I read recently that in a survey commissioned by Move - 62.5% of Americans think of their home as a place to live rather than an investment.  I have no data to back this next claim up, by my guess is that only a couple of years ago that the results would have been inverted.  The commercial contractors among us deal with recovery periods, payback metrics, etc. on a daily basis.  Many business customers use payback metrics to determine what features they will add in a facility. 

What the results tell me this time is that the expectation for cashing in on one’s home have evaporated.  Springing for a gourmet kitchen is now a luxury and not an investment.  A steam sauna (and the five times a year it is turned on) in the Master Bath might not be worth the extra cost.  Yep, as homebuilders and custom remodelers, we are back to the process of selling basic shelter and not dreams.  Or are we?

It is too easy to dismiss the trends of today as truths of tomorrow.  Look at where believing the axiom that home values never decrease took us!  More than ever, we have to become part psychologist and understand what drives our markets and clientele.  In order to do that, especially in a difficult market, we have to tie the “wants” together with the “shoulds”.  I want a new Master Bath, but I should insulate and put in an on-demand hot water heater first.  I want a new kitchen, but I should upgrade my legacy furnace - and so on.  Do your best to understand your clients “wants” and the rationale behind their “shoulds”  If you can make these two meet in reasonable harmony, you have a potential project. 

I have never approved of the practice of telling a client how much more their house will be worth with a renovation - this is misleading at best and we are making an effort at dispensing knowledge most of us are not expert in - but those projects that add long term value to your client have a better shot at success than vanity projects alone.  Do your best to tie the vanity (want) with long term value (should).  This isn’t groundbreaking or new, but as sales become harder to come by, understanding the psychology of consumerism can be helpful.

Like many of us that grew up in a rural setting, I have had a fascination with alternative energies for nearly as long as I can remember.  My neighbor had a well with a pump driven by a windmill that worked up until the late 1980’s.  We often lost our electricity service in the winter and used an old generator to run a few lights and the refrigerator.  More often than not our Franklin Stove was supplanting the hot water heat system in the old homestead during the winter months, and our house had a rainwater cistern directly outside.

As a rule, rural folks tend to live “off grid” more than suburban or urban folks. But we were just doing what we were supposed to: conserving, collecting, harvesting and operating as independently from the “city” as we could.  We were probably considered by many to be rural “hicks” back then - but in many cases that very lifestyle would now be considered “Green”, and we would be pretty hip!

Things go in and out of style.  Some of us build our businesses on capturing the “in” thing of the day and make a decent living at it, for a while.  But those businesses must constantly strive to remain on the cutting edge of trends and fashion.  The point of my short post here is that I don’t think the “Green” cause de jour will stick around forever.  But I do think that sound, fundamental building practices that are enhanced by the green movement will remain with us and improve over time.  Air sealing; improved insulation practices; non-toxic paints and coatings; conserving and reusing resources where possible; alternative energy sourcing, etc. - these items will never be a fad.  I firmly believe that energy conservation and materials will be the focus and primary growth trend in our industry for the next few years.

Let’s face it.  Home equity is tapped out and used up.  Easy credit was last year’s method of madness for homeowners to expand their home to luxury status.  All based on the now faulty premise that home values won’t deflate.  If we want to remain successful as viable building entities, we must stay as “trendy” as possible without ever forgetting our primary focus – being known as experts in sound building practices while providing exceptional counsel for our clients. 

Our average job sizes will most likely get smaller and our profit margins will probably take a hit.  But those of us that make a determined effort to stay informed of the latest news in building science while honoring the time honored fundamentals of sound construction and design will find a new market or adapt to an evolving one.  Sound building practices and wise counsel that evolves with the latest advances in science and technology, delivered at a competitive & fair market value and implemented with exceptional customer service will never go out of style.  The job types and size may change year over year, but the fundamentals of excellence will not.  These fundamentals will serve us in the best of times and the worst of times, and are the premise on which our companies must be built.  In order to compete, our marketing must be focused on the green movement and other trends of the day.  That doesn’t mean that time honored fundamentals of excellence are trendy.  We just have to blend the two – style and substance – into something that the average consumer can get their arms around.  My next post will revolve around some ideas that I have seen work.

It has been a while since our last post and I apologize. During these economic times we have been working almost around the clock to help our clients through. Some of this has involved financial planning, cash flow projections and helping develop workforce reduction plans.

