Today I bought 6000 postcards.
It took me 5 weeks to summon up the courage to spend $3000 on postcards and a mailing list.
The cards will go out in 3 waves to 2000 very targeted people in my area. Hopefully I will get 2 people to buy flooring from me so I can break even. If nobody responds then it's back to the drawing board.
I am not a risk taker by nature. When I look back at some of the "risky" things I've done, most of them were somewhat hedged. I tend to take risks that have a plan B, C, D and E so that I can get my money back, preferably with friends attached.
In this case I have taken care to target potential customers with large houses, in expensive neighborhoods so that I will need fewer jobs to recover my postcard expense. Big houses means more flooring and expensive neighborhoods means more expensive flooring. By doing this I expect each job to be 2.5x more profitable than the smaller homes in my neighborhood. That means I only need a 0.2% response rate if I close half of my leads. It's much safer to advertise to big houses.
Advertising is the kind of activity that most people avoid because on the surface it looks like a waste of money. Plus, it's a lot of money for most new business owners to spend on something that isn't tangible. Buying a truck or tools or business cards is easy. You have something to show for it and you could get your money back and sell most of those items if you had to.
Buying advertising is not easy.
It is nerve-racking.
Now that it's done I'm excited to see the results. If I get a 0.5% response rate and I close half of the leads I'll get 5 jobs and then I'll send out more post cards. As long as it is profitable I will continue to send post cards to build my business. My goal is to have 1 job for every weekday. That means 250 jobs per year.
It takes courage to start a business...to let go of something so precious and sought after as money.
Plus it might fail.
But, if it works (and it has a better than 50% chance in my estimation) then I can't afford not to do it. 250 jobs per year, all derived from postcards, it too much money to pass up just because I'm afraid.
The postcards land in 2 weeks. I'll keep you posted.
