Do you know who your customers are? Sounds like a simple question, but I’ve talked to hundreds of contractors over the years and I’ve come to understand there’s some confusion about this. The simple answer is “everyone.” Everyone is your customer. The building owner. The architect. The head of the private equity group that’s providing the funding. The subcontractors. The building inspector. The neighbor who happens to be related to the largest commercial real estate developer in town.
Keeping those people happy can help you build a base of repeat and referral business. If your company can get more repeat and referral business, you can spend less money marketing for new customers and less time bidding and negotiating for projects you’ll likely never land anyway. Repeat and referral business is the inside track.
Anyone who’s been in the construction business for more than a day knows, though, that you can do a thousand things right, but it only takes one mistake to bring your reputation crashing down. Why? Because bad news spreads faster than good news. If you mess up on a project-miss the deadline by a month, place a wrong order or install a tricky detail incorrectly-everyone on that list will eventually hear about it. And since everyone is a potential referral, you’re losing customers.
Your entire marketing strategy should be geared toward getting the referral. To get the referral, you have to do everything on the job correctly and make the customer happy. It’s that simple and that difficult all in one. Because if everyone is your customer, it’s almost always impossible to keep everyone happy. Keeping one sub happy almost always means making another subcontractor unhappy because he has to redo his schedule. Still, keeping the end game in mind-get the referral-makes handling the tough decisions easier.
Now, here’s a more difficult question: Do your employees know who your customers are? Your crew doesn’t need to speak the King’s English and wear ascots, but following the basic courtesies when the building owner is on-site just makes good sense, and can go a long way to keep relations smooth. Your employees-like your trucks, signs, website and office space-are extensions of your brand.
When people call your office, are they spoken to kindly? Do their messages get passed on? Does the employee answering the call handle the inquiry completely? I can tell you from having called thousands of contracting offices that getting a polite, proficient voice on the other end of the line raises my sense of the company’s competence significantly. It’s that simple. When you consider that any person is a potential customer, the value of civility takes on even greater meaning.