These measures are necessary but mostly reactive in nature. As mentioned previously we have been pushing aggressive business development in these times. Clients who have embraced this and executed well are doing well. The construction market has been impacted as a whole but that impact is not spread evenly across all construction companies. Depending on the study you ready construction starts are down by 13% - any construction company could withstand a 13% reduction of revenue. The problem is that the impact is not equal across all markets and all contractors. We have some clients who are in markets that are still growing like healthcare or industrial plant environmental renovation who are doing quite well. We have some clients who do “plain vanilla” work on commercial buildings who are posting their best quarter ever in Q1 due simply to being good with their marketing efforts. Along with that we have several clients who are posting their worst Q1 in a while.

One thing we have stressed a lot is that satisfied customers are profitable customers. This is something I have known in my gut for a long time. Recently as we have started doing customer satisfaction surveys for some of our clients as part of our marketing services we found a much stronger link that I’d like to share with you.

The “Ultimate Question”

We based our customer satisfaction surveys on research from Fred Reicheld and his book “The Ultimate Question”

The book is well worth reading just for the background but the basics are that Fred and his team at Bain & Company set out to find the customer survey question that had the most direct relationship to profitability and growth. That they determined was “The Ultimate Question” and therefore there wasn’t much need to create a burdensome survey with 20 questions when one would suffice.

The Two Question Survey for Contractors

Phrased for a contractor this “Ultimate Question” turned out to be:

We found that we got a very high response rate from people by telling them that the survey just had two quick questions and would only take a couple minutes.

We actually made the phone calls instead of trying to use some other survey tool such as an online survey or mailer because we really wanted to communicate with them and enter into a true discussion about “ABC Construction.”

Survey Result Quantification

The next part of the survey was to quantify the results. The scoring system used compiles everything down to one number called the “Net Promoter Score” or NPS. Based on the scoring each customer fell into one of three categories:

• Promoter:Those who would be likely to proactively promote ABC Construction (score 9-10)
• Passive:Those who would likely not say anything positive or negative about ABC Construction (score 7-8)
• Detractor:Those who would likely say negative things about ABC Construction if asked and possibly are proactive in saying negative things about ABC Construction to others. (score 6 or less)

The NPS score is a decimal taking the total percentage of Promoters and subtracting the total percentage of Detractors.

The Financial Link between Profits and Customer Satisfaction

Now the interesting part – we correlated the results of the survey against a 24 month financial analysis of projects. One of those was to categorize margin gain and margin fade by group of Promoter, Passive and Detractor.

• Margin Gain: Additional gross margin dollars over and above what was estimated or budgeted.
• Margin Fade: Gross margin dollars less than what was estimated or budgeted.

The chart below is typical of what we have found. There are always jobs that will do better or worse than planned but in the group of customers with lower scores (Detractors) the incident of margin fade is much higher.

Put another way if you take the difference between the gain and fade for ‘Promoters’ and add it to the difference between fade and gain for ‘Detractors’ you will have a dollar figure for what customer service is worth over the prior 24 months.

Even for the smallest contractor we did this survey for ($1.5M per year in revenue) this difference was over $200K!

Driving Results!

The best part of the survey is that through the second question your customers will actually provide you a roadmap for fixing things. If the comments are condensed down and summarized to their core elements there are usually 3-4 key things the contractor needs to focus on and an additional 3-4 minor items.

What is important if you are going to do such a survey yourself is:

1. DON’t let emotions get involved! We have an advantage as a third party because we weren’t the ones dealing with the customer on a day-to-day basis. If you do the survey in-house you should assign it to someone who will be able to get to the bottom of the issue with the customer but who won’t try to dispute what the customer is saying. They may have been absolutely horrible with their bid package and scheduling but in their minds they thought you were the one with the problem. Customer satisfaction is about perception – and perception is reality. Arguing about the validity of the customers comments won’t help anything.
2. CALL everyone that you have done work with in a particular market segment – being selective isn’t a good strategy for getting truly good feedback.
3. LISTEN hardest to those with the most complaints – those are the comments that can make you better.
4. FOLLOW-UP on the comments. Whatever you hear create an action plan internally to address them and then follow-up with the customer thanking them for the survey, summarizing their core concern and then presenting some actions that you are taking to correct this internally.

Just the process of the customer survey has generated work from existing customers for the clients we have done the survey for. I would expect that almost any contractor doing such a survey would get similar results.

Beyond that this will give you a lot of feedback on how to improve your organization as well as providing some guidance on where to market.

