to grow your business. Business development is not just hiring more estimating professionals. Certainly you may need more people estimating but this alone is not business development.
Briefly, business development is the strategic approach that considers and aligns all of the disciplines known to help grow ones painting business, no matter whether you are a painting contractor, manufacturer, or materials provider.
The strategy involved with business development requires focused attention that looks to dig deep into the community, examining opportunities that need your firm's products and services. Contractors can hire a talented sales and marketing manager, experience success, and still not maximize all the best potential work that is available. Likewise, you can spend a huge amount of money on advertising your firm and realize some terrific returns in business and still not have a real clear focus on where the better business is located or know who the "players" are for your future success.
Let's take a brief peek at each of the components listed above. A few of the components have been combined due to the more common understanding of the items and to the brevity needed in this article. (For more information on any of the items please contact me.)
Marketing, Sales, Advertising
These three are combined due to greater familiarity most owners and leaders have with the three items. Should your business have a marketing strategy? Yes! Should you look for ways to enhance your sales? Yes! Should you spend money on advertising? After a review of where to spend your money...YES!!
However, each of the three items is better leveraged after some of the other components are in place and providing greater information and insights into your market opportunities.
Research
This component engages research of your competitors, growth areas of your market area, demographic studies of forecasted growth by industry type, and even the study of what outside investors are considering your market area.
Spending time and money on research is perhaps the best investment you can make. Research is also not as expensive as you might think. First of all, there is ample information available on the Internet. Also, most of your local colleges and universities are full of students who are either interested, or available, to do research for you due to class projects. Even if you have to pay a college student to research, the cost is often little more than minimum wage.
Several companies provide reams of information at a cost that is often more than justified by you winning just one or two jobs a year coming from the information you acquired from the company. Not to plug just one organization but McGraw Hill's Dodge Report can be a great source of enlightenment for an annual fee. There are other groups out there as well, all providing information that can point your strategic attention to a particular market or industry type.
Benchmarking
You need to track your sales efforts. This can include tracking how many bids you complete, how many you win, and the dollar value of each. You might also track how long such sales cycles are to determine the amount of time that is involved. You should track all of this by geographical areas, industry types, and by range of dollar amount.
The benchmarking comes to play by being able to compare your current numbers with past numbers. This can begin to point you into decisions based on your company's successes and failures and point to where you need to focus your firm's sales, marketing, and advertising dollars.
Community Involvement
Business development also considers where in the community the organization should be more active. Should we sponsor a soccer league for children? Should we be part of the fund raising effort for a local hospital? Should we serve on a local board that can open up doors to our company?
These and other questions should always be reviewed. Community involvement suggests that we should be considering more personal involvement with local banks, schools, hospitals, volunteer organizations, country clubs, etc. You can't do everything but you should be involved with the entire networking process. Business development is really opening up the right doors and establishing the right relationships that can profit the company.
Public Relations
Related to marketing, public relations focuses on how to make your company more visible. The effort might be as simple as placing an announcement in your local newspaper about the newly hired chief financial officer for your company or as complex as paying for radio advertisement about your newest office grand opening.
Public relations examine all the means to getting the word out to the public or your potential client base about your company. Public relations can also be maintained through newsletters and seasonal gifting to current clients.
Internal Resource Alignment
Perhaps the most overlooked component of business development. Business development should regularly consider who is on staff, what the strengths are of the company, and then look for means to leverage those resources to help grow the business.
One quick example will help here. I have regularly worked with contractors who proved without a doubt that their field leaders, whether superintendent, supervisor, or foreman were terrific with clients. Customers would actually take the time to write notes of great appreciation about the professionalism experienced with the leader and their crew. Yet the contractor did little with such feedback, sometimes not even letting their leader know.
If you have terrific field leaders, utilize them in your business development. Build them into your sales efforts. If you do billboards, get their faces up on the board. Leverage such strengths in your overall plan to grow the business. Don't underestimate what new prospects will appreciate knowing about the very people who will be performing their work.
Business development done right is huge. It requires more than just a few hours a year about deciding whether we're going to "buy baseball caps, coffee mugs, or pens." It is an entire discipline that when exercised appropriately, can open the door to greater business opportunities than any contractor can imagine.
It is important to regularly assess the "differentiate or die" position. Business development is that division in your business that is best situated to assist you in making sure that your business is unique and presented in that fashion to your market place.
Brad Humphrey and Bob Dusin are partners at Gangbox Incorporated, a training and consulting company that targets the construction industry. They work with all aspects of the construction business - job planning, job costing, sales and leadership development. For more information about Gangbox Incorporated go to http://www.gangboxinc.com.