Parking Lot Flyers, Door Hangers, Cold Call, What Else Is There?

gslawncare

I'm not afraid do some serious foot work to get the word out. I live in one of the most prosperous metro areas of the country. Is it bad to saturate areas with ADS, FLYERS and PROMO coupons. I want to get into the construction and building of landscaping. Decks, patios, walkways, gardens all wrapped in one. I'm really good at confrontational sales, how do I get people to call me? Is it important to have a professional image AKA uniforms, matching equipment? How about mobile ads like interchangable signs with different specials for the week, annuals, aerating, fertilizer. Is there such as thing as too much advertising. Also, for the bigger companies. How does the direct mailing to businesses pan out.

Please help, I love the opportunity to make my own income but the one thing I'm afraid of is, What if I don't make enough?????

DavidD

My father-in-law owns a chemical lawn company and my wife is his office manager, so I can share with you some of the things that they do. What works great for them is sending out flyers at the beginning of spring when the weather's getting warm and people are starting to think about their lawn. They target certain subdivisions because obviously, the closer your customers are, the more you can do each day, and the more you can make. Be prepared to go out and give people estimates on the spot, as well as share some useful and practical information about their lawn. I wouldn't recommend just sending out flyers to businesses. They get advertisements every day, which usually go right in the garbage. You really need to go make some cold calls on them and speak to the decision-maker. If you can afford uniforms, I would recommend them, or at least have some decent shirts printed up or embroidered. And I would definitely NOT recommend putting flyers on people's windsheilds in parking lots. Most of them will end up on the ground and you'll probably get a nasty call from a very upset store manager. There are better ways to use your time and money to advertise your business.

I'm familiar with your area and it is a higher-end market. So realize that what will go far with those people is being clean cut and professional-looking and acting. And while you probably couldn't advertise too much, you can easily spend way too much money and time on advertising that doesn't work. So just make sure that you think it out well and remember that your best advertising is a happy customer.

Grumpy

search this forum for "spring advertising knockout"

Mike Finley

What are "confrontational sales"?

Only if you are spending more on advertising then you are getting back in profits after a certain amount of time has gone by. Your advertising will get more and more effective the longer you do it. If you really go crazy eventually you might be lucky enough for your name to be associated with whatever you do. Think how successful you would be if you get to the point where you can ask 10 people on the street who do you think of when you think of deck building and your name comes up 7 out of the 10 times!

You go back to what you were doing before.

PipeGuy

To the Man in the Arena

It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points how the strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly...who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at best, knows the triumph of high achievement; and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt, 1910

Mike Finley

Damn, Pipeguy I like that quote.

Sure is a lot fancier than mine from the movie The Jerk - "God loves a workin man."

Nothing pisses me off more than some jerk-off, life-long professional employee bitching about how their boss/bosses who own the company are greedy or don't know how to run things correctly, or how they would do thing differently if they were them. Why is it that so many entrepreneurs and business owners are Republicans and so many professional employee types are Democrats who take such offense that people who go out and are doers instead of talkers should be rewarded financially for taking all the risks and creating jobs instead of just filling one?

PipeGuy

Unless you tell me otherwise, I'll take that as a rhetorical question. I think we both have similar ideas of why that is. :Thumbs: