Making Money For Dummies (And In a Crowded Market)

[Ing]

A ver interesting thread!
Im in a Job about 25 years now and I developed the same opinion about service towards customers.
I m earning a 6 fig euro income with much time to spend for ME.
But Im so interested about the theory of all that stuff and the way not to use the internet, but the real world is son amazing for me.

The last 10 years I concentrated much energy to practice the 20/80 principal. Its amazing, how service on the right customers and rejecting the wrong makes the life easy.


Im on a point now, where I d like to start a side project for interest and for a way to retire earlier. For me and some friends!

Here a question: is it a good idea to start a business with good friends?
How to divide the work and the benefits?

 

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[FirstLawMotion]

My primary goal for this thread is to hopefully open your eyes to the fact that although everyone is jumping on the online entrepreneur bandwagon, there is still plenty of money to be made in the offline world. Hopefully it helps somebody out.

You can take almost any old school biz and apply basic direct response marketing principles to the advertising to scale it to a very good 6-figure income. I'm guessing you can scale it to 7-figures as well, but I haven't done that myself nor am I going to pretend that I have.

The Details

Why carpet cleaning?

-Solid profit margins. A $300 job will require $10 worth of cleaning solution. There's also the cost of gas, insurance, etc but the profit margins still remain good if you apply the proper tweaks to the biz. If you play the bait n' switch game like a lot of the competition then you won't last long.

-Recurring revenue. IMO, the greatest benefit of recurring revenue is that it gives you the opportunity to acquire customers at breakeven or even a loss in some cases. I try not to take an upfront loss on a customer though.

-Any ordinary man can learn to clean carpets. It takes plumbers and electricians months or years to get certified, but you can learn to clean carpets in a weekend.

-Low start up cost. If you know where to look and buy used stuff, I'd estimate that you can start the biz for around $1k. As you scale up, you'd want to buy better equipment and a nicer van/truck.

-Unsophisticated competition. It's quite easy to gain traction in this niche because the competition mostly hasn't spent any time learning marketing. Most will just say stuff in their ads like, "XYZ Carpet Cleaning. Call us for the best price". My prices are in the top 10% most expensive for the area. Positioning, positioning, positioning.

-SIMPLE. SIMPLE. SIMPLE. No fancy knowledge needed. EPC, CPC, CPA, none of that.

The Story

I took over the steering wheel of a carpet cleaning biz earlier this year. For years, it was struggling with approximately $50k annual profit. Where I live, you're poor if you make $50k.

I immediately began implementing marketing systems for customer acquisition and customer retention. I never changed the website simply because I'm lazy and running 3 other businesses alongside the carpet cleaning biz. I'll get around to it one day.

There are 2 types of entrepreneurs: the Elon Musk types who create brand new innovative products. They don't need to spend any money advertising because their products are so unique and attention grabbing. Then there's everyone else...the guys who cast a wide net selling many ordinary things. They need to advertise.

The biggest help was that I started using a service called Every Door Direct Mail. This allows you to send postcards to entire zip codes at nearly half the normal postage rate. The postcards had all of the classic elements of direct response marketing.

-Stating the problem

-Addressing objections

-Establishing credibility

-Testimonials

-Risk Reversals

-Described what was unique about our service/product

-Call to action

What I found is that depending on the zip code, I would get back $3-7 for every $1 spent on advertising. Neat. Scaled it like a kid in a candy store once I knew the metrics.

You are literally one direct response marketing campaign away from making a cool 6-figures, perhaps 7-figs...even if you're in a boring niche like carpet cleaning. Study direct response marketing. Once you have the direct response skills embedded into your brain, you can go into almost any niche and make a very good 6-figure income. Or you can just keep it simple and jump straight into carpet cleaning. It's not sexy, but it just plain works.

Here's the YouTube vid that inspired me to jump in. Last I heard, the guy was doing $3M/year in carpet cleaning.

Ask me anything about direct response marketing, the pitfalls of this niche, the process of cleaning, or just anything in general. There are a lot of details I left out simply because it would be too much to type in this already long post.

Jump in. Take action today. Success loves speed.

Very interesting, Congrats!

