Business Planning, Part II by Ruth King If you are putting together your business plan one week at a time, during the past week you wrote down the answers to the goals questions. After establishing overall goals, or perhaps to help establish overall goals, look at the source of your revenues, i.e. your customers. First, you need to know how many active customers you have. This number is easy to determine if all you do is new construction. However, from a service perspective, it is much more difficult to answer "off the top of your head." Find out how many customers you have who have done business with you over the past year. How many total customers are on the list? If you are like most contractors the number of total customers will far exceed the number that have done business with you in the past year. Call some of the customers who you haven't heard from in a while. Find out why they haven't used you. Be prepared to find out that they have moved, died, or that they are using another company now in addition to "I just didn't have a need". Do something to invite them back. After all, they still need their HVAC equipment and plumbing systems checked each year. The results should help you establish your marketing goals for next year. Next look at your advertising activities. Hopefully you have tracked results throughout the year so you know where your leads are coming from. If you haven't, this is your first goal for next year. Assuming that you have tracked your leads, you know what worked well, what didn't work at all. Plan to repeat the activities that worked well and determine why the others didn't work well so that you can either fix the problems or not do them again. Then look at what you did from a public relations perspective this year. Public relations includes all non-paid advertising including your truck signage, service forms and uniforms as well as donations you made to charitable organizations, articles that appeared in the media, etc. Plan on doing more public relations activities. They usually produce better results than advertising does. Examine your trade show results. Many times they are difficult to do; mainly because your feet hurt and you have to get people to man the booth for a weekend. However, they are a great source of leads if you are creative in your booth and get people to stop by. One contractor I know has had a booth in his area's local fair for over 10 years. He gets enough leads from the four day event to keep him busy the entire fall season. And, some of those leads become sales in the spring too. Yes, he and his people are exhausted at the end of the fair. And yes, the results are worth it. Are you getting your customers' e-mail addresses? If you aren't start. This is a very non-intrusive way to reach your customer base for reminders, tips on home comfort, etc. The other thing to look at is yellow pages. This usually provokes an emotional response. I haven't found too many contractors who like the yellow pages. My philosophy is that you can't live with them and your can't live without them. Some contractors have found a way to live without any display ads... with very successful results. In summary, here are some questions to ask when determining your marketing goals: 1. What advertisements did you place that worked in 2005? 2. What didn't work and what did you learn from it so that you don't do it again? 3. How many customers do you have? How many active customers do you have (an active customer is one who has done business with you in the past 18 months)? 4. What did you learn when you talked with your non-active customers? What are you going to do differently as a result? 5. What public relations activities will you do this year? For those of you who are doing next year's business plan one week at a time, your homework assignment is to answer these questions. To contact Ruth King call 800-511-6844 or send an email to ruthking@hvacchannel.tv This article is reprinted with permission from the Dec. 4, 2005 issue of Contractor Cents.