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Like Ammon I to am an operator and a state owner. I am sorry I was not able to be on the conference call, but with severe weather and lots of floods it is 10:45pm and I am just getting back from a long days work. I guess I missed a the meeting of all meetings from the sound of it. I am not going to jump to any conclusions until I hear exactly what this new plan is. Do we have a plan or is this just floating. Is it on paper and will it really fly. I am hoping that this is not set in stone because out in the trenches it is going to get a lot worse. I know that I have four guys that will be out of business that are my neighbors in California. I will loose at least 75% of the franchise territories that I have in Arizona as well. With this reduction for my neighbor I will loose the household name that we have worked for. I will not and can not afford to pick up their areas like I have done for two operators in the past. I will not be able to coop advertising and have a referral network with them. The only thing I will do is pay more money to my state of California to help them out from Bankruptcy. For my investment in Arizona I will loose 75% of my investment. This is my long term investment and it is scary to think that it could be what brings me down. I know that my business is staying strong and growing, but I work hard/very hard to make it happen. I am having to spend more on advertising and watch every penny. I want to make sure that I am still around in the future. What happens when guys just flat out say no. They work until their contract is up hopefully, and they part their ways. What is our contract or word worth if we are telling people that this is what makes us different. A fee that is set in stone and does not go up. How many of the HB operators would have or could have been a Stanley Steemer. My guess is very few. They are attracting a different clientele. Not a better or worse one just different. How many operators were chem dry and why did they get out.
My suggestion is to focus on the individual franchises growth right now. The stronger the franchises are the stronger the company will be when the economy comes back. Our focus should be doubling the amount of vans not the franchises in the market right now. This is something that can be done with the right leadership. I have felt that things have been heading in the right direction with the Internet and the changes that we have seen since the image change. I believe in it so much that I have helped 6 guys get online advertising on google in the last two weeks. These guys are going to grow their business and buy more solutions. When the time is right they will need a second van. With the added cost three of them will be out. They rest will cut back on advertising their business to make the fees.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
I had my biggest client drop me back in September. They were a $8-10,000 a month client. I was shocked that they did this but the reason was that I raised my prices by 10% on them. This was due to my overhead going up and at the time I felt I had no choice. The Fax that I received back hand written across the price increase letter was a bit shocking. It stated “With this economy how due you think you could justify raising your prices by 10%. I will have to look elsewhere for my business.” It was signed by the CEO of the company. I thought that they would be back. It would be impossible for them to find the same product at the price that I was so generously giving to them. I waited two weeks and with no orders I lowered my price to only a 2% increase and still nothing. Finally I ran a special that was 10% off of what they were originally paying and still nothing. The lesson that I learned from this was a 10% increase in price does not mean anything with a 100% decrease in sales. This was a hard lesson to learn, but I did learn a lot from it. I should have dropped my pride and called them the moment that the fax came out. I should have bent over backwards to keep them as a client. Now I don’t think they would take me back even if I lowered their price 50%
I have been busy hitting the streets. We had door hangers made up and we are passing them out whenever we have time. The only problem is that we don’t have time to get as many out there as I would like. I spend a lot of time learning about the Internet and how to advertise our business. I am busy talking to commercial accounts so that we have future jobs. I know that it can be hard out there when times are slow but look at it as a time for opportunity to expand your business and learn a new skill like advertising.
Some one was looking over me on this one. The day I posted this the email had a glitch in it. If it were not for the text message I would have missed a job that was over $300.
I agree that doing restaurants are not fun. They can take a little more time. My pads get dirty. It is sometimes after hours and so on. This is what makes this such a great company. What works for me may not for everyone else. I was saying the same thing about working on the weekends six months ago. The reality for me is that we have a restaurant called the waffle barn. From the name you can tell it is breakfast and grease. They have four locations in town. I clean two of them and two of my neighbors with heavens best clean the other two. They are on my schedule to be done every month on the last Tuesday for one and 2nd wen for other. It takes us about 1.5 hrs and the pay $300 CASH each. That is $7200 a year for just me, and $14,400 for the franchise locally. I am in no way saying that it is for everyone, but for those who are looking to make a little more you might want to reconsider. The first time I cleaned them it took forever and pads were dirty and back hurt… Now I have my solution just right with enzyme and dwell and… It is much faster and easier now and they are great to work with. I would not mind picking up a few more accounts like this I have three daughters to put to put through school.
Just my stab, but pink is part of the primary color red. If there was a color loss in the carpet of the blue and yellow it would leave a pink tint. We have tried to remove a red stain on a carpet before and it took out the color of the carpet dye and left it with a pink stain. The good news was the red stain was now a light pink, but now it was the exact size of the steaming iron. This could be a manufacturing defect from the dye.
Thanks for your input. I will be changing the comment cards on the landing page to be relative to my area before we launch it. I have been working with WSI on this and they pulled the comment cards from the corporate web site. If you don’t know who WSI is yet they are a Internet marketing company that I have been working with for a pay-per-click ad campaign. There is a link on the advertising page in the operators only side.
As for landing pages and web sites. I will be the first to say that I am a real novice at the computer and web. I have been on a mission to get a better at understanding over the last six months. A landing page is a page on a website. Right now if you go to find an operator on http://www.heavensbestclean.com and you will see sacramento California. This is my information page or what I am referring to as my landing page. It is http://www.heavensbestclean.com/sacramento. When I advertise on google or any other search engine I give them the heavensbestclean.com/sacramento as my website. When someone looks for me they land on this page and do not have to to find me in the find operator side. In the future I would like to see the landing page http://heavensbest.com/index.php?customernumber=18319816245876&pr=Greg_Miller be what people see on Heavensbest.com.