	DAVID BROWN is the Founder and President of D. Brown Management, a consulting and management firm that helps construction companies improve profitability. Headquartered in Northern California, the company provides a full scope of general management solutions to construction clients nationwide, including strategy, planning, operations, field productivity, workflow, financial management, technology, and marketing.
As always, ask any questions and comments are always welcome. You can post them here or send an email to david@dbrownmanagement.com. Reader comments and questions will become future posts.

First of all I apologize that it has been a long time since the last post.  The holiday season this year has been more challenging than most. 

The winter months have always been difficult for most contracting businesses because of weather-related work delays.  During these months contractors basically live off their savings that they built up during the peak summer months. 

November and December add additional challenges because with the holidays we typically can only work about 70% of the time on “revenue generating” field activities while maintaining most of our overhead costs. 

With the economy having depleted most of the profits that contractors made during the summer and also making 2009 backlogs weak the months of November and December have been especially trying. 

We have been working with our clients relentlessly during the last couple months helping them get through these months.  The basics are simple - the execution is very, very hard:

1. Shed ALL costs that don’t generate profits and cash
2. Be relentless about selection of revenue

Regarding item #1 when we say ‘ALL’ we mean ‘ALL’.  Literally you should run a report from your accounting system listing out every expense for the last three months and go through it line-by-line.  Every expense should be looked at and ranked in descending order about how it is linked to profitability and cash generation. 

Don’t try to make too many stretches here - if there doesn’t seem to be a direct link between an expense and profitability or cash then there probably isn’t!  For some more ideas on cutting costs there is an article by our LeAnn Evoniuk, our Financial Solutions manager: 

Cut the Fat, Thriving During an Economic Downturn

(http://www.dbrownmanagement.com/docs/article_cut_the_fat.pdf)

Regarding item #2 - this is just as critical.  Cutting costs is a huge first step but you usually can’t cost-cut your way to profitability.  The other side of the equation is that you need to bring in high-quality revenue. 

This sounds like common sense but typically when we end up doing a revenue analysis with a company we find a lot of inefficiency in the use of resources.  Here’s where to start:

1. Going back 24 months make a list that contains all projects with revenue, direct job costs, margin and completion date
2. Add in fields for customer and type of work (service, commercial, healthcare, industrial, etc.)
3. Summarize the list by customer listing the quantity of projects, last completion date, totals for revenue and profit and then add two columns showing the percentage of total revenue and percentage of total margin - Microsoft Excel has a feature called ‘Pivot Table’ that is perfect for this analysis
4. Sort the list in descending order by percentage of percentage of total margin
5. Sort another list in descending order by percentage of total revenue
6. Sort one more list in descending order by the last completion date

Now is time to sit down with your top team and start asking some hard questions.  Don’t stop with the surface level answers - dig down peeling back the layers of the onion on every one of these:

1. Review the list sorted by margin and look at the sources near the top.  Hopefully none of your customers make up more than 15% of your margin - if they do you may have too much concentration with one customer leaving you exposed if they run into problems.  If this is the case you should be looking hard at how to diversify a little more. 
2. Start adding up the percentages of total margin on the list and find those that create 80% of your total margin.  Most likely this list is relatively short compared to the total customers served.  Start brainstorming the ways to develop new customers that fit the profile of these “Top Producers”
3. Review the list sorted by “Last Date” and see if there are any opportunities there to recapture revenue from past customers.  If there are customers on this list that fall within your “Top Producer” category that you haven’t done work for in a while it is probably worth starting there from a business development perspective.
4. Look at the bottom of the list sorted by margin and start at the bottom having a very thorough discussion about each starting at the bottom and working your way up - the key question:  “What value does this customer truly add to our business?”  Like the expenses now is not the time to mince words - be relentless.  If you can’t clearly articulate the value the customer adds to your company then start looking for ways to shed these “Bad Customers” in a way that won’t hurt your reputation.

How many of your expenses have gone into supporting “Bad Customers?”  You may want to go back to your review of expenses and take another look.

This exercise should give you a much clearer idea about where your money and profits are truly coming from.  There are additional elements that we will discuss more in the future but this will get you started improving both the quality and quantity of your revenue.

The basics - you need to be relentless in your focus on high-quality revenue. 

