The #1 Thing You Need to do When Starting Out a New Contracting Business

If you’re starting out a new contracting business, congratulations! This is the first step to one of the best decisions you’ve made! But running a contracting business is very difficult, especially if you don’t immediately nail the concept we’re going to talk about.

That is customer acquisition. The trades are typically super competitive so you need to have a reliable way to get in new customers. This is what we’ll talk about today, not only how to find a reliable customer acquisition channel but also how to scale your business once you do. 

Every business will have a different customer acquisition channel that works best for them. This depends on the owner’s skills, the employees you have and their skills, the area you service, the types of customers you service, and what you sell. So to figure out what works best for you, you need to try a bit of everything. When you’re first starting out, any downtime you have where you aren’t servicing your customers should be used to get more customers.

Be as aggressive as possible in finding new leads, and getting new customers. Do anything you can think of, door to door, content, paid ads, cold email, networking, etc. Figure out what you and your business are good at and once you find a standout channel, go all out on it. And since you already have the ability to go all out on marketing, keep the same aggression and volume that you had previously but now only on this one channel. 

The sooner you figure out how to reliably get new customers, the sooner you are to scaling your business quicker than everyone else around you. So now that we know what channel to use, and we’re advertising at the highest possible volume, how do we grow from here? Number one is increasing your gross profits per customer, this way your work promoting your business has a higher return. Secondly, you can expand to the next best performing channel or increase volume even more on your main one. For example, if door to door sales worked well for you, you can hire more people to do door to door, or you can do door to door and add content into the mix. 

So if you want your new contracting business to succeed, you need to be as aggressive as possible in getting new customers in, and once you figure out which acquisition channel is best for you, go all in on it.