This is the last part of how to create loyal customers.  There are a lot of other things you can do to create loyal customers, but they are more in depth. This last thing is pretty important if you want your customers to be loyal to you.
This actually ties in with part 2 where we covered staying in touch with your customers. Many businesses think they are doing a good job staying in touch with their customers if they send them their specials and advertising materials. This does keep in …

We’ve covered two ways to create loyal customers who will return to you again and again and will send all of their friends and relatives to you. They were to do an excellent job and to keep in touch with them on a regular basis.
The third way to do it is give great service after the job is done. Many contractors fail at this point. Part of the problem is that most contractors look at each job as a separate job by itself. The way they should look at it is …

Last week I talked about doing an excellent job as one of the prerequisites to creating loyal customers. Loyal customers are the best because they will do more business with you, they will refer others to you and they are easier and better to work for.
While doing an excellent job is is the beginning to creating loyal customers, that alone will not build loyal customers. The next thing you need to do to keep your customers loyal to you is to keep in touch with them on a regular basis.
So many …

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. …

 
The most important parts of almost every persons life is their relationships. That is just a fact of being human. We value our relationships with our families, our friends and God more than anything else in life. In fact, almost every person you know, will list relationships of some type or other as the most important thing in their life.
So why don’t we use this in our marketing? In most marketing I have seen, businesses market about price or services or product, but they seldom use their marketing to build …

Today I’m going to dialog on a little different topic. It is of concern to all of us as contractors but does not directly relate to marketing. The thing that I think is the greatest threat to our security and wealth is our own government.
If we do not change the direction our government is going and start to downsize it, I think we will have a very difficult environment to do business in the very near future!  I believe that government is out of control.
One of the greatest indicators of that is …

For most of us as contractors, a large part of our business comes from repeat and referral business. The odd thing about this is that we often take these customers for granted and focus instead on attracting new customers.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t try to get new customers, we just need to realize that completely new customers are the hardest to get and they are also the most expensive to get in terms of marketing dollars spent to get a customer.
The other thing about repeat and referral customers is …

In the business environment today, customers are looking for more value than ever before. Last week I wrote about the importance of doing a great job. That is extremely important.
Today, however, doing a great job is just the entrance admission to stay in business. Doing a great job is what is expected. If you want to stand out, you have to offer more than that.
Customers are looking for more than just a great job. They are looking for a great experience along with a great job. Customers want to feel …

I have seen all kinds of quality in contractors work. As I’m sure you have, I’ve seen jobs that you wonder if the contractor who did them had any idea what they were doing. I’ve seen jobs that were so botched up that there was no way to fix them. We just had to take it apart and start over again.
I’ve also seen a lot of jobs that were pretty decent, but if you looked hard, you could find problems with them. It is difficult to do every job perfect. …

Cutting the fat from your business is one of the quickest ways to boost profits and make a business more stable. It might surprise you how much excess can build up in a business that is not necessary for the business to create money. As contractors, we can sometimes spend money on a lot of things that do not make us any extra money.
As an example of cutting expenses, my sister has a tutoring business where she helps school kids learn better and she has a preschool. She wasn’t making …