My six year old daughter is just learning about money and already has the basics mastered.  For the last few years she has really liked the spare change - it is shiny, heavy and fun to play with.  Now that she is getting old enough to want important things like dolls and such from the store she has realized that pennies, nickels, dimes and even quarters don’t go that far!  Starting appropriately on January 1, 2009 she woke up and simply stated

“I don’t want to get paid in quarters - I need DOLLARS!“ 

I can’t think of any simpler of a way to describe the revenue strategies that we need to focus on to work our way through the current economy. 

Closing on a positive note EVERY one of our clients who has been relentless about business development during the last few months has actually increased revenue even during the downturn.  I cannot reiterate how critical aggressive business development is during these times.

QUESTION:  What can I do to market my construction business? 

In a previous post Construction Company Marketing Package we discussed what the elements of a good marketing package for a construction business are. 

Now the question becomes what the heck do we do with all the shiny brochures? 

The tactics below are geared mainly towards contractors that doing project work - marketing service work is different and is covered very well by a fellow consultant, Adams Hudson who has a regular column in both Contractor and Contracting Business magazines.  Each column is a wealth of knowledge about service marketing. 

There are two things we need to do - (1) is to reinforce with our existing customers why they use us and (2) introduce ourselves to new potential customers. 

In this post we are going to focus on getting #1 dialed in creating a foundation to build on for #2. 

The only way I have ever seen projects get sold is with basic, old-fashioned personal sales tactics.  What I’m going to describe below is truly stating the obvious but the problem we see is that few contractors engage in these activities on a regular basis. 

Start with your existing customers because that is the easiest way to get additional work. 

Do you have one centralized list of all your customers setup in a place where you can add in notes about them and keep track of details such as birthdays, spouse names, etc? 

If not then you need to set one up - Outlook is a great tool for this. 

You should be in regular contact with all your current customers at least quarterly just checking in to make sure they are happy with your company’s performance.  This typically isn’t a problem in a small company because the owner is heavily involved in the management but once the company grows this little detail can slip through the cracks on the assumption that other people in the organization are taking care of the relationship. 

For past customers you should communicate with them regularly.  These should be prioritized ranging from ‘1 - would like to do more work with them’ to ‘3 - don’t bother’ or some other system that suits your business.  Often times if you start making calls or visits you will find that there are some reasons why they aren’t doing business with you currently and that can be an opportunity to fix some of your internal problems and win back some work. 

Having new marketing collateral can be a great excuse to drop by and see a current or past customer.  They may not be aware of new people within your organization, new capabilities such as an added service team or of new project experiences. 

Don’t get too caught up in thinking that just because they have or are currently doing business with you that they know the full scope of everything you do.  We have a client who is primarily a glazing contractor but also does doors and hardware.  They have the word ‘Glass’ in their company name and because of that they were overlooked by an existing customer for a large scope of work on the doors and hardware because the customer “didn’t know they provided that service.”

Don’t leave anything to chance.  Make sure that all your current and past customers know the full scope of everything you do. 

Also make sure that this information gets to all levels - it doesn’t do much good if the owner of the company has your information but the estimator does not. 

Your goal should be building tighter relationships at all levels within the customer’s organization.  Everyone from the field foreman to the project manager to the accounting team should know and love your organization. 

Work heavily on building those relationships and getting your new marketing package out. 

While you are there meeting with them ask for referrals. 

Look at this exercise with existing customers as a way to hone your skills in presenting your company and its capabilities.  It will set you up for phase 2 where you will work on introducing your company to new potential customers. 

As always, ask any questions and comments are always welcome.  You can post them here or send an email to david@dbrownmanagement.com.

One sidebar to the recent presidential election that I believe is monumental in importance yet hasn’t garnered much press is the incredibly successful use of the internet in a major national campaign.

President-elect Obama’s online machine was staggering in its size and scope, and clearly demonstrative of the pervasive capabilities that the internet has to offer.  Rather than being told – in one-way fashion – what interests one should have from conventional print, television and radio sources, the internet allows the customer to drive the focus of the campaign.  Now we may not be running for national or local office, but those of us in the construction business have a lot to learn about fully utilizing this vast and economical resource.

If we were told by a marketing expert that for relatively little cost we could understand our clients’ desires better; grasp what is key in their decision making process; pre-filter potential clients and ultimately appear more substantial as an organization, we would ask to whom we write the check.  The funny thing is the web offers these capabilities to us as we speak.  I believe it is time to wholeheartedly embrace the next generation of the web and make your site an interactive business development and management tool.

