How to grow your franchise

If you try to deliver every service to everyone you’ll end up targeting no one, this is exactly the same in every single industry whatever you may be working in. For example in the cleaning industry every cleaner had a different skill set depending on what sort of work they do, domestic cleaners generally don’t do as well in offices and office cleaners don’t do as well at end of build cleans, there are of course exceptions however this is the general rule of thumb therefore before you try and scale your business know exactly who you are trying to target.

By knowing exactly who you are going to target you can then tailor your customer service offering, I know of many people who would go somewhere else and pay more so that they get a better customer service, so by targeting a specific niche you can really target that customer service as with everything you need to be testing and measuring. Many people say you can’t test and measure customer service but this simply isn’t true, you can use some simplest forms such as asking the question what did you think of the service? you can run referral programmes, if someone isn’t happy or thinks the service is just ok then chances are they aren’t going to refer you to anyone.

But to really grow a business you need to do more than niche and offer customer service you need to be able to actively increase your revenue, one of the fastest and easiest ways to do this is to attend networking events, by growing your network your business instantly has a wider reach. Think about the last time you were having a conversation with someone and they said I need a X – Painter, builder, cleaner, accountant whatever it may be, by being a part of a network you are putting yourself into a position that when people ask for a cleaner you will be on the tip of their tongue and as we all know generally it is easier to get a client through a recommendation than to go out and try to win the client through paid advertising.

There are however a lot of other ways to build your revenue through marketing, the thing to remember is that marketing has to be an investment and therefore you can’t just try one thing you have to try many. Not all marketing has to be paid for though, by creating a social media page and asking friends and family to follow it you will start your journey. You could also try making leaflets and asking your current clients to give them out if they think they know anyone that might need your services.

The most important thing though is to measure everything, know exactly how many leaflets you put out, how many calls came from it? How many sales came from it from there work out how much money you made and then you can see if it’s worth your time to continue doing it. If it costs you £300 to deliver leaflets and only generates 1 piece of work, is it worth it? maybe depending on the cost of the job.

This doesn’t have to be done on a fancy spreadsheet; it can be done on a simple notebook but the important thing is to make sure that you measure everything, every call, every sale, everything.