Adventures with Lyrical: Buying a Business (REPOST)

Tmac47_sl said:

...what? Seriously? WTF.

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When the anchor did that, I lost hope for mankind. The news wants to interview me again in the next hour, and I'm not going to speak in superlatives. Every time I talk to them, they want me to say "Worst x Ever." I guess that draws headlines. "if it Bleeds, it Reads." I'm going to tell them that this was just a minor storm, but then try to give people tips before the next real storm. Tips like "Don't wait until your family is in peril" or "Don't go with out of town companies that will hike up the rate 1000%." I.E. Call me. Last time we were interviewed we signed up every person that called from that interview, up until a month later.

I'm sure I'll get home, watch the newscast and they'll say I claimed that there was a Zombie Apocalypse or an Extinction Level Event, because that's how they get ratings.

Holy crap, they are running teasers about how businesses were hurt by less than expected ice. I'm booked either way until Spring. The reporter asked me how I felt about how the storm was a dud, asked if I was upset. I wanted to yell to him that I needed the money for my Corvette payments. But we always stay busy, it doesn't matter.

My first thought after watching the teaser spot for the news is that they are going to make it look like all the businesses they interviewed are going to starve from no storm. I'll know here after the news is over. But man, they always spin the news to make the story interesting, rather than tell the truth.

edit: OK, they didn't go with the teaser. We ended up being the opening story. They talked about how I doubled the size of the company (I was hiring for March anyway, I just moved it up). They got plenty of pics of the trucks and even our logo and phone number. The last time I was interviewed, we got calls for a month. All it cost me was $5 in gas.

BrutulTM_sl said:

Interesting because I just heard about Jeff Jarvis having the exact same experience on the BBC and basically calling them on their bullshit on the air.

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I'm learning that they spin it however the hell they want. You hear people say that their interview was taken out of context, and it's unbelievable until they do it to you. But hey, they played us three times today, we got at least $1k in free advertising.

Tmac47_sl said:

My first sale just went through on Friday. I'm getting 3% off of sales, which is pretty good for just doing lead generation.

I had a special deal in this instance, where I was only getting 10% of the commission, but generally I'll be getting 3% off of the total sale (both real estate and timber).

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Copy the check, frame it and put it on the wall.

$2,475 in service fees from TV today. Not bad for still being in the ramp up period. All is well, other than losing about 15 days this year to inclement weather.

I've been so "store blind" that I haven't been paying attention to the numbers. We've had lots of little problems and some big ones. The rain/snow has made us miss 15 days this year, which at this time of years, is about $35k in lost sales. We've made up some of them on Saturdays, but I'm not going to be the idiot that makes his workers show up on Sundays. One of our pieces of equipment broke down, and it's made it so that we've not been able to complete 50% of our jobs. People don't pay until the job is complete, even if we get to 90% complete. So receivables have been slow (something like 30k in receivables are past due). The machine is rare enough that we had to go to the other side of the state to get one. And we just had a guy get hired, disappear for two weeks with no word, and then come back demanding his job. It was a guy I hired this month. We've had freak repairs based on guys not paying enough attention to the equipment (one guy flipped a machine that he gave too much power to, another guy kept running a machine hours after it sounded funny).

But I just realized, that, we only lost 20k this Winter, and 15k of it was due to not being to go out and work. So this is the best Winter we've ever had. Even the previous owner didn't do half of these numbers in the Winter. Calls were steady, with my now massive advertising budget. Even better, my goal is to do 80k in sales a month (which equates to 40kish in total profits monthly), and we could have done it this month. March is still a Winter month. Boosting my ad budget has helped. I didn't layoff anyone this Winter. Every other company in my industry lays off 50-100% of its staff until April.

Billboard, yellow pages and Internet brought new customers. My huge radio campaign was a flop. The first month of TV was a success. Since we started running, 25% of all calls have been from TV. This is just on one network, and only on the 5am and 6am shows. This happens to be the lowest rated network in the area also. I'm thinking that I could increase call volume by 50-60% off of TV. From there, it's all a numbers game, as we close about 40% of all of the customers we talk to. For some reason, these customers that watch the local news all tended to have HHI in the 80K+ range (except for one). Weird.

So outside of the problems, there's a lot of opportunity for us. I've never heard of anyone in my industry doing 80k in service fees in March. Monthly demand is usually two to three times higher than March up until December. Our absolute maximum monthly capacity on non emergency work is 90k a month (if we only worked Mon-Fri). That's all I can do with the equipment I have. I'm pumped to be at max capacity in a Winter month, but that's gonna be a lot of heartache this Summer when call volume quadruples. I'd have to add a new crew and spend 100k+ in equipment for them.

But hey, if you are going min/max your business, you may as well go balls to the wall. It's better to not be able to keep up than to starve.

This thread is always good for me, because it condenses down what I need to do. Based on the above post:

1- Hire at least one new skilled guy (I just got a good one a couple of weeks ago)
2- Expand to the 6pm news
3- Cut radio, other than NPR it's been a disaster
4- Establish a good relationship with the banks, as I may need loans on new equipment (something I've not thought of)
5- Continue to train the guys on the equipment, they are making some costly mistakes from incorrect operation
6- Continue to work to make the new guys "fit." One of the new guys works hard, but the new guys don't like him for some reason.

OK, we take the first week off of each month from TV, and 30% of calls today came from TV. That's surprising.

Tonic_sl said:

Maybe you're hitting the sweet spot between over saturation and being under-advertised. Might be worth testing a bit both ways to see if that's the case?

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I don't think we are over saturated. We are on the 5am and 6am news only, on the lowest rated network in the area. We'll expand to 6pm and 10pm (with higher viewership), and then onto at least one other network. We benefit from being the only company in our industry on billboard, radio and TV. If there were ten other companies in my industry doing these things, we wouldn't be as memorable. Apparently, we made a commercial that is resonant enough, and we ran with enough weight to get people's attention, as evidenced by 10% of the calls last week being from TV (with us not being on TV that week).

I've got some relatives of one of the families that works for me coming to work next week. So my daily capacity for service fees will increase by $1,200 when they get here. They are both great workers (one of them took off for the Winter to go visit family on the other side of the country). At that point, I'll move to 6pm. Half of the customers I've surveyed say they watch at this time only.

So, I talked with the TV station, and for me to keep the same frequency (that I'm running at 5 and 6am) at 6pm is going to cost me 3k a month. Ouch.

I'm on three mornings a week, twice a slot, in the 5am and 6am slots for 2k. I was wanting to spend the same on 6pm, but that would only buy me two spots, two days a week.

At issue:

1- The station thinks I'll get better results running two spots, two times a week versus running one spot, four times a week. They can't tell me why, other than it reinforces you in the customer's mind better.

2- Do I go 3k or 2k? I've brought in 6k off of TV in our first month on it, and I haven't even received a bill for it. So I'm playing with house money in that the cash came in before I had to pay for it. Do I take the gamble and go 3k, or settle for lesser results from the 2k?

It's going to push my monthly budget to 11k, and I'm getting a little uncomfortable. But it's bringing results, so does it matter?