Cash is King…yadda yadda…

Business is well and truly flying.  I’ve been so busy that I’d forgotten about the economic doom and gloom until I accidentally caught a glimpse of the news one lunch time.

Whilst being busy is all good it does bring with it it’s own set of problems.

It is becoming more obvious that left to the gods this type of business has terrible cash flow.  My invoices are rarely paid on time, I can’t get credit from specialist trade suppliers and I’m using one hell of a lot of fuel to get around.  My day to day operating costs are bleeding me dry.

I’m in danger of becoming a busy fool. 

Armed with my hefty new local authority contracts I approached my bankers for an overdraft facility to help  inject some working capital into the business.

My approach to my bank was a 2 Minuit conversation and it ended in a no.  Not even idle chit chat about financial projections and forward orders just a straight forward ‘Feck off  small fry and get back in your box’.

Maybe they were doing me a favour by not giving me a rope to hang myself with,  I have no particular right to be lent money nor do I have any track record of multiplying borrowed money but they could have at least feigned an interest in what I was doing.

So I guess it’s back to the hussle and I’ll  just have to crack on until such time I build up my own cash reserves to grow on. 

Either that of find an outside investor…

Success number 1

Cast your mouse back to the beginning of this blog where I took my first steps into the grubby world of telemarketing.

You may recall how I spent several hours of my life that I will never get back wading through the phone systems of our local councils.  I thought i’d completely wasted my time.

As it happens the message I left  didn’t find it’s way to the bottom of a council bin, it actually found its way to the correct person who dutifully contacted me and handed me a beefy contract to safety test and maintain the cooking facilities for a whole load of council schools. 

Quite a result.  And one hell of a foot in the door.

Spurred on by this early sucess I decided to roll out my Yellow Pages advertising campaign on a massive scale.  The ad in our area book is doing so well I though i’d be daft not to.  A bit of reasearch (and 12 volumes of the yellow book later) I learned the gap I spotted in our YP book existied in every other north west YP book too.

A bit of trickery with VOIP telephone numbers to get the correct area code for the book area should see our level of work explode in the coming months.

I’ve also being having a dabble with direct mail.  As a starter for six I ripped off Gary Halberts ‘Dollar Letter’  (google it) wholesale and adapted it to fit my needs.  As Isaac Newton once said ‘If I have seen further it is only from standing on the shoulders of giants’.  So a bit of plagerism is fair game I thought.  I’ve mailed out the first test mailing and will report back on the results next time I manage to grab 5 mins and get online.

I’ve also found a great way of  getting good looking websites online quickly. You can also track  results using google analytics, adwords and A/B split testing.  Best of all it’s completely free and you don’t need to know a stitch about website code and such things to make it work.  But I’ll cover that in my next post.

To Quote Thomas Edison..

I could sit and read Thomas Edison quotes all day.  There is an fabulous rawness in his attitude towards life, work and business.  He was a true grafter.  If you have 5 minutes spare one afternoon I suggest you look up his musings.

One particular quote that struck a chord in me was..

“Opportunity is missed by most people as it is dressed in overalls and looks like hard work.”

With that pearl of wisdom ringing true in your ears do you think you could list at least 5 things you could do or people that you could call and get some business from by the end of the month?

I bet that you could.

I know I can think of at least 5 people that if I rang them would more than likely give me some business by the end February if not sooner. 

So why the heck haven’t I rang them?  Probably because I can be a lazy so and so and I don’t want my feelings hurt if they say NO.

What’s your excuse?

Another cracking Edison quote I cam across was..

“Everything comes to he who hustles whilst he waits.”

With that in mind if you can’t think of anyone you already know to call and get some business from by the end February do yourself a favour and pick 5 people at random every week  and see what happens.

A recent study revealed that 85% of all available business in any market goes to the 5% of companies that that know how to cold call and sell successfully.  

With odds like that can you afford not to learn? 

Hooray it’s 2009! The Fun Starts Here.

So here we are 2009. Time to get moving before I start wondering where the hell the year went.

