When Jason approached me, he had already done the strategic work.
I like a strategy I call watering the garden and sowing the seeds.
If you get a new piece of land to garden, it helps to observe for a while to see what sort of plants thrive. This is the watering the garden phase. In business, it’s what Jason started out doing: “hey everyone, I’m a builder, what would you like?”
When we get a project or make a sale, it means that customer had a need, they decided we were the best person to fulfil that need and were happy to swap money in their wallet for the result we offered.
That tells us a few things. 1) There’s a need. 2) At least in some circumstances, we offer the best value solution. 3) There are people willing to pay what we ask to get their problem solved.
It’s quick-n-dirty market research.
Back to the garden analogy if you water your new garden and watch what naturally grows you’ll discover what’s easy to grow and then you can sow seeds for the sort of plants that grow there anyway, but perhaps just the varieties you want.
So in this case with Othick Property Services Ltd, it turns out they were being asked to do more and more asbestos removal, so they got all the gear and the certificates and so on and now that’s what they concentrate on.
A couple of things. I can’t find it right now, but there’s some theory, I think it was about airplane wing manufacture. Basically, every time you double the amount of time you’ve spent doing something, you can halve the time it takes to do it. Something like that. Anyway, the point is, the more you do something, the better you get at it, the more testimonials you receive, the higher your reputation and the harder it is for anyone else to catch up with you. Specialisation is good.
This applies to marketing too. There’s the idea that the ultimate marketing situation is where you’ve thrown most of it away and you just do one thing that you’ve optimised exquisitely. Like Tupperware parties. And IKEA not doing ecommerce.
So again Othick Property Services is doing all the right things in specialising.
For this website I took most of the pictures and wrote the copy, I also created the social media company profiles. The logo and colours were provided. The pages and the topics, they were arrived at through keyword research.
Before Othick Property Services can do any asbestos work the material needs to be tested, so the form on the website sends off that request direct to the lab tester with a notification to Othick Property Services. That saves my client paperwork and speeds up the process for the prospect.
We literally built the site ‘live’. I’m not necessarily recommending that but in this case we thought no-one would know until we publicised it, and if someone did find it, OK. Jason ended up getting enquiries and sales before we’d even reached the design phase.