It’s Gary Geiman DMN8 Partners. 2020 is going like a fucking turtle. It just won’t end. So I’ve been talking a lot about customer communication, having customer communication, and continuing customer communication. The reason why I do is because your customer interaction is very critical to your continued success, increasing your revenue, and your ability to grow your company. If you think that you’re going to just get enough customers every year to grow by whatever percentage you want to grow by, that’s a hard way to grow your business.
So you have to develop customer relationship strategies that continually help you grow your revenue. What if I don’t have customers? Okay. Then what you need to do is, as you develop customers, you put them into a system where you’re constantly communicating. Some of you may or may not know I sold a pressure washing business in August of 2018. We grew it to seven figures in revenue annually and it was purchased by a national buyer in August of 2018. Now the people that know that don’t know this, that sale was not based off of anything but our revenue capability and our customer list. That’s what that sale was based off of. You see, in 2016, I sat down with my CPA and we mapped out this five year plan where we would get our financial house in order. We were a small business and we did things like making as much money as we possibly could and pay ourselves more than we probably should have. That’s why I’m in business. In terms of a sale, we weren’t showing things like capitalized earnings or retained earnings. We weren’t showing investment in things that we should have been probably showing. I was investing in my pocket and our bank account. So we would either show very little profit that was retained or we would show a loss. And in fact, in 2016 we showed a loss. Now that doesn’t mean that I didn’t make money because I did. However, that’s how you focus on your business, not paying as much tax as it could because you have a CPA that does those things for you. There are financials to save money in taxes and there’s also financials to sell your business. Those two things don’t really go together. So we had this meeting in December of 2016, that coincided with a plan that I put together that was the five year plan to sell our business. It was about revenue and it was about retained earnings. We had a conversation and I said in 2020, (this was 2016) I want to start marketing our company for sale. So in order to do that, I want to have three years of financials that I can take and go boom, our company is worth X. But what I didn’t know was that there was a national buyer who was looking to buy market share.
By buying market share, he basically was willing to pay a premium for businesses and I just happened to fit into what his criteria was for purchasing a business. That was a big ass customer database and our ability to capitalize and earn revenue. Now that’s not always how you sell a company, but I’ve sold three organizations that I have started and all three of those organizations have been based on our revenue. So for all of the “I know everything” people that are going to tell you “you’re gonna lose with profit”, well you’re wrong. That’s not the only way you can sell it. However, I would recommend selling a business that way. But at the same time, I’ve been successful, not selling business that way.
I want you to understand that the customer database is the most important asset. So what should you do with that customer database? You should grow it. You should take care of it. You should continually feed it. You should always be on the hunt for new customers. You should always be acquiring data. Look, the richest people in the world are where they’re at because of the data that they possess. Think about Jeff Bezos, richest man in the world. He’s probably gonna eclipse Solomon at some point as the richest man ever. Why is he the richest man in the world? Because he has a company that everybody buys from.
Sure. That’s part of it. But when you buy from him, you give him your data. You give him your buying patterns, give him how you purchase things. You give him how you ship things. You give him information about your home. You give him, information about your car, about what you eat. All that information is very, very valuable. He uses that information in a way that that allows him to grow that business and allows him to grow his customer database. So you’re a small business owner. What does that have to do with you? You’re absolutely right. What does that have to do with you?
I’m going to give you the secret and help you generate an additional $5K in revenue this month. That’s the title. That was the clickbait that I gave you to click on this video to listen to me so that I can tell you how to generate $5,000 in additional revenue this month. Well, the first thing you need to do is you need to communicate with your customers. That’s what you need to do. What is it that we’re going to communicate? If you’re having a great year phenomenal, but it’s a shit show. Like we’ve grown by 15% this year, but my goal was to grow by about 50% this year. So while I’m happy for the growth, I’m also not excited about the percentage. I’m sure every entrepreneur or small business owner reading this right now wants more money. We all want more money.
