Hi Dal, I absolutely love your book! I am a small business owner located in NY (Staten Island). I do not sell products, rather services. I feel once I have exhausted my clientele I will reach a road block. I am not interested in franchising, do you have a

Question

Hi Dal, I absolutely love your book! I am a small business owner located in NY (Staten Island). I do not sell products, rather services. I feel once I have exhausted my clientele I will reach a road block. I am not interested in franchising, do you have any ideas on how I can grow a service based business? Unlike the tweezers, I do not have a product, and selling services is a personal interaction with the client. I'd love to hear some of your ideas. Thanks in advance!

Submitted by Mike Grande

Answer

Obviously you are getting referrals from your existing customers. You might set up some kind of reward system for your existing customers to drive new customers to you. If you don't have a fan page on facebook set one up. Then you populate it with testimonials and information about you and your service. Then you can ask people to "like it" so their friends see they like your business. You could make an under 3 minutes video (funny if possible) that promotes your service and put it up on You Tube. Then include the link at the bottom of all your emails. That is the new way to promote yourself - on line. The oldest way - street marketing or guerrilla marketing - might also work. Nevertheless I would consider putting flyers on cars parked at the local supermarkets, posting these flyers on bulletin board everywhere in town and running ads in the church bulletins.

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Submitted by Anonymous on June 21, 2011 - 12:14pm.

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. Ahh, guerrilla marketing...my favorite. What I did this summer was pretty unique. I bought 30,000 napkins advertising my music school (the Staten Island School of Rock) and called up the local distributor for Ralph's Ices. Coming from NY, you must know how every kid comes running up to buy a Ralph's Ice in the summer. And naturally the parent is right behind them (money in hand) to buy them the ice. So every kid (and his mother) buying an ice gets one of my advertisement napkins. It's sort of a win win. I get free distribution of 30,000 napkins and the Ralph's Ices trucks get free napkins. However I have not seen much a return on those napkins. We also have refer-a-friend programs that offer free lessons to the people who bring in new students. I started a blog (Blog.SISchoolofRock.com) that is frequently updated with news and events. We also have a student of the week that we post with pictures of the students. I also have a Facebook page as well as use Facebook Ad's to advertise (pay per click). We play local venues (most of the time for free) to show off our talented teachers...All this and I feel like we are hitting that brick wall.

As far as flyers on cars. I tried that and was banned from the local mall parking lots. Turns out the mall owners feel most people throw the flyers on the floor and that leaves the property owners responsible for cleaning up the flyers.

I really admire your 'out of the box' approach. Like when you sold chances as a kid. To go out to other parts of town. Or when you charged everyone on campus $1.00 to take a swing at the VW you wrecked. I think I need one of those ideas to jump start my business. Unfortuantely without a product to sell, expanding seems to be a challenge.

I look forward to hearing from you!