 

Not a bad start to the year by any means.  My fiancée managed to bag herself a new job after only 3 days on the credit crunch scrapheap.  I was secretly hoping she couldn’t find a job so I could rope her into working for me for a few weeks.  No such luck.  She now works for a little start up business that checks the credit worthiness of people renting houses and flats.  They’re doing a roaring trade by all accounts.    

 

On the business front work continues to roll in without much effort and people are paying on time which is all that matters for the moment.

 

I’ve been thinking about barriers to business recently.  As in what are the barriers that stop me (or you) from doing business with people.

 

 My first one is that at the moment I only do business with companies who have faults that need fixing.  This is all well and good but obviously quite restrictive as I’m relying on things going wrong to make my living.  Chance is playing too big a part in providing me with work.  If nothing goes wrong I don’t get the call.  Meaning hundreds of potential customers will never even know I exist as they have no reason to look me up and use me.

 

So to remove that barrier I need to have something that appeals to everyone.  Something that gives me a reason to speak to everyone.  Something of real benefit that demands a response.

 

The solution I’ve come up with is offering electrical and gas safety certification to businesses.  

Reams and reams of red tape working in my favour for once as it is a legal requirement to comply with this legislation.  If businesses don’t have these certificates their insurance policies will be about as useful as a pedal powered wheelchair.

 

So the plan would be to hire a couple of telesales people, stick them in my office and get them selling these safety tests and hey presto we build our customer base double quick.  The more people I hire to sell the quicker the business grows.

 

Except I’m pretty strapped for cash and can’t afford to front the wonga to set up a sales force.

 

I know diddly squat about selling on the phone.  Luckily Amazon does a rather natty line in books on the subject.  When my copy arrives I shall read it cover to cover and then hit the phones with at least half an idea what I should be doing to close that sale.

 

 

 

I’ve been Credit Crunched.

The credit crunch has taken it’s first bit out of me.  I’ve tried no to mention it so far on the blog but it got to me in the end.

My better half has just had the fabled credit crunch axe wielded above her at work and ‘Due to the down turn in the housing market your position is now redundant’.  So it’s do not pass go and do not collect your £200 Christmas bonus.  She didn’t even know she worked in the housing market.  Bizarre.

Still, she still gets to go to the slap up Christmas do at a luxury 5 star spa hotel and got to see the firms partners take delivery of their shiny new fleet of brand spankers Mercs (saves them money as they don’t have to use their own cars for work anymore you see…Clever eh?)

And to top it all of her old man has decided to run off with a new mistress.

So that’s our Christmas cheer down the pan. 

Business wise I’m chugging along with nothing of any real interest to report.   Too much ‘life’ stuff going on to crack on with any urgency.  

One highlight of the week was the advert on yell.com got us on the inside of a big bar and nightclub chain.  Had a route around a massive cinema that was deserted in the 70s and partly converted to a night club.  I felt like I was in an episode of Scooby Doo. Very spooky and very easy to get lost in the pitch black.  If my torch died I’d have been very lost for a very  long time!

They needed their steak char grills going ready for their party season to start.  The chef  decided to leave it to the day before their first sitting to check they still worked.  And guess what…. They didn’t work.

Next day delivery on parts wasn’t good enough so I had to drive 100 odd mile down the M6 to Birmingham and fetch the spares and get back in time to fix the grills for the first sitting.

Anyway it was mission accomplished and panic over.  Just the kind of job I set the business up for.

Local and World Domination

The good thing about operating in a niche market is that it isn’t that hard to achieve local domination.  rather then plough through yellow pages making lists of everyone in the local catering industry to phone and try and help out in some way I bought a telemarketing list from www.selectabase.co.uk that had the details of all or pretty much all of the restaurants in my local (or within an hours drive) area.  There were about 1200.  So all I need to do is get them all to spend £833.33 each with me this year and I’m done.

Armed with this list I can now directly target the owners of these businesses.  I just need to think of an offer to tempt them with.  I think it would be a pointless waste of ink  just sending a letter just telling them we are here if they need us.  I need to get through their front doors asap.