I’m going to tell you a little secret and it’s actually not a secret. It’s a customer of mine that I was talking to yesterday. He’s one of our larger customers. So he is a spray foam contractor and does spray foam installation. However, in the states that he’s in, there are efficiency programs in place. While he’s a premier contractor, the only way that he gets chosen as a premier contractor is if he does the energy audit necessary to get those individuals into that program, so what he promotes is free energy audits. It got me thinking, so we’re in the exterior cleaning business. I probably have 75% of my clients in exterior cleaning because that’s what we did. That’s what we were successful at growing. So 75% of my clients need to know how to use this to go make more money. It goes back to things that you’ve heard a lot of people talk about and that is doing a free review of the work that you did four, five, or six months ago.
So here’s how it would go. I call it my customer. Hey John it’s Gary Geiman. We performed a [insert the service: roof cleaning, house washing, concrete cleaning, gutter cleaning, whatever] as a courteous service. I want to come back out and make sure everything looks okay. Make sure that everything is still in order and do a quick review of the property. You don’t need to be there. But if you are, we can do a quick walk around, uh, just to let you know, I’m going to be there on [insert day and time].
You’re not telling them you’re coming out to give them an estimate. You’re not telling them that you’re coming out to do a service. You’re going to do a review of the service that you performed. Now here’s a couple of things you need to do when you go do that. Number one, you need to take video. You need to take pictures. Like if you’re not videoing and taking pictures of every thing that you do on a consistent continuous basis, you’re not ever going to win the game of social media. Next thing you need to be doing is have a checklist. Have a checklist of items. You don’t have to put anything preprinted on the checklist. Have three columns, item, notice, needs attention. You’re going to go and you’re going to audit your work, but you’re going to look for other things that are going on in that property and you’re going to provide it to them. You see, people aren’t going to know what you can do unless you tell them what you can do. While it may be clear to you because you do pressure washing, exterior cleaning, roof cleaning, carpet cleaning, junk removal, etc, a customer’s brain doesn’t always understand the complexity of what it is you can do for them. So you have to tell them, you have to consistently tell them what it is you can do for them.
“I’m not going to waste my time and I’m not going to go do a free review” but yet you’ll take time to go do a free demo. You’ll take time to go clean something for free, but you don’t want to go look at the work that you perform and see what else there is at that home that you can actually do for them to help yourself make money. Right? So for all you guys that would do demos, this is easy to put into place and to add to what you can do for these customers.
Call the customer. If they’re not there, leave them a message and tell them why you’re going to be there. If you have their cell phone, text them the information and follow up with an email. So they know you’re going to be on their home property. I would definitely do this with homeowners, I would probably stay away from commercial property managers if you’re trying to make $5k in October, but do this process with commercial property managers, understanding that this work can come in March or April. I’m talking about work happening in October. So you go, you have a form that checklist, items that you can put on the left notice and recommendation. Obviously what you’re trying to do is tell them, Hey, I noticed as I was reviewing my work from blah, blah, blah, that you have these items that need cleaning. Maybe there’s algae on stone and you did a house wash or maybe there is some black concrete and on the patio in the back or maybe the decks looking a little crappy or maybe the gutters are full of crap and you cleaned the roof four or five months ago.
We used to do it all the time. Gutter cleaning, exterior window cleaning, 350 bucks. You’re there for 45 minutes to an hour. Move on to the next one. We would schedule five or six of those in a day for a truck and it was easy money for our residential crew. Those are all things that you can look at. Those are all things that you can put in place, things that you can go and view at a homeowners property and take that form that you’ve created and then at the bottom, “Hey, we can get this scheduled for you on this date and here’s the amount that it’s going to cost you to hire us. Is the morning or afternoon better?” Boom, put it in an envelope. If they’re not there, throw it in their door. If they are there, hand it to them, get the job scheduled. If they aren’t there, call them back the next day. Talk to them about what it is you found, start with the areas that you cleaned. Make sure those areas are still clean. If they’re not, clean them again.
