- Mar 10, 2010
- 42,695
- 107,111
I'd like to share with you something I did that generated just under 1 million dollars of revenue for a company I owned over a 4 year period.
Back in the 90's I owned a bottled water company, the kind of company that sold 5 gallon bottles of water and rented water coolers on a monthly basis.
My business was about 65% commercial clients and 35% residential clients and that was by design. The residential clients would pay quicker but had less volume and that cash flow kept my business running so that I could wait for the commercial clients that had larger volume to pay their bills.
In that business, the fastest way to grow the clientele was to go door to door to businesses and offer the service on a trial basis. Give them one month free rental and 4 free bottles of water and if they wanted to keep the service, I then started billing them for the cooler rental and set them up on a delivery schedule; generally every 2 or 4 weeks.
By calling on businesses, I would also generate residential clients from the business owners as well as the people that worked in those businesses.
One thing I would do though is when working an area, I would hit every business no matter how big or how small because you just do not know what lies behind that door when you approach it.
The business was doing well even though I was under capitalized because I would work from 4:00 AM until 8:00 PM 6 days a week (yeah, I was and still am a bit of a work-a-holic) but that was what was actually necessary to make it work in the first few years.
One day, I'm out cold calling on businesses (I always did that face to face) and I came upon a company that was building a coal fired power plant in the area that I was working and went to the trailer on the property where the purchasing manager had his office.
I walked in, introduced myself, explained a little about my company, my products and my pricing and asked him what he was doing for his bottled water needs. He told me that he was using "Competitor A" and was happy with both the product and service and asked why I was different than the other guy.
I explained that I knew "Competitor A" had a good product and I was sure that his service was fine and that I doubt that if he changed companies that he would see much difference in either. I told him that we both put our customers on routes and that we assigned well trained drivers to serve our clients and that we both had to pass the same FDA requirements so in essence the difference would be negligible.
I thanked him for taking time to talk with me, gave him my card and also wrote my cell down on the card in the event that he had an emergency and that "Competitor A" was unavailable and I would be glad to try and help.
Back then, my cell phone bill was in the 500.00 neighborhood monthly.
Lo and behold a few weeks later my cell rings on a Sunday and it's the purchasing manager, "BTB, this is Jim from "Texas based coal fired power plant building company and I need some water real fast... can you help me out?"
He had 50 bottles of water inside of an hour of course and a few days later called me up and asked me to come and get the empty bottles. We went up there to get the bottles and thank him for the business and in the course of the conversation he said, "You know what, Bleep Competitor A, if he can't serve me when I need to be served, I don't want him. How fast can you get me 200 water coolers and 1000 bottles of water?"
2 days later, I am delivering a truck load of water every day, 7 days a week to that job site as well as so much block ice that I was the biggest customer of the local ice manufacturing plant and billing him 4,500.00 a week.
Fast forward to a couple of years down the road... the coal fired power plant is winding down and I'm slowly picking up water coolers from them, dialing back on the volume of water being delivered and I see that the city is putting out a bid for bottled water and water coolers.
I get a copy of the bid as well as the pricing of the current company that is serving the city, read it over, pound out some numbers on a calculator and put in a bid.
Now, when you are bidding a big contract with a major municipality, you have to prove that you have the wherewithal to buy the necessary equipment as well as the assets to serve that municipality.
The purchasing agent for the city calls me in and begins to tell me that he thinks I am too small an outfit to give him the service he requires.
Fortunately, I was prepared as I had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen as I've dealt with cities, counties as well as a state when working for others so I showed him the titles to all my trucks (all paid for), the list of current inventory of bottled water coolers (all paid for), my business bank statements for the past 6 months and had a letter of recommendation from the power plant purchasing agent.
That kept him from precluding me from the bidding process... we won the bid and it was a 250,000.00 year contract for 2 years.
A year and a half into the contract, I sold the business to three separate people for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So, just by being diligent and making sure that I didn't skip one door to knock on, I ended up generating somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 million dollars.
You SEO guys, don't leave one stone unturned, be faithful in your marketing.
You guys with 1 site or 100 sites, make sure that you take full advantage of the site and don't just aim for one KW, mix it up, add in others and you'll end up with more traffic and more revenue.
You service providers, offer a quality product and good service, go the extra mile especially when you don't want to and you may just land a big client.
Those of you that work offline jobs, make sure that whatever you do, that you outwork the other guy and you'll succeed.
Offline business owners, take some of what I have shared and implement it in whatever way works for you and get that extra customer, additional client and build your revenue.
Are you a commissioned sales person? There are some things in this post that can really make you money.