 

[Andrewjgong]

My primary goal for this thread is to hopefully open your eyes to the fact that although everyone is jumping on the online entrepreneur bandwagon, there is still plenty of money to be made in the offline world. Hopefully it helps somebody out.

You can take almost any old school biz and apply basic direct response marketing principles to the advertising to scale it to a very good 6-figure income. I'm guessing you can scale it to 7-figures as well, but I haven't done that myself nor am I going to pretend that I have.

The Details

Why carpet cleaning?

-Solid profit margins. A $300 job will require $10 worth of cleaning solution. There's also the cost of gas, insurance, etc but the profit margins still remain good if you apply the proper tweaks to the biz. If you play the bait n' switch game like a lot of the competition then you won't last long.

-Recurring revenue. IMO, the greatest benefit of recurring revenue is that it gives you the opportunity to acquire customers at breakeven or even a loss in some cases. I try not to take an upfront loss on a customer though.

-Any ordinary man can learn to clean carpets. It takes plumbers and electricians months or years to get certified, but you can learn to clean carpets in a weekend.

-Low start up cost. If you know where to look and buy used stuff, I'd estimate that you can start the biz for around $1k. As you scale up, you'd want to buy better equipment and a nicer van/truck.

-Unsophisticated competition. It's quite easy to gain traction in this niche because the competition mostly hasn't spent any time learning marketing. Most will just say stuff in their ads like, "XYZ Carpet Cleaning. Call us for the best price". My prices are in the top 10% most expensive for the area. Positioning, positioning, positioning.

-SIMPLE. SIMPLE. SIMPLE. No fancy knowledge needed. EPC, CPC, CPA, none of that.

The Story

I took over the steering wheel of a carpet cleaning biz earlier this year. For years, it was struggling with approximately $50k annual profit. Where I live, you're poor if you make $50k.

I immediately began implementing marketing systems for customer acquisition and customer retention. I never changed the website simply because I'm lazy and running 3 other businesses alongside the carpet cleaning biz. I'll get around to it one day.

There are 2 types of entrepreneurs: the Elon Musk types who create brand new innovative products. They don't need to spend any money advertising because their products are so unique and attention grabbing. Then there's everyone else...the guys who cast a wide net selling many ordinary things. They need to advertise.

The biggest help was that I started using a service called Every Door Direct Mail. This allows you to send postcards to entire zip codes at nearly half the normal postage rate. The postcards had all of the classic elements of direct response marketing.

-Stating the problem

-Addressing objections

-Establishing credibility

-Testimonials

-Risk Reversals

-Described what was unique about our service/product

-Call to action

What I found is that depending on the zip code, I would get back $3-7 for every $1 spent on advertising. Neat. Scaled it like a kid in a candy store once I knew the metrics.

You are literally one direct response marketing campaign away from making a cool 6-figures, perhaps 7-figs...even if you're in a boring niche like carpet cleaning. Study direct response marketing. Once you have the direct response skills embedded into your brain, you can go into almost any niche and make a very good 6-figure income. Or you can just keep it simple and jump straight into carpet cleaning. It's not sexy, but it just plain works.

Here's the YouTube vid that inspired me to jump in. Last I heard, the guy was doing $3M/year in carpet cleaning.

Ask me anything about direct response marketing, the pitfalls of this niche, the process of cleaning, or just anything in general. There are a lot of details I left out simply because it would be too much to type in this already long post.

Jump in. Take action today. Success loves speed.

You've inspired me to take the leap into carpet cleaning. After being in reselling books for awhile, I've concluded that I need to build something more local. Getting my loan next week and I've been doing a lot of on-off research the past few years, but really put some heavy research the past two weeks.

Hope you're still around the forums. I'd love to ask you some questions regarding your current setup and get some pointers from your point of view.

 

[CivilianCone41]

Employees go on a 2-day apprenticeship to learn on the job at a real customer's house. The best way to learn a new skill is through immersion, not through some book or classroom. The general cleaning solution will clean 95% of stains. Stains such as rust, pet urine, blood, coffee, tea, and wine require their own specialty cleaner.

Yes I have someone that sets up the routes. The goal here is to outsource as much as you can so that you can focus on high leverage activities.

