The idea of streamlining your plumbing business operations might sound as difficult as rebuilding your truck while it careens down the highway at 60 miles per hour. But, if you don’t focus on efficiency, you might find the wheels falling off at the worst time imaginable!
This is why we’ve created this Plumbing Business Bootcamp.
We’ve highlighted three key areas where you can make small, but transformative changes to streamline your plumbing business that will create lasting change and meaningful improvements:
- Leadership and Operations
- Bookkeeping and Sales
- Marketing and Outreach
Growth doesn’t have to be painful, but there comes a time where your business should be working for you, not the other way around. Let’s discuss:
I. Shape Up Your Plumbing Business Leadership and Operations
“It’s up to us to provide solid reasons for our employees to want to work for us, over and beyond their compensation.” – Danny Meyer
Commit to Your Why
Before you can ask for passion from your staff, you need to understand why you created your business in the first place.
This starts with crafting a compelling mission statement and company vision.
Once you’ve revealed why your company exists, you can use that to direct your decisions that will touch on all aspects of your plumbing business.
This is a meaningful and highly personal exploration. But it also aids in recruitment, sales and marketing. Not to mention culture and communication.
Create a Compelling Culture
Your plumbing business has a culture, whether you set out to create one or not. And this means more than mandating casual Fridays, or team happy hours once a month.
Your culture acts as the ligaments that keep the bones of your business moving.
Workplace culture can greatly help or wildly hinder your relationship with your staff and your clients. This is why it’s so vital to take a close look at the interpersonal functions within your operations.
Download our FREE Plumber Hiring Guide to SUPERCHARGE recruitment for your plumbing business!
Clear and Considerate Communication
Haven’t focused on cultivating a healthy culture at your business? Think of communication as the flare that is shot in the dark by your culture boat that’s lost at sea.
In other words, if you’re attentive enough, you can spot culture issues that might need addressing when you survey the communication styles of your staff.
Meeting regularly with your team to hear their comments and concerns helps to keep an eye on any growing discontentment within the ranks.
Also, avoid cryptic messages to your team. This is where clear communication is so important. Beyond respecting and valuing your staff, you don’t want to confuse them.
This is why using cloud-based software is such a game changer for intra-office and field staff communication. This way you know everyone, no matter where they are, is seeing the exact same information and documentation.
Not every issue can be resolved as easily. But it can feel transformative in helping your entire team feel included in the day-to-day operations of your business.
II. Modernize Your Bookkeeping and Sales
Cloud-Based Document Storage
You know what they say, you can only rise to the level of your available documentation. What? They don’t say that? Well, they should!
Sales and operations become less of a headache when everyone has access to the same information. This includes documentation, company information, and client profiles.
Make sure to store everything in the cloud. This will allow all information to be updated in real-time, and most importantly there’s only one version of the documents that any one member of your staff might be accessing.
This means there is less second-guessing. Less racing to find a file crammed into an overstuffed filing cabinet. And less confusion when serving your clients.
Be Kind to Your Bookkeeper
While cloud-based storage will drastically help your bookkeeping, you’ll also be happy to see how much this improvement will help you scale your plumbing business.
When you’ve got just one person balancing your books each month, it may seem easier to keep doing it the old-fashioned way. Pen and paper or a desktop-only software solution might fit just fine. But what if your business grows?
As soon as you have more than one person working on your books, you’ll do anything to avoid the headache of duplicated work, or incorrect figures as you try to close out your months.
These costly oversights might not get caught until further down the road, and then it becomes a massive headache to correct.
Integrating QuickBooks into your workflow helps, but that still requires attentive focus on all the data filtering in. That is, unless you use a plumbing software that features instant sync.
With QuickBooks instant sync, the data that your bookkeeper or office manager sees is always the most up-to-date figures available. Peace of mind, less errors, and all-in-all a less stressful process for your growing accounting team.
Multi-Option Quoting
This is another useful tool to consider when decreasing the stress around selling your clients on your services. Multi-option quoting is when you present multiple available service options to your customer at the point of purchase.
Many plumbers just want to get to work or get the job done. But oftentimes, growing your plumbing business means upselling on the job. That’s where multi-option quoting comes into play.
If you’re using the best plumbing software available, you likely already have the ability to serve up multi-option quotes.
You might find that you can increase your bottom line without increasing the stress or workload of your current staff!
Great Service Leads to Plumbing Business Sales
Sales become a snap when you lead with a service mindset. As soon as your customers feel that your focus is on great service, they’ll drop their defenses and sales will arise effortlessly.
