Exponential Growth For Window Cleaners

Grow your business exponentially in three key steps: Most people grow their business incrementally by merely growing their client base, but one way for you to give your business an exponential growth spurt is by focusing on increasing the number of times these clients avail of your service, as well as increasing the amount of services your client gets from you. Doing so will increase your revenue and income by as much as 100 to 200 percent, or even more.

Here’s an example of how this strategy works: say you have 100 clients that use your service once per year for a fixed price of P200. The equation for your current business would be something like this:

100 transactions
x
P200
=
P20,000

If you increase your number of clients, the size and the frequency of their purchase by 10%, your equation is now:

110 transactions
x
220
x
1.1
=
P26,620

That’s already a 33 per cent growth for your annual net revenue—and that’s just from increasing each area by 10 per cent. The idea is quite simple—you’ll only be focusing on growing each aspect of your business (that is already there in the first place) and the combined effect can be hundreds of percent growth for you. You can do this with so little effort, time or expense because this plan has already done much of the work. Eventually you will be able to find other ways to grow your business and add more “multiplier effects,” but just to get you started, here are three strategies that will go a long way:

Form Strategic Alliances. A strategic alliance is a formal relationship between two or more parties to pursue common goals or to meet a critical business need while remaining independent organizations. Potential partners may provide strategic alliance with resources such as products, distribution channels, manufacturing capability, project funding, knowledge, expertise, capital equipment, or intellectual property.

A window-cleaning business, for example, can partner with companies whose clients are interested in clean windows, i.e. strike a deal with a window-installing business by leaving registration forms for a free window cleaning at your partner’s retail store, a win-win situation in that it gets potential new clients plus the names of the people who would be interested in its services, the window-installing company gets to keep track of the people who visited their store, and someone gets their windows cleaned for free. Another strategic alliance is an event planner tying up with a production agency. If someone can afford hiring an event planner, that potential client would also probably want audio-visual works running to keep the guests entertained. The event planner could work out an agreement with the production house to promote the latter’s services in exchange for a referral fee. If a planner does one event per week and half of its clients for the year chose to have audio-visual presentations, that would be extra money in the planner’s account for almost no effort.

Whatever your business is, just remember that the key in forming strategic alliances is synergy. The collaboration is ideal when the amount of benefits accumulated in the partnership is greater than those from individual efforts. Evaluate your current alliances and see if the benefits far outweigh the costs of doing business with them.

Establish Referral Programs. Maximizing referrals can greatly increase your sales and keep unnecessary spending to a minimum. Word of mouth is the strongest form of marketing; a good referral program can get your client base actively talking about your business, which ultimately increases your clientele.

Online businesses, in particular, practice and benefit much from referral programs. In fact, this is how most of today’s successful niche bloggers earn their income. With the speedy growth of the Internet, a number of companies now include online marketing in their budgets. Note that online marketing does not necessarily mean online advertising. Advertising on the Internet is not really as lucrative, what with clients wary of clicking on online banners due to the spread of spam and viruses, but partnering with a well-known blogger or even a well-known celebrity who owns a blog can increase client growth. Establishing ties with online sites with high visitor traffic can serve to increase your business. Most of these online sites create testimonials praising the quality of a product or service, and have established a network of loyal visitors that could mean potential clients for you, too.

Client testimonials are also a good way to get new clients. Every time you finish a service for your existing clients, collect testimonials and compile them. The next time you pitch your service to potential customers, show them the testimonials of satisfied clients—this could be a very powerful differentiator between you and your competitors.

Client Reactivation. Since past clients are already familiar with your level of service, they are much easier to claim back as clients than if you were to try and get new ones. If you offer a service that is not done by most people on a frequent basis, it is likely that many of your past clients do not have your contact details on hand. You can send out letters to past clients to reactivate them and get more work.

Using reactivation letters brings back 20 to 30 percent of past clients on the average. In some industries, it is not uncommon to have a reactivation rate greater than 50 percent.

Existing clients have already overcome their misapprehensions of doing business with you. They have already developed a level of trust in you and your business. The key here is to never let a customer or client forget you. It doesn’t take much too keep happy customers coming back to you again and again. When they do, the profit margin is substantially higher than when you drag out a new client from a list of cold suspects. Repeat clients are also effective sources of referrals as they help advertise your business through word-of-mouth marketing.

Increase the value of past clients’ average transactions to you by sending them reactivation letters, packaging complimentary products and services together, offering them something new, client appreciation seminars, or maybe even offering irresistible promotional discounts. These are just a few simple ideas to get you started. There are, of course, many other ways to reactivate clients. The key is to maintain regular contact, continue adding value to them through a good relationship, and to continue giving them reasons to come back.