Business Development Consultant Kathy Neilsen shares how home services businesses can respond by playing to their strengths during the COVID-19 crisis. From tips to increase lead volume to what steps you can take to evaluate your business honestly, these are important measures every business owner can embrace. 

Be Honest

Kathy highlights that now is the time to really sit down and evaluate your business. Be honest with how you’re doing and what direction you’re going in. Own those key financial indicators, and where you might have blind spots. For technicians turned owners, identifying these gaps in your business knowledge and experience can help you solve big picture problems. 

Marketing During a Crisis

Similar to your seasonal marketing, Kathy emphasizes the importance of making sure your ads are relevant to what is going on. 

Some businesses might be thriving right now, others may be slower. Look at where you can do some spring cleaning in your downtime or how you can make your business more efficient. Her recommendations include:

• Clean Your Email List: Go through your database and make sure your list is full of people who are viable customers in your area of service.
• Organize Your Financials: Go through your spreadsheets and identify any errors that you may be repeating in a normal workflow and fix them.
• Connect With Customers: Reach out to your customers during this time to see how they are doing and how you can help them. They will be grateful for the thoughtful call. Most importantly, this is a chance to build trust and let your people know you are there for them, even if it’s just to drop off complimentary hand sanitizer or notify them about a service discount.
• Highlight Your Services: While your company may be well-known for your larger services, make sure you give your smaller services some time in the spotlight. People are spending more time at home which is putting more wear and tear on basic home appliances and units that your customers may be unaware you can service for them.

“A lot of people have never spent this much time in their home, so their dishwasher is getting used - ours gets used almost every day now, we never did that before - your disposal, all those things. So let people know ‘Hey, we can do maintenance on things, we can do repairs.’ Again, customers don’t realize you do a lot of things. You think they know, but just really they are unaware until it’s needed.”

How Is Your Team Wired?

In order to be successful, you need to do what you are wired to do. By spending time understanding how everyone on your team is wired and how their talents can align with a specific job, your business will be more efficient.  

Now is also a great opportunity to zero in on the processes and workflow that your business runs on. Will it be able to run smoothly if someone is out sick? 

Kathy shares that it’s important to realize that in order to manage well, you need to know how you can delegate and put people in the “right seat on the bus” as Jim Collins, renowned business consultant and author says. 

“A lot of people don’t like to let everybody know how they do something, it’s human nature, because then they think they’ll be out a job or not be needed, but the truth is that then they can do something that they’re amazing at instead of going to do this other stuff that maybe they’re just not wired for.” 

Advice

1. Now is the time to allow people to fail in order to learn and grow.
2. Be really clear on your language and intent when communicating with your team and customers since so much is being relayed over phone and email.

Learn more about Kathy’s consulting expertise at Kathy Neilsen.