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What I Learned About Small Business Marketing While Searching for a Garage Door Service In Edmonton
There are really just three things you need to do with a small service business: 1) offer a service that customers will refer to people they know, 2) get more customers, and 3) charge enough for your services to make money. Get all three right and you’re winning. Getting none or just one right is usually a non-starter. There’s either no business or it’s ready to go under.
You can get two out of the three right, though, and still make a go. Depending on which two, you end up with very different businesses.
Take the case of not making money while growing and building a solid reputation. This happens. In my experience, small business owners quite often get rapid growth and happy customers, but, because of pricing or spending decisions, they can’t translate their growing sales into growing profits or a growing bank balance. This is usually a numbers and financial management issue, a matter of changing perspective and habits. It can be fixed.
That leaves the two other scenarios: both result in money making businesses, but the businesses make money in very different ways.
One type stays small, focuses on service, and relies mostly on word of mouth for customers. The owners care about doing good work, and the money they make is good enough. They don’t want to grow beyond a certain size and manage the people and problems that come with a bigger, busier operation.
The other type grows by marketing aggressively while paying little attention to the service itself. The owners in this category also don’t want to manage a big operation. They’re pirates of a sort. They want to make money, as much and as quickly and simply as possible.
I met both types of these businesses a while back when I had garage door problems.
A cable looped to one of the bottom rollers snapped one day. So I took out my phone, searched “garage door repair”, and called the first couple of sponsored links that Google popped up. I went with the one that said they’d be out the soonest. That call and repair job led to three more calls and three more repair jobs (all for the same issue) over the next three years.
Why? One explanation is that, in addition to lacking basic DIY skills, I lack basic Googling skills.
Another is that searching for garage door repair companies in Edmonton is like stepping into a quagmire: “a soft boggy area of land that gives way underfoot” according to the dictionary definition. (The alternate definition also works: “an awkward, complex, or hazardous situation.”)
The comments on “Garage door repair companies in Edmonton are so bizarre” on Reddit back me up on this. One of them sums up the main problem of searching for service businesses online: “... Definitely not easy to find real companies in the mess of spam.”
For a long time now, gaming the first page results for search terms on Google has been very, very lucrative. Digital marketing specialists have figured out that if they can win at the lead generation part of a home services business, they can altogether ignore the pesky other part of “running a business that people will recommend.”
No need for quality control, customer service, or referrals. Just pay Google, work on SEO, generate leads. Then sell those leads to subcontracting locals for a fee. The fee is just for the lead, mind you. There’s no guarantee of work for the subcontractors. It’s up to them to make what money they can from the call, which means customers get the hard sell — and quick, unreliable service.
The scale of Google is so immense, a Pacific Ocean of searchers and prospects, that this decoupling of marketing and service delivery doesn’t just work, it works really, really well… for the marketers.
For the customers, it’s a mess. We want to deal with real local businesses that care about their customers, their work, and their reputation. The lead generation specialists either push these real local businesses off the most valuable search real estate, or mix in and masquerade as one of them, mucking everything up for searchers.
Recently, one of the Origami team had a garage door issue of her own. She had been wading through the “mess of spam” online, and she messaged to ask if I knew anybody.
I recommended the last service that I contacted. The one that fixed the problem.
They were a father and son team, though I think the father owns the business. Two guys who knew what they were doing and cared enough to do it well. They walked me through the whole process: from diagnosing the problem (including why the previous fixes didn’t stick), to listing options and making recommendations, and reviewing the work with me once they were done. They even did some maintenance work on both doors while they were there, just because they noticed it needed to be done.
I haven’t had a problem with my doors since. I didn’t find them on Google. I don’t think they have a website or social media accounts. And yet, they have a business that any homeowner would be glad to find.
They were recommended to me by one of the owners of a local plumbing business that I count on. She’s someone I only know through my interactions with her business, but also, as it often works in the service industry, and often after just a couple of such interactions, someone I genuinely trust. She’s one of those invaluable links in social networks: a good person who knows other good people.
After getting her garage door fixed, my Origami teammate had this to say: “My dad deemed him worthy to go into our cabinet door of phone numbers. It's only family, doctors, and very select restaurants that get on that list.” She already passed the name to her brother’s friend.
So it goes, and so, for most of us small business owners who care about our work and our customers, we would like it to go.
P.S. The business is called Dave’s Garage Door Services. You may be able to find the Daves of the world on Google, hidden somewhere in the mess of spam. Or, if you’re lucky, someone you know will give you their number.