NEED HELP WITH GETTING NEW WORK

[tim_white]

WE ARE A VERY SMALL TOWN AND BUSINESS, THINGS ARE GETTING SLOW AND WE WANT TO GET INTO MORE MANUFACTURING WITH ARE SHOPBOT, ANY IDEA'S WOULD HELP GREATLY THANKS SO MUCH

TIM

[phil_o]

Do you have a website? A website can greatly expand you're market.

[olecrafty]

Check out custommade.com You may find a listing there will help your business. This site is very economical and is good exposure. The site usually comes up in the first ten listings on most search engines.

Kaiwa
olecrafty@charter.net

[Brady Watson]

Tim,
The website is definately a good idea. As far as getting business quickly, I would do some more socializing in your town. Stop by the local hardware store and leave a card and introduce yourself. You never know when someone will need something that they cannot find. Hobby stores are another good one. You will always make good money catering to people's hobbies. They don't want an engraved trash can...they want you to cut out something for their train platform or their R/C airplane. I know that churches are a good outlet and they always have some kind of fund raiser or Christmas Bazaar etc. There has to be some kind of knick knack that you can develop and distribute via those channels.

I am not sure what kind of work you have been doing or what you really want to be doing...Some things require fabrication while others are straight CNC work. If you are into making signs, start looking for places that need one, make a software rendering of it in Corel or whatever software you use and stop by to talk to the owner.

Hope that helps,
-Brady

[tim_white]

thanks to all of you guys for all your help, and i really want to do cnc work no fab if pos. i will try a web site thanks again

tim

[paco]

I plan too to create me a WEB site... just wondering how it really getting more jobs?... Do you get "far away" jobs?
Tell me more...

Thanks in advance!

[elcruisr]

Tim,
I don't know what the situation is like in your area but the most effective thing for us was getting with every woodshop, sign shop, plastics fabricator, counter top shop, etc we coud find in about a 50 mile radius. We made multiple visits and showed up with samples. We explained how we could increase their production by processing their labor intensive (ie curved, complex, engraved, etc) or repetetive parts. Most didn't listen but enough did to keep us going full time. Several have expanded their business because of their work with us. It starts, though, with you convincing them you can either save them money or expand their market for them. Make sure to do your home work and know your stuff when you meet them! Then make sure you deliver as promised...

Our website does bring in the occasional job but we have far more business from face to face contacts.

Eric

[gerald_d]

Don't overestimate what a web site can do for you. A web site is a backup for samples and a portfolio file. Realise that your best potential customers are those that are going to give you repeat business, ie. those that are wanting to form a permanent business relationship with you. And those guys want to look you up and down and shake your hand - judge your self-assurance and maybe your over/under confidence. The personal contact and the free samples are very important. I would say that web sites should be less than 20% of your marketing effort - personal contact should be more than 50%

In our area, the wood and plastics shops have the names of some "processing companies" lying on their counter, or stuck to the wall next to the payment point etc. We make sure that our name is also visible there (we have a CNC cut business card holder that stands on some of their counters) and we only buy from guys who are happy to promote our name and services. And we are nice to, and chat to, our informal "salesmen" - their referrals count a lot.

If ever we wanted to go for a niche market, I think we could make a living purely on cutting ovals or circles. We are amazed at the number of people who get referred to us by board merchants because we cut neat circles and ellipses. Picture frames, mirror frames, cutting boards, café table tops, bar-stool tops, etc.

Put hours in - lot's of them. Our business tel. calls are mostly in the mornings 9-12, that when customers expect us to answer our phone quickly - they have remembered something during their commute to work, and want to get it off their "to do" list. So we try to do the computer work in that time, and the shop is more quiet than other times. Going out to suppliers and clients is better in the afternoon - their phones have also calmed down by then. The best time for high volume cutting is from 5 to 9 in the morning, and after 3 in the afternoon. In the early days of starting a business, expect to put in 70+ hours a week, and expect that half that time is spent promoting yourself (calling and making samples) without any sales result. If you really want to do a web site, leave that for the weekend, to do from home.

Nobody said it was going to be easy, did they?

[richards]

Tim,

I'm going to agree with Eric and Gerald. It's been my experience that a web site should NOT be your main marketing tool. In my opinion, it should be the last thing you do UNLESS you're trying to market a product to customers outside of your local area or unless the web site can increase your efficiency.

In your post, you said that you were located in a very small town. It seems to me that it would be fairly simple to physically visit every possible client in your town within a reasonable amount of time. If you know your customers, if you know the kind of work that each customer would need, and if you have some samples that show that you can do the job better or faster, you might make a sale - after several visits.

How many local customers would you pick up with a web site? My guess is that few local people, in a very small town, would decide to use your services simply because of a web site. HOWEVER, if you do have a web site and if you have a product that has wide-spread demand, have you considered the problems you might have in communicating design details, problems in shipping high volumes of goods via UPS, FEDERAL EXPRESS or the various trucking firms? Have you considered how you would be paid and how you would handle returns and rejects? Not having local customers can and will create certain kinds of problems.

With those caveats in mind, there is a place for a web site. Right now, I'm sitting at the computer console of one of my biggest customers. (My main business for the last twenty-five years has been process control computer design and programming.) This morning I got an urgent call to check the main web server. In any case, this particular customer has had a web page for several years. In tracking their sales that originated directly from their web page, they realized that their costs to operate, maintain, and modify their web site were about $40,000 a year more than direct sales from the web site. As soon as they realized that they were, in effect, throwing good money down a bottomless hole, they looked for other ways to use the web site. Now they have a service that allows their customers to upload digital files directly to their business. This new service has reduced time-in-house from 5 days to 1 day, reduced pick-up/delivery costs by 1/2, and increased sales (in the digital area) by more than 100%. In other words, they used the web site to make their business more efficient. Those customers that have high-speed Internet service are happy, while those customers that still have dial-up modems have to do things the old way.

One other piece of advice that I always give freely - even when it isn't asked for, is that learning how to use a speadsheet effectively is a basic requirement for any self-employed person. If you don't have a spreadsheet, buy one or download the excellent (and free) OpenOffice package. Run a break-even analysis on every product that you sell (If you're not familiar with break-even analysis, talk to your accountant or even to the person at your local High School that teaches accounting.) Whatever you do, don't fudge the numbers. Find out exactly the quantity and price of each product you have to cut to break even. By playing with quantity and price, you'll find out how to price your work for a small run and how to price your work for a large run. AND, if you're a one-man-shop, realize that you'll need to spend 40-50% of your time selling and taking care of business. That only leaves you with 50-60% of the time to produce product. Price your work accordingly, or you'll find that you'll be tied to your business 70-100 hours per week forever. Believe me, that gets old after 25-30 years.

[gerald_d]

Something else that we learnt, is not to compete with our clients. We have to complement their business, not become a potential threat. We know that CNC routing is our strength and we sell only that. We don't do sanding, assembly and finishing - there are many guys doing that well already.

Redding has 80 000 people, Cape Town has 1.5 million, so please realise that our situation is not the same as yours.