How To Grow A Small Property Maintenance Business And Double Your Sales
Property maintenance businesses are known to be very competitive. To stand out from your competition and strengthen your position in the market, you need to establish yourself with a unique brand proposition. This will support you in growing your reputation and winning confidence and authority in your target market.
If you are looking for innovative ways to grow your property maintenance business and boost sales, read on:
-
Automate processes using technology
Any business, regardless of industry or niche, requires a great deal of managerial and administrative tasks to operate functionally. This is also true of property maintenance businesses. Attempting to conduct all these manually is both costly in terms of time and money and can also be subject to considerable human error. Advancements in technology have made this significantly quicker and easier, and many companies now adopt industry specific property maintenance software to help them streamline their internal processes and make them more productive with their time. Software such as this can help you with the following tasks:
- Keeping track of maintenance schedules
- Assigning duties remotely
- Tracking time worked by your crew to help in payroll processing
- Sending appointment reminders
- Preparing quotes and turning them into job items
- Organizing client information
- Designing, preparing, and sending professional invoices to clients
Invoicing is a crucial aspect of your property maintenance business, arguably one of the most important as it’s the channel of communication whereby you track and receive payments. Perfecting your invoicing process is something of an art and should be prioritized to get right.
Free invoice templates such as this one from Jobber allows you to create fully customizable and professional invoices quickly which can be forwarded to clients on time with automated timely payment reminders. This enables you to receive payments promptly, keeping your cash flow healthy.
-
Enhance your employee efficiency
Employees are the foundation of a strong and sustainable business. They’re a chief determinant of the success or failure of your business. Customer satisfaction relies on the quality of services your employees provide. If the quality is consistently high, your customers will be content and talk positively about your organization. This enables you to attract and retain new clients, and should be part of your overall growth strategy. Below are some tips to improve employee efficiency:
- Train them to help develop their skills
- Offer incentives where appropriate
- Match tasks to individual skills and preferences
- Communicate effectively
- Keep goals clear and focused
- Give proactive feedback
-
Do more market research
Doing market research will go a long way towards enhancing the expansion of your small business. It enables you to better understand your existing and potential customers, gaining insight into their preferences, problems and needs. With this, you can devise ways of growing your business to meet those needs. Additionally, market research enables you to:
- Strengthen your position
- Minimize the risk of failure
- Determine possible threats and opportunities
- Stand out from your competitors
- Make your decision-making process more strategic and tactical
- Identify your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses
- Be aware of upcoming business opportunities
Ultimately, market research may help you know what areas of your business require expansion, and this goes a long way to increasing your sales and future growth.
-
Leverage the power of social media
Social media is currently one of the most powerful platforms to reach out to potential clients. This is because millions of people in your locality most probably hang out there. By creating accounts on the most popular social networks, you can constantly engage with the public by posting material that they relate to. In the end, this creates a strong emotional bond between them and your brand, which may help in influencing them to order your services.
Additionally, social networks allow you to advertise your services directly. You can set up campaigns on platforms like Facebook and Instagram and target users around your area of operation.
-
Put more effort into client retention
Usually, when you’re looking for ways of growing your business, you may be tempted to focus only on new customers and forget about the existing ones. But remember, you’ve already developed authentic relationships with your current or past clients, meaning they’re more likely to hire you again or ask for additional services. Moreover, getting a new client is much more expensive than maintaining the current ones. Thus, make a point of crafting strategies to ensure you don’t lose your precious clientele to your competitors.
You can boost client retention by:
- Creating a customer loyalty program through rewards and bonuses.
- Keeping the promises you make to your customers
- Responding to their questions and concerns both online and offline
- Using a customer relations management (CRM) system to improve your relationship with customers
-
Develop a good content strategy
As you know, people nowadays are on the internet scouring for helpful information. Therefore, consider providing content that gives solutions to typical property maintenance issues. As visitors read your articles, they’ll get to know you and your brand. Eventually, this will pay off when they need to avail of your services, they’ll remember who to turn to for help.
-
Make use of customer referral programs
Using a customer referral program is a sure-fire way of securing new customers and boosting sales. Usually, people trust the recommendations of their relatives and friends. Therefore, have a system in place to reward your loyal customers who spread the word about your brand and bring in new clients. But first, you have to win their trust by offering excellent services, as no one wants to recommend an unreliable company.
-
Attend property networking events
Attending the events within your field enables you to meet like-minded people that might one day become a vital part of your business, especially if you decide to partner with them or collaborate together.
Attending events also enables you to:
- Obtain new business ideas
- Keep up-to-date with trends
- Strengthen business connections
- Raise your profile
- Build confidence
- Obtain career advice and support
- Gain access to job opportunities
To conclude
Business success comes with hard work and determination. If your goal is to grow to achieve more sales, consider what growth strategies above might be most effective for you. You may need to experiment with trial and error to really understand what works best. The entire process requires patience, resilience, and a little bit of luck. Eventually, this will pay off and you’ll get to enjoy the benefits this brings you as a result.