It also helps to provide your customers the easiest ways to interact with your plumbing business by choosing a plumbing software with features like:
- Customer Portal
- Paperless Invoicing
- Online Payment Options
- Field Tech Dispatch Notifications
- Automatic Appointment Reminders
- Robust Customer Profiles that include notes and equipment inventory
Empower your teams to improve their sales skills by enhancing your plumbing company’s ability to serve.
See how FieldEdge can boost your communications and streamline your sales. Book your FREE personalized demo today!
Unlock the Power of Plumbing Business Cards
A great way to streamline sales is by increasing your repeat business.
It’s not all about fresh leads. Your client base can become a wealth of referrals and return business. So, make sure each of your field techs get in the habit of leaving behind two or three plumbing business cards.
You want each of your satisfied clients to have a few of your stellar plumbing business cards. Maybe these will get stuck to their fridge or just get handed over to friends, neighbors and co-workers. We recommend printing your plumbing business cards on magnets so they don’t get lost.
Score.org notes that verbal referrals have the highest percentage chance of converting to sales. A whopping 32 percent on average!
Be sure to equip your field team with enough plumbing business cards to be able to leave a few behind with each client that they serve each day.
III. Marketing and Outreach
Plumbing Business Marketing Personas
Always remain true to your brand identity and your mission statement. That said, not everyone responds to the same marketing messaging.
Understand your clients, but also understand how they’re different people with different motivations and different pain points.
Make sure your defined marketing personas are aligned with your target customer to get the most bang for your marketing buck. Think of a persona as a fully fleshed out character that matches your ideal target customer.
If you dissect your market and your desired client base, you may find more effective methods for targeting each group. Perhaps specific times of the year certain clients will need certain maintenance. In turn, specific neighborhoods in your region might suffer from a similar pain point.
Small changes to streamline how you approach your messaging, including tailoring outreach to different groups, could increase the effectiveness of your marketing far more than merely spending more on advertising.
Tracking Digital Campaigns
For marketing campaigns that you run online, you are afforded a wealth of tracking tools that don’t exist for physical mailers or door hangers.
With online marketing campaigns, you can track things like:
- Location: See where your messaging is generating attention. Use that information to focus marketing efforts.
- Open Rate: Specifically for email and text-based marketing, you can see the percentage of your customers open a communication. You’ll be able to A/B test lead-ins and titles to get your full message seen more frequently.
- Bounce Rate: Get clear data on what isn’t working by reviewing your bounce rates. If visitors or recipients don’t stay long on your marketing message, it clearly isn’t resonating with them.
- Conversion Rate: Follow your prospects along their sales journey and track once they convert into clients!
- Click-Thru Rate: A key metric for emails, texts, and any paid ads. This metric tracks how many people follow a link that you provide.
- Demographics: Who your customers are and what they like. This is useful in tuning campaigns and targeting future campaigns. And also helpful in defining your marketing personas.
Now that you know what to track, you can leverage all of this data when launching new campaigns. You can also track existing leads between campaigns to see if you’re getting closer to converting them into paying customers.
Optimize Your Plumbing Business Website
Think of your website as your digital plumbing business card. Streamline the content on your site to make your business easier to find when leads search for a plumbing business in your area.
First, make sure your site is mobile-optimized since 68.1 percent of traffic to your site will likely be from a mobile device.
You’ll want your website packed with vital information so you can be found by those that are searching in your service area. Certain bits of info are obvious, like your phone number, but other things that you’ll need to add aren’t quite as visible to your average visitor.
This content, called metadata, is used by Google and other search engines to understand how to rank your site compared to others when people search for businesses like yours. Consider the process of streamlining your site’s metadata as the first step in starting your SEO journey.
And if you’re ready to take the next steps in marketing your plumbing business, check out our Ultimate Plumber Marketing Guide!
Behold, Your Sleek and Refreshed Plumbing Business
Streamlining your plumbing business is not something you do in an afternoon. These changes can lead to transformative growth for your company, but only if you approach each with consideration and consistency.
In this bootcamp, we’ve shown you how to streamline three key areas of your plumbing business. Doing so will help with:
- Staff and client communication
- Stress-free sales
- Improved marketing and customer loyalty
Each category that we’ve discussed has a ripple effect that affects the other. However, you don’t necessarily have to tackle everything all at once. Start by defining why you created your business, focus on clear communication and a healthy workplace culture. At that point, you’ll have a sturdy base within your business to grow and address the other areas.
And let FieldEdge show you how much the best plumbing software can help you streamline all areas of your plumbing business. Book your FREE personalized demo today!
