Good evening and happy Wednesday everyone!
As you can tell from the title, this post will be the commencement of a weekly review of the progress my service based business has made and will make. In addition to serving as a source of accountability, I am hoping this regular posting will help keep things in the big picture for me. I tend to over analyze the micro and become overwhelmed when it comes to the macro. I’d also like to be able to help anyone else out. Even if one of my posts sparks a sense of determination to get sweaty in one reader, I think that’d be pretty cool. This first post on 9/22/2021 will be brief and i’m sure scatterbrained as I really have no idea how I want to do this. But here we go.
Introduction
Our family company, solely owned by myself and my father, has been through many many phases. It started out as my dad’s custom speaker design business, where he would design and build abstract speakers. He would craft beautiful speakers out of wood, metal, and anything else he could get his hands on, which acted mostly as a hobby. Over time, he started getting into residential audio video through various side jobs for family and friends. He realized a niche and started his own business doing audio video installations in 2010 after leaving his job. This work consisted of Home Theaters, Surveillance Cameras, Smart Home Automation, and TV Mountings.
Him and his business partner were in business for about 6 years when the business shut down. At their prime, they had 5 employees working for them and 3 vans on the road. I have no clue what numbers they were pulling in as I wasn’t involved at all at this point. Eventually, they kept getting less and less busy and decided it was time to close doors. This was because of a few different mistakes that were made. Mainly, there was zero marketing, no systems in place, and there was a reliance on third party contracts that eventually completely dried up. This led to the ultimate demise but allowed my dad to step back and realize where the business went wrong.
This is when I came into the picture. I had just graduated school with no idea of what I wanted to do. I began to help my dad out here and there, and eventually realized there is a golden opportunity with my dad’s experience and know-how. The services are extremely niche, the overhead is low, and most of the competition is overpriced Geek Squad or Magnolia through Best Buy. Over the last year or so, my dad and I have been working on building the business back up. I have been handling all online and back-end work while my dad is the master of production. We both have free time now more than ever so I figure now is the time to really grind it out and get sweaty. And document the process along the way.
Services Offered
We mainly do residential audio video installations consisting of:
In addition to residential services, we’d also like to move into commercial installations, such as:
I also just learned about sam.gov, so overtime it seems extremely lucrative to get into the contracting world with the fed. Our main issue would be the learning curve associated with bidding as well as installing certain technologies that we must become dealers for before anything else.
Marketing
Our current marketing is archaic, inefficient, and ineffective. Actually, scratch that! It’s essentially non-existent. I do our marketing. We post on facebook, run the occasional ad, sometimes post to Instagram, and that’s about it. We also use yard signs stapled to telephone poles. A simple batch of 12x18 signs has been getting us a steady drip of calls over the past year or so. Extremely cheap but it is a very time consuming - and nocturnal - activity. Our online directories are mostly all up to date. I realize the marketing area is yet again lacking. A campaign needs to be put together, but not before quality content is produced and our website is updated. When I say I post to facebook, we have about 10 posts total. Instagram has a few more posts but has been largely inactive. Google MyBusiness has 15 reviews, all 5 stars but one 1 star. This entire area is where my priorities should lay. How can we be hired if we’re not in front of our customers?
Competitors
There are about 2 small local guys that offer the same services, although we all battle with Best Buy who gets away with charging customers obscene prices for sub par installation quality. My pops and I are in a very condensed area and are relatively far away from the local competitors. We believe we can saturate our hometown and the 3 surrounding towns and capture most of the workload with the right marketing.
Financials
In the last 8 months, our revenue has been increasing & for the last 4 months we’ve averaged ~$7k in revenue. I’m new with this so i’m still in the process of learning the books. We own the work van, all of the tools needed, and we don’t employ anyone as of right now. I suspect we will gross about $100k in 2021.
Next Steps
Our next steps are to layout a whole marketing plan and to start producing content. I’d like to begin establishing a brand people will recognize, beginning by saturating our hometown market and growing outwards. Marketing needs to be the main priority, starting yesterday. I also need to identify where production processes can be improved or established. This includes customer relationship management, marketing automation, billing protocol, etc… I want to build a business that will run itself, I just don’t know how!
So this has been slightly scatterbrained, and I thank you for bearing with me. I’m not sure how I will continue with this each week but it will be more organized than this! I’m going to post about different strategies I try, our successes and failures, and everything in between. Let me know what you think! I look forward to documenting this journey.