Hopefully some of you can take some of the above, adapt it to your personal situation and end up increasing your revenue, making your savings account larger and giving you a better lifestyle.
Back in the 90's I owned a bottled water company, the kind of company that sold 5 gallon bottles of water and rented water coolers on a monthly basis.
My business was about 65% commercial clients and 35% residential clients and that was by design. The residential clients would pay quicker but had less volume and that cash flow kept my business running so that I could wait for the commercial clients that had larger volume to pay their bills.
In that business, the fastest way to grow the clientele was to go door to door to businesses and offer the service on a trial basis. Give them one month free rental and 4 free bottles of water and if they wanted to keep the service, I then started billing them for the cooler rental and set them up on a delivery schedule; generally every 2 or 4 weeks.
By calling on businesses, I would also generate residential clients from the business owners as well as the people that worked in those businesses.
One thing I would do though is when working an area, I would hit every business no matter how big or how small because you just do not know what lies behind that door when you approach it.
The business was doing well even though I was under capitalized because I would work from 4:00 AM until 8:00 PM 6 days a week (yeah, I was and still am a bit of a work-a-holic) but that was what was actually necessary to make it work in the first few years.
One day, I'm out cold calling on businesses (I always did that face to face) and I came upon a company that was building a coal fired power plant in the area that I was working and went to the trailer on the property where the purchasing manager had his office.
I walked in, introduced myself, explained a little about my company, my products and my pricing and asked him what he was doing for his bottled water needs. He told me that he was using "Competitor A" and was happy with both the product and service and asked why I was different than the other guy.
I explained that I knew "Competitor A" had a good product and I was sure that his service was fine and that I doubt that if he changed companies that he would see much difference in either. I told him that we both put our customers on routes and that we assigned well trained drivers to serve our clients and that we both had to pass the same FDA requirements so in essence the difference would be negligible.
I thanked him for taking time to talk with me, gave him my card and also wrote my cell down on the card in the event that he had an emergency and that "Competitor A" was unavailable and I would be glad to try and help.
Back then, my cell phone bill was in the 500.00 neighborhood monthly.
Lo and behold a few weeks later my cell rings on a Sunday and it's the purchasing manager, "BTB, this is Jim from "Texas based coal fired power plant building company and I need some water real fast... can you help me out?"
He had 50 bottles of water inside of an hour of course and a few days later called me up and asked me to come and get the empty bottles. We went up there to get the bottles and thank him for the business and in the course of the conversation he said, "You know what, Bleep Competitor A, if he can't serve me when I need to be served, I don't want him. How fast can you get me 200 water coolers and 1000 bottles of water?"
2 days later, I am delivering a truck load of water every day, 7 days a week to that job site as well as so much block ice that I was the biggest customer of the local ice manufacturing plant and billing him 4,500.00 a week.
Fast forward to a couple of years down the road... the coal fired power plant is winding down and I'm slowly picking up water coolers from them, dialing back on the volume of water being delivered and I see that the city is putting out a bid for bottled water and water coolers.
I get a copy of the bid as well as the pricing of the current company that is serving the city, read it over, pound out some numbers on a calculator and put in a bid.
Now, when you are bidding a big contract with a major municipality, you have to prove that you have the wherewithal to buy the necessary equipment as well as the assets to serve that municipality.
The purchasing agent for the city calls me in and begins to tell me that he thinks I am too small an outfit to give him the service he requires.
Fortunately, I was prepared as I had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen as I've dealt with cities, counties as well as a state when working for others so I showed him the titles to all my trucks (all paid for), the list of current inventory of bottled water coolers (all paid for), my business bank statements for the past 6 months and had a letter of recommendation from the power plant purchasing agent.
That kept him from precluding me from the bidding process... we won the bid and it was a 250,000.00 year contract for 2 years.
A year and a half into the contract, I sold the business to three separate people for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So, just by being diligent and making sure that I didn't skip one door to knock on, I ended up generating somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 million dollars.
You SEO guys, don't leave one stone unturned, be faithful in your marketing.
You guys with 1 site or 100 sites, make sure that you take full advantage of the site and don't just aim for one KW, mix it up, add in others and you'll end up with more traffic and more revenue.
You service providers, offer a quality product and good service, go the extra mile especially when you don't want to and you may just land a big client.
Those of you that work offline jobs, make sure that whatever you do, that you outwork the other guy and you'll succeed.
Offline business owners, take some of what I have shared and implement it in whatever way works for you and get that extra customer, additional client and build your revenue.
Are you a commissioned sales person? There are some things in this post that can really make you money.
Hopefully some of you can take some of the above, adapt it to your personal situation and end up increasing your revenue, making your savings account larger and giving you a better lifestyle.
