On my continuing theme concerning spreading out your business risk and giving yourself a much better opportunity to succeed, we’ll continue on with a different type of business as an example of diversity of markets.
I was consulting with a company that realized that doing home repairs and the seasonal nature of the business, left it open to risk of failure or continuous loss of good employees that were hard to find as they had to cut back on hours as the season slowed down.
So in looking at other services that could be offered that complemented that which they already did, this is what I told them to do and they responded and implemented.
They looked for something that was on a contract basis throughout the whole year so that there could be predictability of income. They did this through bidding on cleaning and repairing HUD homes that opened up after they were moved out of or abandoned. They won this contract. So now they had individual owners and HUD as clients. This was also an excellent move as when there was a lot of business during the peak remodeling season, they could outsource the work through a bidding process and have the best of both worlds.
Next they looked at the various customers they had been remodeling for and found that they had a number of clients that owned homes or apartments as investments. So they researched the area of managing property and then called upon these people who were already satisfied with there service and won a number of clients in that area. Again creating revenue that was steady throughout the whole year.
Not only that but then they discovered that there were a number of times that existing clients would ask them about selling their homes. This led to developing a reality as part of their ongoing strategy.
As you can see, all of this has developed steady income which resulted in being able to keep and attract key employees, filled in seasonal holes in revenue, and diversified to the degree that if any one thing suffered, it would just be a small bump in the road.
Take a look at the business you are in to find the needs of the customer base you have, and expand them into various services and products.
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I have been continuously touting the need for businesses to branch out into several markets as a safety net and a vehicle for growth. Along with that I have been mentioning that promotion of your online business cannot be... [Read More]
Tracked on: February 10, 2006 6:45 PM | Permalink to Trackback