Yes! In Fact, If You Don’t, You’re Killing Your Future Sales.

Contractor Marketing Quick Tips: Branding

By Rich Harshaw

When most people think of branding, they think of huge corporations with internationally known brands like Nike, McDonald’s, Apple, Mercedes, and so forth. So the temptation is to assume that to “brand” your company, you have to behave, marketing-wise, like those guys—which includes spending millions of dollars on every kind of advertising and marketing imaginable.

Clearly, dumping millions of dollars on advertising isn’t a viable strategy for most local contractors… but the good news is that you don’t have to behave like a Fortune 500 company to effectively brand your company in the local marketplace. It’s much simpler than you might expect.
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Want More Visitors In Your Booth? Use A “Big Bill” Like This One To Stop People In Their Tracks And Get More Home Improvement Leads & Appointments…

Attract More People Into Your Booth. Get More Appointments.
Make Follow-Up A Snap. Read These Tips!

Marketing Quick Tips: Home Shows

By Rich Harshaw

Home show season is right around the corner… so it’s time to get your home show ducks in a row RIGHT NOW. As you ponder the best ways to maximize home show leads and revenue, consider these tips:

Tip 1: Is It Even Worth Your Time? Remember the good old days when there was one main show that came to town every year that attracted more attendees than you knew what to do with? Now most cities have multiple shows at different times of the year—and fragmented attendance. The last thing you want to do is pay a ton of money, staff up, then sit around twiddling your thumbs for three days.

So do a little bit of intelligence work. It’s pretty simple: contact the show organizer and ask them for references from last year’s show that you can call, then actually do your due diligence. Call at least five companies and ask them how many years they’ve attended, what the attendance patterns have been in recent years (Up? Down? Steady?), how last year’s show was, how responsive the attendees were, and whether or not they’re going back. Those questions should loosen the lips, so to speak, and you should be able to gather a wealth of information.

If the organizer won’t give you information on previous attendees, you can often find them by searching on their website—frequently the information from last year isn’t updated until just before this year’s show. Of course, if they won’t give you the info, that’s just weird—and a really bad sign.
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Dialing For Dollars

The Phone Is NOT Dead! Pick It Up And Make Some Money!

Written by Rich Harshaw.

October 1, 2003.

That was the day that life officially changed forever for many home improvement and remodeling companies. That’s the day the National Do Not Call Registry began enforcing penalties on infringers of the new Do Not Call Law. Suddenly, thousands of companies in the industry needed to find a new way to generate home improvement leads.

You could say it was the day the phone died.

Or did it?
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Your English Teachers Were Wrong. So Was Shakespeare.
Your Writing Should Be Simple And Easy To Read.

Written by Rich Harshaw.

When I was in Boy Scouts, one of our leaders, Mr. Colby, was a certified, bona fide, and unapologetic NERD. He constantly said stuff that left all of us scratching our heads and wondering what the heck he was talking about. If the answer to a question was yes, instead of a simple “yes,” he’d say “affirmative.” Instead of telling us where we were headed on a hike, he’d give us latitude and longitude coordinates. Like that.

Usually we’d just roll our eyes and ignore him.

Then one night after a hearty campfire meal, Mr. Colby put his hands behind his head, leaned back in his chair, and pronounced to the entire group,

“My gastronomical satiety admonishes me to such an extent that I am no longer able to indulge myself beyond the limits of dietary integrity.”

He said it with a straight face. We all just looked at him with blank stares.
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