In a Town This Size, the Same Customer Has to Come Back

Danny had a good year and could not work out why it did not feel like one. He had done more jobs than the year before. The revenue was flat.

Walt Brennan asked him a question that took a week to answer. "Of the people you worked for this year, how many had you worked for before?"

The answer, when Danny finally went through the book, was eleven out of ninety-four.

"There it is. You are not running a business, you are running a parade. Everybody goes past once."

The arithmetic that only exists in a small market

A business in a city can grow for a decade on new customers alone, because the supply of people who have never heard of it is effectively infinite. Almost all the marketing advice ever written assumes that.

Your town has, say, sixteen hundred households. Some fraction of them will ever hire your trade. Which means there is a real, arrivable number of first-time customers available to you, and once you have served them, the parade ends.

So in a fixed population, the growth question is not how many people you can reach. It is how many times the same household calls you back. That number is the difference between a business that plateaus at a size you resent and one that keeps growing in a town that is not getting any bigger. It is one of the four levers available when the town is not growing, and the other three are set out here.

Most repeat business is lost to a missing phone number

Here is the uncomfortable finding when owners actually go and ask: the customer who did not call back usually did not choose somebody else. They could not find you.

The invoice is in a drawer somewhere. The truck had a name on it that they half remember. They needed somebody on a Tuesday morning, they asked the first person they saw, and that person named somebody else.

You did not lose on quality. You lost on retrieval.

Which makes the highest-return retention habit in the trades almost embarrassingly simple: leave your number where the problem was.

A sticker on the water heater, the panel, the furnace, the pump. A card in the box with the filters. A magnet on the side of the unit you just serviced. In three years when it makes the noise again, the customer is standing in front of your phone number at the exact moment they need it. Nothing else you can do for the same money comes close.

Tell them what the next thing is

Most service work has a natural sequel and the customer does not know what it is. You do.

The furnace you fixed needs looking at before next winter. The gravel drive you built will want grading in two springs. The panel you upgraded has two circuits the customer said they would deal with later. The septic wants pumping on a schedule that the customer has no way of knowing.

Saying so, plainly, at the end of the job, is not a sales pitch. It is the most useful thing you can tell somebody, and it does three things at once: it makes you the person who explained it, it puts a date in their head, and it gives you a legitimate reason to make contact later.

Write it down for them. One sentence on the invoice: "next thing to look at is the flue, sometime before next heating season." That sentence is worth more than any discount you could have offered.

Then actually make the contact, and make it rare

If you told a customer the pump wants checking in two years, then in two years, call them. Or send one short message. That is a welcome contact because it is a real one.

What does not work in a small town, and actively costs you, is generic marketing to people who hired you once. Monthly email newsletters full of offers. Repeated texts. In a place where you will run into these people at the post office, being the business that pesters is a reputation you cannot outrun, and it is not worth whatever the extra contact earns.

The rule is one contact, tied to something genuine, at the moment it is genuinely relevant. Once or twice a year at most. If you cannot name the real reason for the message, do not send it.

The maintenance agreement, and when it is honest

The standard advice in the trades is to sell a maintenance plan. It is good advice when the plan is real work at a fair price and bad advice when it is a subscription that mostly buys a phone call.

In a small town the test is stricter than elsewhere, because the customer will discuss the plan with their neighbor who has one, and any gap between what it promises and what actually happens will be public within a season. If the plan means somebody genuinely turns up and genuinely does something, it is one of the best structures in this trade: predictable revenue, a route you can schedule, and a customer who is yours by default.

If it would mostly be a way to bill people in February, do not sell it here. The pricing conversation in a town where you see your customers applies to this too.

The number to keep

Count it once a year and it will change what you do. What share of this year's jobs were for people you had worked for before?

Eleven out of ninety-four is a parade. Getting it to a third changes the character of the business: fewer strangers to convince, more work booked in advance, and a customer base that grows rather than turns over. It is also the cheapest growth available to you, because you have already paid to acquire every one of those households once.

Three readings to take this week

• Go through last year's book and count the repeat customers. The number is usually worse than owners expect, and nothing here matters until you know it.
• Buy stickers or magnets with your name and number and start leaving one on every piece of equipment you touch. This is the single highest-return thing on the list.
• On the next five invoices, add one sentence saying what the next thing is and roughly when. Then put those dates somewhere you will actually see them.

Adapted from Small Town Strategy: Simple Marketing for People with Real Work to Do, out now on Amazon in paperback ($14.99) and Kindle ($6.99).