Why is this important. I can not speak for everyone, but we are receiving more estimates form our corporate site lately. If you search carpet cleaning on google heavensbest.com comes up 8-9 on the first page. This means that people are finding our site and it is not costing me anything in advertising. I in return will run a pay-per-click campaign and have people land on that page in the future as well. I hope this makes some sense to you, and for those that rely understand it I apologize if I did not use the right terminology
GregWe have started using a company to track the phone calls. We have already signed up with Mitch at wsi for an online campaign. This comes with a RCF number. I am also getting more numbers to track my phonebook and my own website. The numbers cost $29.99 a month, but the data I receive is worth its weight in gold. I am able to see who, when, where, how long, and record each call coming in. There is a 24hr turn around so I know what advertising is really working on a day by day basis. I even had my yellow book credit me $200 off my 1 page so that I could help cover the cost of tracking. For those of us who do not know about RCF numbers like me until recently they are a local number that gets forwarded to your main line. Any phone company can set this up, but I like the features that WSI had and it was easy. Hope this helps
Hear is a copy of the ad. I did not create it my web designer did her name is michele and she is very resonable. I think that I only paid $50 to have her make this for me. She took our exsisting landing page and modified it for me. I open up the attatchment copy and paste into craigslist once a week. I only have to fill out the first part of the craigslist form about discription and location.
If you are interested she can be reached at micheleswebdesign@gmail.com
She is very nice and easy to work with but forget talking to her live. In two years I only talked to her once., and that was after repeated requests. The rest was email. I can’t tell you how much she would charge you do to the fact I have spent thousands of dollars with her on multiple web sites, and she gives me a lot of freebies. on
Heaven’s Best Carpet Cleaning Service(916) 987-8368 – (530) 677-1141
Heaven’s Best Carpet Cleaning Service
(916) 987-8368 – (530) 677-1141
They could not have picked a worse picture. We were laughing at something. As for the logo they photoshoped it out for some reason. I was not to happy when I saw that. If you notice the pocket looks very large. Hopefully the next issue will represent much better. As for the spotter bottle size I am only looking at the large bottles. The most important issue is getting the upc code on the bottle. I can make them myself, but i would love to see that integrated into the labels in the future. When it comes to refill and coupons the is a slippery slope. The carpet guy in me wants to slap my sticker on every bottle in my area with my number. The Marketing guy in me is a bit more realistic. It is much harder to pitch a store, or chain with this verses a very professional look. We can still work on making more of an emphasis on the website. Once we have them there we can hit them up for our services. As far as the stain guide i was thinking that should be the carrot to the website. Meaning if we emphasise a free spot cleaning chart on http://www.heavensbest.com then the hope is they check it out. All of this is just the frosting if they were to do all of this. The reality is that the shelf space is advertising. The logo stands out and after a while we are not the never heard of them company. We are the I use the stuff all the time they truly are heavens best, I did know they were a full service cleaning to. And imagine the look on the competition as they go strolling down the isle and what do they see.
Craigslist will never be a stand on its own campaign. What I like about it is the way google reads craiglist. I have not perfected it, but from time to time when you are searching for a carpet cleaner in my area My craigslist ad shows up in the top 5 organic (free) This is why I paid to have an ad built that looks professional. For me it is all about the branding of the name, and logo. My ad is saved on my computer. All I do is cut and paste every week. It take about 2 min and it is free. We have only booked a 5-8 jobs off it, but that was a few jobs that we would not have booked otherwise. Don’t feel that you need to get into the $14.95 a room game it still works for us and we charge regular prices
Google carpet cleaning (your area) I spend lots of time googling different variations. I ask family, friends, and customers if you were to look for a carpet cleaner on line what would you type. For my home town I would type in carpet cleaner Folsom. The top results are what I care about. For me Folsomliving.com is always near the top. they are a local Folsom website. My cost to advertise with them is $70 a month and we receive 6-8 calls every month. Find out who is on top in your area and that would be the first place I would go.
As for all of these that guarantee first placement on google, in my experience they are not good resources. Yes they will get you on the first page of your local town on google. Heck send me your money and I will do the same for you. It is free and it takes only a few minutes. It is http://www.local.google.com follow the instructions and there you are.
The companies that I have had a bad experience with so far are superpages.com, reliable listings, and servicemagic. I have not tried city search yet, but they seem to be much of the same as the others. This is just my experience and I am sure they have made some companies a lot of money.We were on with sm for three months. I had repeated problems and they were good most of the time with giving me credits. I dropped them as soon as the last credit was up. They were worse than a used car salesman trying to get ,have, and keep my business. I do understand that for some it works great. It was worth trying out for the few hundred that I did spend. I just did not like the drop everything and beg for the job mentality that it put us in.
In my experience the yp.coms do not work well. It seams like every book now has a on line version. It is a way to make up for all of there lost revenue. I agree that the books are becoming like the Old encyclopedia Britannica’s. Who wants to keep a volume of yp around when they can use the computer, or a blackberry to look it up. The problem that I see with all of the YP.coms is that they are trying to run their web like they do their books. I feel that going with a web page and having it pay per click or other optimising companies will get a bigger bang. I have noticed that the CA website is coming up a lot under searches. I have not started yet, but will be online very soon.