I haven't tried FB advertising. The only guys that I personally know who have done 7-8 figures on FB have done it with sketchy offers requiring the use of cloakers to bypass FB's advertising guidelines. I have no interest in constantly playing a cat and mouse game with FB or Google because one week you can be making $10k/day profit then the next week your campaign has been blacklisted.

Slow and steady is the game I want to play. Patience pays dividends.

Great post. You just may have given me inspiration for another service business idea using your methods. thank you

 

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[Wax Comical]

1. I have both my website and a number written on the postcards. The secret sauce of the postcard is that I offer a free room of carpet cleaning. No obligations. No purchase necessary. No hard upsells. It's just my way of saying hey we believe in the quality of our work so much that we're willing to give you a free test drive. All of the calls are hired out. I don't want to deal with that stuff.

2. I currently have 2 vans driving around 6 days a week. I don't plan to scale any further because then I'd have to rent a warehouse, deal with motivating a large fleet of employees, meh. That just doesn't excite me. I'm currently just stacking my cash and slowly moving myself 100% into the investor quadrant. If I were to scale to more than 2 vans, my biggest obstacle would probably be staying excited about the project long term. I know my personality well enough to understand that if I stay deeply involved in a biz for too long, things start to go downhill. My expertise is in putting all of the systems in place so that the biz has its own "legs" to run on its own without me. If I stay involved on a daily basis then I go crazy.

3. Yes it's a long waiting list. People usually have to schedule 1-2 weeks in advance unless they're what I consider an A+ customer. An A+ customer is someone whose bill comes to $1k or more. They live in huge homes with a zillion rooms and most of the carpets are already pretty clean.

One of the biggest lessons I learned is to never say no to a customer. If you say no to them then they get angry and never call you again because you were unwilling to accommodate their demands. Get them to say no to you. For example, if a customer needs a cleaning done within 24 hours we'll tell them, "We don't have an opening tomorrow until 7pm. Would that work for you?". Most will say no thanks, but perhaps will call you in the future since you were nice enough to at least attempt to help them.



EDDM is a beast of a service because it allows you to tailor down all the way to household size, income, ethnicity, vehicles driven, it's wild.

The don't say no to a customer... get them to say no to you advice of always seeking to provide value (which also naturally leads to upselling) is such gold - thank you!

 

[Joejordan95]

Hands down, short copy worked way better.

Main objections to address:
1. Are you going to upsell me like crazy? Is your quote set in stone or are you going to BS me with shit like, "Oh Mrs. Jones you have specialty wine/pet/blood stains so that will be an extra $100".

2. The last cleaner left my carpets wet for 72 hours. Will you do the same?

3. Is your stuff safe for my pets and kids? Is it toxic?

4. Why should I trust you? I hate to admit this, but even though I'm in a diverse place like the Bay Area my clients would rather trust a white guy coming into their house than a black/Asian/Mexican employee. I plaster pics of happy white people all over my ads. I've spent a ton of money testing different ethnicities and happy white people has an insanely better conversion rate.

I laughed so hard at the happy "white people has an insanely better conversion rate." but if that what people want (Or converts them) then its our job as entrepreneurs to do that for them.

 

[Issi007]

Nope because I'm not passionate enough about the industry.

If you wish to become ultra successful at something, you must be able to put out amazing quality work. The best way to put out amazing quality work is to be passionate about the project in front of you. That's what separates the billionaires from the millionaires.

Another reason why I wouldn't want to franchise is because it's extremely time intensive. My primary reason for getting into biz in the first place was so that I can set myself up to be there more often for my future kids. My dad hardly spent any time with me because he was always working and I hated it. He never asked me, "How are you?" until I was 25. Any time spent with him wasn't quality time because he was tired. He was present, but not present. I'm 29 now and the ripple effects of my childhood experiences are still felt.

My aim is that when I do have kids, I'll be 100% in the Investor quadrant already with all of my monthly cashflow coming from real estate and stock options.

I absolutely like your thinking style and thank you for sharing these valuable tips.
I want to learn more about stock options, do you have any specific recommendations to start with that ?

 

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[Bones81]

This was a great read. My take away is that if you know how to market and have good customer service, you can make good money doing pretty much anything.

Thanks for sharing this.