Hello again. Jim DuBois here with a different way to look at your marketing that many don’t talk about – or just don’t know to talk about it.
As an entrepreneur, I like to be in the middle of the action – not in a boardroom, but in the ‘weeds’ of my business. Every three months, I hold a quarterly planning meeting with my top people. We get to spend time figuring out new ways to market the business, strengthen our weaknesses, and find new retention strategies, among other things. We spend 8 to 10 hours in this meeting!
These are some of the topics we discuss in the meeting:
- Annual targets and their evidence of success
- Attrition plan and goals
- Lead generation strategy and goals
- Roadblock and challenges
- Eliminate, delegate, and do more of… exercise
If you’re a window/pressure washing business owner, you should pay special attention to the second point on the above list: attrition plan and goals. Many fail to include this in their marketing, and they generate very few retention strategies as a result. Therefore, they struggle to build a solid customer base.
The Retention Problem
Years ago, I found out that growing a company is extremely difficult if you’re constantly losing customers.
Starting with a plan to minimize customer attrition allows the rest of your marketing to grow the business. This way, you aren’t trying to make up for lost customers before adding new ones.
Understanding The Numbers
When I work with my clients in Window Washing Wealth who aren’t growing fast enough, it’s typically due to an unknown or inaccurate attrition rate that suffocates their growth. Unfortunately for them, knowing that number may be the most critical step to increasing their business’s growth. The reason is because of two primary things:
- The longer a customer has been with you, the more money they spend with your business.
- The longer someone is your customer, the more opportunities you have to get referrals.
For those who like numbers, here’s the math on this:
- Number of customers = 500
- Desired annual growth rate = 33%
- New customer goal = 165 new customers per year, or 14 new customers per month.
On the surface, these numbers seem totally achievable. Problem is that I left out one crucial factor: monthly customer attrition. In this case, it’s 2.4% or 12 customers per month.
If you aren’t factoring in attrition, when you finally look up at the year’s end, you’ll have only grown by 24 customers. Or 0.4% per month or a 4.8% annual growth rate.
When you understand how destructive attrition can be to your growth, you can see why it’s discussed in our marketing meeting agenda. Most don’t know their attrition rate, and even fewer have a plan to fix it.
The Steps To Take
The first step is realizing that having a good service isn’t enough. We all have competitors, but most of them operate at a Holiday Inn level versus, say, The Ritz Carlton. However and, unfortunately, some customers do decide to move to this Holiday Inn level of lower service, and we have to factor this into our attrition. Finding and utilizing better retention strategies is necessary if you want long-term growth.
The next step is to build a relationship. We find the customers we interact with the most and built a friendly relationship with handle problems differently than customers we barely know.
Once we realized the relationship was the key, our goal became having a relationship with as many customers as possible. The vehicle we use for this is teaching your office staff, your technicians in the field, your supervisors, and your salespeople how to do this – how to make the customer feel special – like they are our only one. Then add in other retention strategies on top of this, and you create a Ritz Carlton “stacking experience.” When you have customers saying, “I’d be an absolute idiot to go anywhere else!” then you know you’re on your way.
Other retention strategies are:
- Add more services to service offerings
- Do things your competitors don’t when providing these services
- Identify the correct or right type of customer “avatar”
- Implement a seamless customer buying experience
- Communicate with your customer in a highly personalized manner – often
- Track or predict the “why” to your customer attrition
A program like this takes time, but when done correctly, it will be a turning point for you to fuel growth.
Tip: Remember; if you want to be like a Fortune 500 Company in your window cleaning business, you have to think like one!
Jim DuBois,
Strategy Sensei ™
- The Kickstart 30-Day $10,000 Revenue Strategy
- The 5 Steps to Doubling Revenue in 12 Months
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Jim DuBois is the founder of WindowWashingWealth.com, a niche specific business coaching company for window cleaners and pressure washers designed to get you out of the truck, scale beyond $50,000 or $100,000 per month revenue, and separate you from the day-to-day. For more information go to WindowCleaningBusinessCoach.com.
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