Another juicy lead I had this week was from the UKs number one suppliers of mobile catering facilities.  We’re not talking donut and burger vans here we’re talking real deal mega bucks mobile kitchens.  They fly mobile kitchens (When I say mobile I mean mobile if you have a fleet of artic lorries or a cargo plane at your disposal) to top sporting events all over the UK and world.  As well as having major Government contracts to supply school, hospitals and the armed forces with tempoary catering facilities.

They wanted us to attend an emergency gas leak at one of their mobile school kitchens or the kids would go hungry.  Needless to say they didn’t have to ask twice to get us to do the 300 mile round trip and win some brownie points with the management.  This lead has some good milage in it.

Get on the phone

If I’m ever going to make this a business a success quickly I’ll need to do more than sit on my butt waiting for the phone to ring.

Waiting for people to ring me will only bring so much work in.  Although it is pretty much how 99% of the competition operates so I can use that against them.  I need to get in front of my potential customers quickly.

Although I dispise the thought of doing it (only through my complete lack of sales skills) I think cold calling is going to be the way forward here.  It was quite difficult picking up the phone to make that first call as it was the first time I’d ever cold called.  Once I’d got over my first call nerves I soon forgot about being nervous and cracked on with reaching my objective.

First port of call was the local councils to get on their tender lists for catering equipment maintenance.  The good thing about councils is that you don’t really need to sell to them.  They just want someone suitably qualified to go on the tender or approved contractor list.  All I have to do is dig deep into their phone system and find the right person.

This proved tricky as know one seemed to know who was responsible for the  councils quite substantial stock of catering equipment.  After much passing through the department I eventually get the info I’m after.  Unfortunately the person I needed to speak to was on holiday…Bummer.  Though at least I have a direct contact number for her which is a result.

The other councils I approached were not so helpful.  I was just told ‘It goes out to tender’ and got a ‘dunno’ when asked how I could be informed when these tenders come up for renewal.  They took the company details and promised to pass it on to whoever deals with preparing the tender list.  My guess is that my details are probably already at the bottom of a council office bin. 

I shall not give up on them though. 

The next victims of my telemarketing assault will be catering equipment suppliers.  I’ll let you know how it goes

Open for Business.

Well. It seems the yell.com listing has done the trick.  We have our first punters.  Hooray!

I’m quite amazed how quickly it has taken off.  The leads that have come in have not exactly been high ticket stuff but they have been crammed full of opportunity.  And the call handling facility worked a treat.  Though we did rack up a bill of £60+ over the course of the week such was the volume of calls.  Still peanuts in the grand scheme of thing though.

In the week the ad has been live it has made me nearly £1000 pounds towards my goal, light years off target granted but it’s the people behind the leads that interest me most.

The juiciest lead was from a national supplier of catering equipment that needed a problem customer with a problem commercial dishwasher in our area sorting out before they sent their mega bucks dishwasher back under the terms of their 14 day money back guarantee.  Eager to please I jumped straight to the aid of the company and within a few hours we had the problem sorted for them and 2 sets of happy customers.  Job done and an invoice for £88.13 issued (which is our minimum charge). 

To most companies that is the end of the saga.  I felt this call had more to give and I had some great inside info to work with.  As the problem had escalated to the top level of the equipment supplier it was the boss of the company that phoned me in a panic to get this problem sorted.  So now I have a direct line to the gaffer of a major catering equipment supplier – I’dbe daft not to ring him back to thank him for the call and  tap him up for more work.  So I did and we’re now his ‘go to guys’ in the North West.  A win win situation for both of us.  Though I must keep reminding him of our existence or he will no doubt forget about us before long.  It will cost nothing to send him a reminder in the post every month or so.

Another bonus was that I managed to get chatting to the boss of the care home business with the iffy dish washer .  I casually asked who looked after his heating plant room and if he was happy with their service whilst stuffing his hands with my shiny new business cards.  Turns out he wasn’t happy with the company who looks after his mechanical services and wants us to give the plant room a good service in January.  Result.

