Greetings Floor Dealers! About two-thirds of my coaching for flooring retailers focuses on marketing and making more money. The other third focuses on helping dealers engineer their businesses so they can have the time and freedom to enjoy the fruits of their labors. After all, what's the point of investing the enormous amount of time, [...]
Greetings Floor Dealers! In the last installment, I made the case that the main purpose of your flooring business is not to provide jobs, sell stuff, help customers, or even to make money. (Or to keep your brother-in-law employed and out of jail.) The main purpose is this: to fund and facilitate your ideal lifestyle. [...]
Greetings Floor Dealers! JIM: What is your goal for your business? FLOOR DEALER: To make more money. JIM: What's important to you about making more money? December is a great time for floor retailers to begin setting goals for the upcoming twelve months. However, for most entrepreneurs 'setting goals' means figuring out how to make more [...]
Greetings Floor Dealers! Before I moved to Colorado, there is a lube shop I used to patronize that had such great customer service that I wrote a couple of articles about them, and even talked about them in some of my training manuals for flooring dealers. When I pulled up to the work bay—and before [...]
Greetings Floor Dealers! FLOOR DEALER: The newspaper ad guy says you've got to run an ad at least 7 times before people start to respond. JIM: If you run an ad and no responds, do you know what will happen if you run the ad 7 more times? FLOOR DEALER: What? JIM: People won't [...]
Greetings Floor Dealers! JIM: What's the "Big Promise" in your ad? FLOOR DEALER: That we guarantee to have the lowest prices. JIM: Let me guess…you get beat up on price a lot. FLOOR DEALER: Yep. Before you read this article I want you to do a quick two-minute exercise. Google "flooring retailers" in your town [...]
Greetings Floor Dealers! I've spoken with many floor dealers who were extremely discouraged with the advertising results they'd gotten from websites, newspaper ads, letters, postcards, email, flyers, etc. They are often convinced that the advertising media itself was ineffective, when many times it was the message being delivered that was responsible for the campaign bombing. [...]
Greetings Floor Dealers! FLOOR DEALER: What do you think of my ad? JIM: It's got your business name at the top, a list of products, and contact information, just like your competitor's Name, Rank and Serial Number ads. FLOOR DEALER: So what do you think? JIM: I think you should start over. In the last [...]
Greetings Floor Dealers! FLOOR DEALER: Our prospects throw away our mailers without opening them. JIM: Put a sample-packet of aspirin in the envelope next time. FLOOR DEALER: A what??? How many times have you pulled a big stack of mail out of your mailbox and stood next to the trash can, putting your bills [...]
Greetings Floor Dealers! FLOOR DEALER: We've tried direct mail, but we quit using it. JIM: What kind of results did you get? FLOOR DEALER: Lousy. I was on a coaching call with Tim, a dealer who had recently joined Flooring Success Systems, and I asked him what kind of results he was getting from [...]