Contractor’s Wakeup Call!

How are the old time contractors going to make it?

Talk about stirring the pot, look out with this post it may make a few old timer’s a little pissed.

But hey, I need to bring up some points that I see happening with contractors that have been in the contracting business anywhere from 20-30 years and man let me tell you they are a lost puppy.

Just think of being in the contracting business for 30 years and all the ups and downs they have been threw, but they will all tell you that they have never seen anything like it is now. So just think of the decisions that they made last year not thinking that things would get this bad.

They believed that hey, I have been threw it all before and it always comes back and usually in a bigger way. Well smack me silly now but it never came back!

Some bought tracts of land for future development, some bought fancy yachts or even airplanes and do not forget the nice expensive cars or trucks. Ouch! Some even built new office head quarters and now that they are buried in debt and there banks will not refinance there loans or there banks are out of business and the federal government now owns there loans.

Even the smartest contractors have blown threw 2-3 million last year alone just trying to survive and working on doing major cutbacks to there overhead to try and get there expenses down to meet current market conditions.

It really is easy to figure out, Money in needs to be more then money out. Or as some contractors said last week as long as I am even I would be happy. As long as they do NOT need to reach into there personal pocket or life savings they would sleep better at night.

Think about the contractors that had been putting money in the stock market for that rainy day and for there retirement to see most of it wiped out or at least cut in half if they are lucky.

Where are they going for money now? At what point do you pull the plug on the whole damn thing? Do you spend every dollar you have saved to keep the company afloat?

Let’s face it contractors small and large have tough decisions to make if things do not turn around. You see a lot of our suppliers failing everyday plus distributors are dropping like flies.

Yes, only the strong will survive this market and the ones that will must embrace marketing there companies online. Yes most contractors have taken the low road on this one because this is something they do not understand. They thought it was just a fad and that you could not do business this way.

Yes, they put up a website, but hey they got no traffic so see I told you it wouldn’t work and then left it as it is. Well I am here to tell you to crank that bad boy up if you want to survive this market.

See online marketing is your least expensive way to get your message out to new customers and your existing clients. Content is still king! So kill them with 30 years of your knowledge and work your existing client base big time.

Yes, you may need to hire some things out like [keywords or seo] pros for your website but this is cheap to do in today’s world. Check out www.guru.com and put your task out for bid. I use this service all the time and highly recommend it. I found the best graphics person on this site and have used her for 2 years now.

I found the person at guru to write all my ad-word campaigns and have just hired 2 companies to help me write articles for our website that will already be seo ready and this will help with organic search. This means free traffic. Yeah!

So just like you have built a great team for your contracting company, you need to do the same for your online network. This will help you survive this market and when it does come back and it will by the way you will be set to grow by leaps and bounds.

So just don’t set by the way side and watch your dream fall apart, step up to the plate and rethink your strategy and make a few tweaks here and there and you will be back on top sooner then later.

Happy Selling

Glen

 

Tagged as: Contractors, Guru, Marketing, Online