Another good lead was from a big Theatre in North Wales.  Another simple job – fix a leaking glass washer behind the bar.  Again we were called in blind panic by the building services manager at 3pm, they needed the washer fixing as they had a full house to deal with at 5pm.  To the relief of the building services manager we got the leak fixed just as the bar started to fill with customers.

 Another great foot in the door and a brilliant platform to up sell the rest of our maintenance services directly to the man that matters.

I guess the moral to this story is to use all you can to leverage random situations to your advantage.  It costs nothing and pays well.

Finding Customers: Step One

So we’re almost ready for business.  Didn’t really take long did it?  Although all we have is a name, bank account, logo and a bunch of business cards it’s all you need to get the ball rolling.  The website is not all that important for now. 

First thing I need if I want customers to phone me is a phone number.  There really is only one solution for this that won’t cost the earth or mean getting conned into signing up for a BT business line.  I went for www.voipfone.co.ukwho provide an Internet based phone service.  You pick your own phone number (even choose your dialing code) which can then be diverted to wherever you want it.  It’s an awesome system.  As I’m out on the road all day working  I’d be daft to divert all calls to my mobile.  I’ll be too busy to deal with enquiries when I’m working.  With this in mind I went on the hunt for something called a virtual assistant.  They handle your calls to your own pre determined system and ping an email or text to whoever is tasked with following up the lead.  Simple.  Meaning you are on call 24/7 without having to speak to the customers.  After much searching I went with www.alldaypa.comas they had the most simple sign up process.  You can be up and running in a few minutes without having to speak to anyone and it costs peanuts to use.

So there we have a very basic system for turning calls into customers which follows the same format every time someone calls us.  This I feel is a very important point.  The phone will always be answered in the same way all day long, day in day out, 24 hours a day.

All I need now is some customers to try the system out on. 

Yell.com gets a lot of flack and most of it is quite justifiable as the sales people can be a right pain in the arse and their offers are crap. 

I decided if I want customers quickly a hefty listing on their directory would probably do the trick.  I made sure I chose a category with little to no competition related to catering equipment repair.  This gives me a two pronged attack.  It means we get work in that makes us money and it gets our foot in the door in the right places, so if we do a good job and keep reminding them that we exists and sell to them we will build up a working relationship and become thier ‘go to guys’ for all of their maintenence problems.

My listing is live  and I’m hoping to welcome my first punter any day now and get some mula in the bank as a starter for six.

Getting Down to Business

So I know the what the business will do.

I know what it’s going to be called.

Now I gotta start spending some cash to get the show on the road.  This is the easy part.  It’s not a business untill there’s cash in the bank and a swarm of customers to keep happy.

I have a logo designed by me and it cost nothing after hitting youtube for some GIMP tutorials.  Granted the logo is probably technically shite and wrong on many levels (which the punters don’t care about) but It will look great plastered on the side of a shiny red van (which is all that matters.)  I took a trip to our local printers www.cydprinting.co.uk with my logo and design concept and they turned them into 500 business cards for £45.  Which I think look great.

Letter heads are again designed by my own fair hands and will be produced on demand by the monster colour laser jet printer that resides in my office.  Keep it all nice and simple, remember, no one ever bought a service for the letter head or logo unless they were weird.

 I think a web site will be needed too.  I’ve always had beef with Web designers, like some graphic designers they are another species that are frequently full of hot air and often giddy on their own amazingness.  From one designer I had a quote of £6,000 + VAT for his most basic 5 page brochure website and a whole load of technical bullshit fired at me about tags, spiders, meta something or other and coding.  He also told me that he hand picks his clients to make sure he only works with the very best, has great customer service and for good measure has a degree or two.  And I had to provide my own copy.  Either he’s very good at tricking idiots into parting with their cash or is a complete tosser.  My guess is the latter.  This theme continued with another couple of web designers – none of which seemed to grasp what I wanted as they were too in awe of their own technical brilliance to realise you don’t have to be a web god to produce 5 pages of very basic web design.  Then I remembered Michelle (who has done bits for me in the past)  a fab designer who runs www.design2go.net .  A quick click around her site tells me a 5 page site can be mine for a very tidy £220 and it will take about a week.  Nice one.

So £265 down and almost in business.