Thanks
As you can tell from the title, this post will be the commencement of a weekly review of the progress my service based business has made and will make. In addition to serving as a source of accountability, I am hoping this regular posting will help keep things in the big picture for me. I tend to over analyze the micro and become overwhelmed when it comes to the macro. I’d also like to be able to help anyone else out. Even if one of my posts sparks a sense of determination to get sweaty in one reader, I think that’d be pretty cool. This first post on 9/22/2021 will be brief and i’m sure scatterbrained as I really have no idea how I want to do this. But here we go.
Introduction
Our family company, solely owned by myself and my father, has been through many many phases. It started out as my dad’s custom speaker design business, where he would design and build abstract speakers. He would craft beautiful speakers out of wood, metal, and anything else he could get his hands on, which acted mostly as a hobby. Over time, he started getting into residential audio video through various side jobs for family and friends. He realized a niche and started his own business doing audio video installations in 2010 after leaving his job. This work consisted of Home Theaters, Surveillance Cameras, Smart Home Automation, and TV Mountings.
Him and his business partner were in business for about 6 years when the business shut down. At their prime, they had 5 employees working for them and 3 vans on the road. I have no clue what numbers they were pulling in as I wasn’t involved at all at this point. Eventually, they kept getting less and less busy and decided it was time to close doors. This was because of a few different mistakes that were made. Mainly, there was zero marketing, no systems in place, and there was a reliance on third party contracts that eventually completely dried up. This led to the ultimate demise but allowed my dad to step back and realize where the business went wrong.
This is when I came into the picture. I had just graduated school with no idea of what I wanted to do. I began to help my dad out here and there, and eventually realized there is a golden opportunity with my dad’s experience and know-how. The services are extremely niche, the overhead is low, and most of the competition is overpriced Geek Squad or Magnolia through Best Buy. Over the last year or so, my dad and I have been working on building the business back up. I have been handling all online and back-end work while my dad is the master of production. We both have free time now more than ever so I figure now is the time to really grind it out and get sweaty. And document the process along the way.
Services Offered
We mainly do residential audio video installations consisting of:
- Home Theater Installation
- TV Mounting
- Surveillance Cameras
- Smart Home Automation
In addition to residential services, we’d also like to move into commercial installations, such as:
- Surveillance Cameras
- Access Control (access to multi-family units, apartment buildings, etc…)
- Automation Systems
- Conference Room/Teleconferencing
- Prewiring
I also just learned about sam.gov, so overtime it seems extremely lucrative to get into the contracting world with the fed. Our main issue would be the learning curve associated with bidding as well as installing certain technologies that we must become dealers for before anything else.
Marketing
Our current marketing is archaic, inefficient, and ineffective. Actually, scratch that! It’s essentially non-existent. I do our marketing. We post on facebook, run the occasional ad, sometimes post to Instagram, and that’s about it. We also use yard signs stapled to telephone poles. A simple batch of 12x18 signs has been getting us a steady drip of calls over the past year or so. Extremely cheap but it is a very time consuming - and nocturnal - activity. Our online directories are mostly all up to date. I realize the marketing area is yet again lacking. A campaign needs to be put together, but not before quality content is produced and our website is updated. When I say I post to facebook, we have about 10 posts total. Instagram has a few more posts but has been largely inactive. Google MyBusiness has 15 reviews, all 5 stars but one 1 star. This entire area is where my priorities should lay. How can we be hired if we’re not in front of our customers?
Competitors
There are about 2 small local guys that offer the same services, although we all battle with Best Buy who gets away with charging customers obscene prices for sub par installation quality. My pops and I are in a very condensed area and are relatively far away from the local competitors. We believe we can saturate our hometown and the 3 surrounding towns and capture most of the workload with the right marketing.
Financials
In the last 8 months, our revenue has been increasing & for the last 4 months we’ve averaged ~$7k in revenue. I’m new with this so i’m still in the process of learning the books. We own the work van, all of the tools needed, and we don’t employ anyone as of right now. I suspect we will gross about $100k in 2021.
Next Steps
Our next steps are to layout a whole marketing plan and to start producing content. I’d like to begin establishing a brand people will recognize, beginning by saturating our hometown market and growing outwards. Marketing needs to be the main priority, starting yesterday. I also need to identify where production processes can be improved or established. This includes customer relationship management, marketing automation, billing protocol, etc… I want to build a business that will run itself, I just don’t know how!
So this has been slightly scatterbrained, and I thank you for bearing with me. I’m not sure how I will continue with this each week but it will be more organized than this! I’m going to post about different strategies I try, our successes and failures, and everything in between. Let me know what you think! I look forward to documenting this journey.
Thanks