Let’s be smart about this. It’s a opportunity for you to serve your customer, but it’s also an opportunity to gain revenue. When you do these free audits and you talk to 10 homeowners that you do free audits for, your closing percentage should be 40, 50, 60%. If you do a good job the first time in closing them, then you should have the opportunity to go back and talk to them. If you didn’t do a good job, you didn’t do a good job. Then you need to make sure you’re doing a good job serving your customers. There’s a reason why when you drive by every Chick-fil-A at any time of the day, except for Sunday, that line is 50 cars deep. There’s a reason why it’s not because that Jesus’ chicken is the best chicken in the world, although it is pretty good chicken. The reason is when you go to Chick-fil-A, you get a great experience and you get through that drive through line within five minutes. It’s amazing. It’s because they serve their customers. They take care of their customers. If you take care of your customers, you have the right to go back and do this free audit. So you see, we don’t think about this very often in terms of what our business is. Whenever I talk to someone that’s in the exterior cleaning, they always state that the turnaround time or the frequency of service is usually not same year. If you don’t do window cleaning, dryer vent cleaning, gutter cleaning, you don’t have a sticky service.
There’s a reason why those things are necessary. There’s a reason why, because it creates sticky service. But if you don’t have one of those sticky services, or even if you do, you need to create these audits on a monthly basis. Look back at your schedule for five months. Who is it that I can talk to? Let’s develop a list of 10. If you have someone in the office, have them start talking to them. If not, it needs to be you. Create a schedule for yourself to complete it on a weekly basis.
This is what you need to do to grow your business. This is what you need to do to be successful in getting to that next level in business that you want to get to. That doesn’t always mean revenue. It could be a lot of different things, but to get to that next level, you need to develop practices that help you. Grow customer relationships, we need to be more about relation instead of transactional. When you see those individuals going through the Chick-fil-A line, that is definitely a transactional relationship as they’re going through to Chick-fil-A, it’s a relationship because to them, you’re going to come back tomorrow. Just listen to one of them say thanks for visiting. They say “can’t wait to see you tomorrow” or “come back tomorrow” or whatever it is in terms of their ability to create a relationship. They’re trying to continuously to do that. And so you have to figure out how to do that with your customers database, how to create those relationships that are relational with your customers, not transactional. You did a house wash so go back and look at it. Take what you learned from visiting their property and give them a new estimate on things that you can take care of. Why do you do that? Well because they probably don’t know that you can take care of those things.
A customer database is gold for your business. So you need to build one, take care of it, feed it consistently, water it, grow it, and it will return to you tenfold. I challenge each and every one of you to take this audit strategy, put it in place, make an additional $5K in October.
Friday, October 23rd in Covington, Kentucky at my office, I got some of my friends showing up Jamie Schmidt, David Sessions, David Carroll, Tyler Geiman. We all will be speaking to help you grow your business. I’ll be bringing some things like this at the live event, but for the first time ever at any event, we’re going to be doing something that has not been done at any home service event ever.
I promise you that you are going to be putting action in place that I teach you right on that day to generate customer revenue. I promise you there’s going to be activity where you will have the ability to generate customer revenue. The goal is that you walk away with a new customer or two and we’re not talking about from your customer database. These are going to be cold prospects that you’ve never prospected before. So if you want to to come and learn how to grow your business from guys like Jamie Schmitt, David Carroll, David Sessions, myself, Tyler Geiman, and you want to have the ability to actually generate revenue for your business you need to get here. October 23rd, 9:00 to 4:30 in Covington, Kentucky. Lunch and happy hour are provided. Only $299. I promise you this. You will walk away with not only ways to grow your business, but the opportunity to get new customers at this event. Can’t wait to see you. Can’t wait to help you. Let’s dominate.