While having some web presence, it could be argued, is better than none at all, I tend to disagree with this sentiment.  Many of us simply place our hard copy brochures electronically on our site and call it a marketing expense.  Something is better than nothing is about all of the thought that goes into it.  But there is vast potential for learning about your clients without much effort.  Industry specific newsletters (some offered by professional marketing firms or done by yourself with considerable effort) can be sent to those who choose to receive them from your site.  While to the recipient the newsletter is free, to the business owner the information provided is priceless.  Every article that your client navigates to; every supplier site they are sent to; every extra click that a particular link receives is logged and presented to you as useful data.  Which past projects are the most popular and should be used more extensively in your print marketing campaigns?  What “green” or bathroom products receive the most hits?  What demographic actually comprises your online market (or your potential customer market) that you may not even notice from the corner office?  Which services receive the most hits? 

The data from an interactive website can be used to help focus a marketing campaign and to more clearly define where the nuts and bolts of building are intersecting with the customers’ desires.  No information is perfect, and many of the “clients” poking around on your site may be tradesmen, dreamers or competitors simply e-surfing.  In some cases, the data may even be skewed somewhat.  But there is nothing like getting quality information and feedback from potential, current and past clients that are not answering a ho-hum survey, but actually choosing to spend time the way they wish to in the comfort of their own homes or offices.  The strength of this possibility cannot be understated. 

Let’s move our websites from the “old internet” to version 2.0.  You may be surprised at what you will find.  In the case of a campaign, there may be some 40 million or people willing to donate $5 to your cause.  In the case of our businesses, we aren’t asking for donations, we are asking for something even better – real data from real clients about what is important to them.

QUESTION:  I want to lose customers and experience poor results from my marketing efforts.  What can I do?

OK, no one really asked this question but looking at some of the things we see on a regular basis it might appear that many contractors are actually trying to lose customers and achieve poor results from their marketing. 

I’m going to give a few examples of things I’ve seen just in the last few weeks.  If you want to achieve good marketing results the first step is to be honest with yourself and realize that things like these examples probably go on in your business whether you see them or not.  Secondly you should work just work like crazy to minimize the occurrence of these things within your business through training and systems. 

FACT:  Repeat service business is one of the best things a contractor can have for margins and cash flow.

FACT:  Technicians are taught how to fix things - they are not taught the nuances of sales or customer service.

FACT:  Few companies that engage in service spend an appropriate amount of time training their technicians in these nuances.

STORY #1:  A marketing campaign drove a new customer to call and request some electrical service work to install a new ceiling fan.  The service technician did a great job on the installation and as he was leaving the customer asked him about his disposal not working.  The technician as he was getting into his van simply replied that “It’s probably just the circuit breaker - you can easily flip it back on yourself.” 

The service technician should have taken the extra ten minutes to look at this with the customer and build a deeper relationship. 

Luckily this story ended well - the customer had enough respect to call the owner of the company and tell him what happened.  The owner went out to meet with the customer and in looking at the panel found some additional problems and was able to sell a service upgrade as well as landing some future remodel work. 

• How many of your technicians would do something similar in a hurry to either beat traffic or get to the next call? 

• Do you do formal training with your technicians about how to truly service a customer?

STORY #2:  I saw a friend this weekend who owns a physical therapy business.  The center of the business is two treatment rooms with identical equipment in them that requires some plumbing connections. 

One of the valves started to fail and was making some noise - but the equipment was still functional.  She called a plumber on a Friday and told them the problem and that she needed to have that room working by Saturday. 

The plumbing company had been doing work for her for a long time so she left the plumber to work on the rooms when she left on Friday afternoon. 

Saturday morning she came in to find that the plumber had taken apart the functioning room to rob parts to “fix” the other room leaving a message saying that he had to order the part that was making the noise. 

This technician did technically do what he was asked to do which was to “fix” that room but missed the bigger picture of what the client really needed to run her business.  He essentially cut her revenue in half by disabling one of the rooms and hurt her relationships with her customers as she had to reschedule them. 

This story did not end well for the contractor - by Saturday afternoon she had a new plumbing contractor and my guess is that she won’t be paying the bill for the first contractor anytime in the near future. 

Don’t let things like this happen to you and damage your relationships with new and existing customers. 

• Use stories like this to talk to your technicians and managers

• Develop your own “Lessons Learned” book of customer service wins and losses

• Have a “Best & Worst” discussion each week about the prior week’s performance

Think that these things only happen with service work?  I just didn’t have the space in this post to get into the things that people do to harm relationships with customers on projects. 

