9-to-5's Versus Marketing Your Own Business
2024-11-25 14:22
business

Doing contracting jobs or running your own business is a great way to eventually earn schedule freedom and perhaps financial freedom too. But you have to work hard at it for a while before it pays off.

Normal shift jobs: You show up, do what you're told, go home, and generally get paid dirt bottom wages (like $7.50-20/hour US, depending on location), which are usually more than enough to live on if you have the cheapest living arrangement and no debt. But if you do have considerable rent or mortgage or vehicle or credit card debt, then you're kind of boned. Honestly, if you're stuck in a loop you may as well declare bankruptcy unless you have reason to believe one of your first few business ventures would actually be successful.

For choosing a field to work in:
Do skilled manual labor: Electricity, plumbing, roofing, building/construction, automobile repair, even clearing land and farming... this stuff is always in demand and typically isn't as hard to learn as you think (especially if you're a nerd). There may be some government licenses involved, those tests are easy (if you're a nerd).

Bad idea 1: Open a store to buy and sell something from another source... It's easy for people to buy stuff anywhere nowadays. If you're going to sell stuff, it should be your own handmade stuff and it should be something unique enough that the great China and Amazon catalogues don't have it yet.

Bad idea 2: Anything involving gambling, sports, or the stock market. Just stay the heck away from that stuff. Anyone can dump excess money into an index fund, but if you live in the real world you can probably find decent/good people to help with your excess cash.

Good idea 1: If you have some kind of service that can be sold or billed on a subscription: This makes your ideal customer's life easier and you keep getting paid for a minimal recurring service.

Marketing your service: You will want business cards. You will definitely want to get a hold of your ideal business customer's addresses (for mailing campaigns), phones, and emails (there are a few laws and some etiquette to all of these contact methods; but there are ways you can mail lists without being spam or annoying).
Generally hold off on paid campaigns until you've exhausted word of mouth.
Visit business places and talk to people who are likely to be customers or know customers.
The local chamber of commerce and any government facility related to your field are a good place to start. Local newspaper ads are also good. Location-targeted Google & Facebook ads are another way to make yourself known locally.
Don't blow the bank on mail/SERP/email marketing right away. But you can allocate small budgets and see if you get any decent results. Different businesses and locales have different optimal marketing methods so play around and experiment.

Have and monitor your contact methods: Mailbox, real office hours (if on a physical location), phone texts, emails, website contact form... Try and be the kind of person who answers all their business/personal emails without wasting anyone's time. Liberally say no to stupid/unprofitable requests — it only takes a second. Give people brief help and advice if they ask for it.

As far as emails go, generally you want to have a mailing list and only send to opted-in subscribers. When contacting new prospects, opt for an in-person visit or the phone or even mailing a brochure before resorting to cold emails.
One thing you can do if you run a service job, is to publish guides on how to do the repairs yourself (where there isn't an obvious safety hazard). If you save someone $500 on a plumbing job they can do at home with $20 of parts and a flashlight, they're likely to remember your name when they have a job that's too big for them to handle.

Now for business cards, I can tell you that plastic/vinyl cards last a lot longer and are more likely to stick around. If it looks pretty and fancy, some people might just keep it and pass it around for that reason alone!

When you have a happy deal, give the client several business cards or a lawn sign or something to help spread the word. I see a lot of lawn signs around here for home services (mowing, power washing, roofing...), people are clearly OK with displaying these ads in some cases.

Expect to lose money on some early jobs.
And it takes a while to build traction.
You've got to put a full effort on marketing your service in order to get the best results.

Ideally, you want to position yourself into a field that's underserved. The harder it is to get into the field, the less competition you'll have (although the "guild members" may be more ferocious than average).