In this day and age, loyalty is almost dead. There was a time when people were loyal to a certain company. I remember when the company you bought a car from almost included you in that association. There were people who were Ford guys and that is all they would buy. Then there were people who wouldn’t be caught dead in a Ford.

The same was true for many other businesses. People bought groceries at the same grocery store. They went to the same lumber yard and the same hardware store. Many times they knew the owner and were on a first name basis.

Then we got away from all of that. The big chain stores came in and everything was about price. Now people want service and value. Many contractors think that it is still about price, but price is often not the determining factor. Actually, when it comes to many businesses like contracting, people want to go back to the days when they did business with only one business.

The difference is that they are not going to go back to you just because they want to be loyal. They have to have a reason to be loyal to you. They do want to be able to call just one guy for everything, but that guy needs to fulfill their needs.

This means it is up to you to make sure you do what it takes to create this loyalty. One of the ways you can do this, is to do a great job. This is the foundation for the kind of loyalty. The big three car companies didn’t always do this and they opened the way for foreign car companies to come in and take away their market share and profits.

There is so very little excellence in many contractors work that people are pleasantly surprised when they find a contractor who will do whatever it takes to get the job done right. If you are determined to do the job right, you probably can’t be the lowest priced contractor. Don’t even try to do that. It is important to be fair, but price can be very elastic in our field. Often the price is higher in our own heads, than it sounds to the customer.

Doing an excellent job means that you will have to monitor your helper’s work very closely. You can’t allow them to jeopardize your business. Unless you are a one man band, you will need to set some systems into place to ensure that every job is done to exceed the customers expectations.

Now as I mentioned, doing an excellent job is just the foundation to build this customer loyalty. This is like paying admission to get to compete for their loyalty. If you pay the admission, you get to play. If you don’t pay the admission, then you are already out of the game. There are several other things you need to do in order to win your customers loyalty.

I will cover some of these other things in the next few articles. Come back next week and learn how you can build iron clad loyalty in your customers.