Got any of your own customer service stories good and bad that you’d like to contribute? 

As always if there are any questions you’d like to see answered on this blog please don’t hesitate to post them under comments or email us directly at:  david@dbrownmanagement.com

QUESTION:  I Need To Market My Construction Business More – What Are The Elements Of A Good Construction Marketing Package?

This is a question that we are getting more and more these days considering the tightening of the construction market and economy as a whole that has gone on for the last couple years. 

The first part of the answer is that you should have been focused on marketing before the economy started to tighten because marketing takes both consistent effort and time to show results. 

When I look at the financial performance of our clients including critical indicators such as backlog, the ones that are doing very well right now are the ones that have always had and currently have a strong focus on marketing.  The ones that are having difficulties are the ones where culturally their organizations were more focused on “doing work” during the booming economy rather than marketing. 

OK – so regardless of where your company or the economy is at, you should be focused on marketing your business every day. 

“Good marketing enhances your ability to say ‘NO’ to bad customers.”

Taking things in order first you need to decide on a few things before you even start to design your marketing package:

1. Strategy – Target Market:  Before you start doing anything in regards to marketing, you should figure out generally who you should target and with what services.  It is important to look for markets where money is still flowing – marketing to the production residential builders today is probably not a good idea!  Good markets to look at involve some type of service/repair – in good times and especially in bad money gets spent to maintain existing facilities or infrastructure. 
2. Differentiating Factor:  After deciding what potential markets are out there with the most potential, take a hard look at your company.  You need to decide where you have a differentiating factor that sets you apart from the competition.  This may be experience, specialized equipment, key personnel or relationships.  It is very important that you are honest with yourself at this point about what truly makes your company different.

Where target markets and your differentiating factors have the most overlap is your “Marketing Sweet Spot,” and this is what you should build your marketing material around. 

What comes next is what is called “Marketing Collateral,” which is the generic description for the various brochures, website and other materials that you use to market your business.  In this post, we are just going to focus on the elements that make up that package, not on an entire marketing plan. 

Company Overview Brochure:  Typically this comes in the form of an 11X17 half-folded brochure that provides a big picture look at the whole company.  It may include things like mission statements, vision, core values, brief history, overview of markets, etc.  It will work as the center piece for your marketing. 

Company Information:  This can be a 1-4 page insert sheet that provides basic information such as insurance, surety, contact information, etc.  It would answer most of the standard questions required to pre-qualify your company with a new client.  Part of this may be the insurance cert forms. 

Project List:  This should be a nicely formatted list that contains all the basics about projects your company has completed.  The information should include project name, size, client and a short 2-3 sentence description of the work noting anything key including finishing ahead of schedule or use of an innovative use of new construction technology.  You may want to maintain different lists for different project types so that your marketing package can be targeted to a specific market. 

References:  A simple one-page list relevant to a specific market that contains some selected quotes and reference contact information will be very effective.  This is more effective than trying to attach dozens of reference letters.  Get the letters, but summarize them into a single consistently formatted sheet. 

Resources:  If applicable to a particular market you are going after, you may want (or need) to produce a listing of the resources you have available including heavy equipment, software, accounting systems, project management and field crews. 

Project “Sell Sheets:”  These are individual sheets designed around a particular project that are heavy with pictures and provide more details about the project than the project list.  These are used as backup to augment the marketing package.  Once a template is designed, these can be built pretty easily to showcase individual projects. 

Key Personnel – Professional Résumés:  Building a professional résumé marketing piece that showcases the experience of all the key project personnel is very powerful.  These should be maintained for all personnel from superintendent through the senior management.  Your people and their collective experience is a key differentiating factor. 

Intro Letter:  Design a template of an introduction letter that can be easily modified when sending this marketing package. 

Website:  Your website should have at a minimum all the elements outlined above except formatted for the web. 

Every element of this marketing package should focus on your differentiating factors and your target market.  No matter how great your marketing looks in one area, it may be totally ineffective in another. 

Another thing to remember is that you need to simply be “Good enough” when it comes to building this package.  After a certain point, brochures don’t get shinier and résumés don’t get any better.  Set a strict time limit to producing this collateral in a first draft format and make the commitment to getting it out there. 

A future topic I’ll cover in another post will be actually putting this package into use – remember that the best marketing materials won’t do anything for your business unless you are getting them in the hands of potential clients.