Soap Warehouse Blog

I wrote this blog post four years ago but I thought I should bring it out again with a little up dating as well.

Here are ways to look back at the end of the year and set up to do in the new year to focus on the positive and hopefully change any negatives to make your next year even more merry and bright.

1. During the year, monthly, or even weekly if you have time, record your progress for that time period. At the end of the year, you’ll be able to look back and see how much you really have accomplished. If you did not do that this year it is not too late to get out the appointment book or job accounting records, take a look at your email account and take a trip down memory lane. Keep lists of the following:

• all the new contacts you’ve made in person;
• all the one-on-one email, Facebook or similar B2B contacts you’ve made;
• any networking events, lunches, meetings you’ve attended and the benefit you got from them;
• press releases you published or any free publicity you’ve received;
• any classes you’ve taken to further your business, and how they improved your business plan;
• any recognition, award or nomination you’ve received;
• new clients you’ve gotten this year and how much they financially impacted your bottom line;
• volunteer projects you’ve taken on;
• how many referrals did your referral program bring you;
• potential clients who’ve shown an interest in you that you can revisit this next year;
• creation or improvements of your web site, social media, business cards and other marketing materials.

2. Join a Business Success Team. These weekly group meetings with other small business owners are great for sharing ideas and the agenda often requires participants to report what they’ve done the past week and set a new goal for the following week. This is great incentive to do what you said you would. Not all “B&I” groups are the same so find one that fits your marketing style and has members you think you can learn from.

3. Ask clients for feedback on the work you’ve done for them. Get verbal testimonials over the phone, in writing is best and if possible shoot B&A video of jobs with the customer’s reaction after work in finished. Photo B&A will work too.

4. Keep an e-mail folder where you keep testimonials and any positive feedback you’ve received for something you’ve done. Add these monthly to your web site, Pinterest board, or as footnotes to your e-mails.

5. Call up a friend, networking buddy or another entrepreneur and go for coffee. Getting out of the office and sharing similar concerns with a like-minded person is a great morale booster and problem solving activity. Knowing you are not the only one in the same boat or that has faced the same difficulty leaves you feeling better and hopefully with a solution or possitive outlook.

6. Finally make your self a list of how you can use these positive things to promote and make your business better in the next year.

Happy Holiday and Happy New Year to you all.

This Saturday, August 23, 2014, Soap Warehouse, along with the North American Pressure Wash Outlet of Gainesville, GA, will be hosting a free UAMCC event.

It will be held in the meeting room of the Olde Town Tavern in Lawrenceville, GA at 835 Lawrenceville-Suwanee Road. This event will have classes running from 10:30 until 5:00 and will include lunch. 

To start the day attendees can go up the street to Panara Bread to grab breakfast and do some Networking and just before the venue opens we will be having an outside wash demo done on the Olde Town Tavern building starting at 9:15.

The venue opens at 10:00 am to check in, get badges and get up to the meeting area. Welcome will start at 10:15 with the first speaker scheduled to start at 10:30. Most talks will run from 30-40 minutes and will cover a wide range of topics: incorporation and taxes, customer retention, cold calling, chemical safety, how to set up OSHA training, pumps and more. 

During lunch the tables will be set up with talking topics to coincide with the speakers to enhance and expand on the information being presented.

At the end of the day there will be a drawing for some items donated by the sponsors as a thank you to the attendees for coming.

If you have not registered yet there is still time, spaces are limited but some are still available, so act fast.

I hope to see many of you there and am looking forward to this intimate learning experience that the UAMCC is bringing to our area. You must have a ticket number to register but the tickets are free, you can contact me 1-800-762-7911 to get yours.

We just finished the PWRA/WCRA convention in Nashville, TN August 8and 9th held at the Gaylord Opryland Resort.

We had a great turn out at our booth. There were over 300 attendees and 30 vendors that exhibited. 

We sold sample size quarts of many of our favorite exterior products and had a drawing for two $100 product gift cards and one, 60 second professional video, valued at $695.00.

The winners of the gifts cards were: Joe Hiryak of Fayettevile Window Washing from Fayetteville Arkansas and Mike Willard of Dirt Zero from Nixa, MO.

The lucky winner of the free business video was Peggy and Terry Miller of Tegrey Family of Coatings from Canton, OH.

The resort is beautiful and attendees loved the venue. This show will be moving next year to the Washington D.C. area but at this time we are not planing to attend. We will move on to another show and closer to home but know it will again be a quality event, so if you can, make plans to attend.

This is the season for cleaning industry trade shows. This past week Soap Warehouse was a sponsor of another of the UAMCC's events. This one was the big National East event that was held Aug 1&2 in Orlando, Florida.

Even though we could not be there we are a sponsor and we did send two $100 product gift cards that were given away to two local Florida Companies.

The first went to Patrick Anthony of "A Tampa Bay Pressure Washing" from Valrico, FL.

and the second went to David D'Eramo of "CentraFlo" from Winter Springs, FL.

This coming weekend we will be in Nashville for the PWRA National Convention and then we are right back home to do our own event for the UAMCC for Atlanta, here in Lawrenceville, on Saturday Aug 23rd. We have a great line up in store for the companies that attend.

We will have a CPA to discuss how you should set up your business for taxes, we will have speakers to talk about customer retention, chemical safety, how to trouble shoot pumps, how to set up OSHA training, Social Media, plus more and a quick building wash demo to start the day off at 9:00 prior to the classes starting at 10:00.

Remember as a UAMCC paying member you get to attend one free event each year and anyone can attend their first UAMCC event free with a VIP Pass even if you are not a member yet.

If you missed the event in Orlando and can get to Atlanta for the day in a few weeks be sure to call us for your Free VIP pass. Once you have the pass with your ticket number you just go to the event web page www.uamccevents.com and use it to register for the event that you want to attend. I hope to see you soon.

I saw this come up in a Travel blog (Disney vs. Universal). Sould employees of one be allowed or banned from answering a question asked about the other? And thought it can easily relate to our business as well since it comes up for us at least a couple of times a week.

Now obviously you are not going to know your competitions actual prices, even if you do, you do not need to answer that one but simple questions should be answered as just good form and quality customer service.

Also you should try very hard not to bad mouth the competition nor give info you do not know as fact, just an easy I do not know would be fine.

For instance I am asked all the time if some other companies specific chemical is as good or better than one of ours or vice versa.

 I usually answer by finding out and going over the products ingredients, their strengths, weaknesses, and how they work for the job the customer is wanting to get done. If they already have a product on hand that should do the job whether it is ours or not I will tell them. That is just good customer service and normally that caller will appreciate that and think of us again the next time they need a product we have that they need and will make a purchase.

It would do us no good to tell the caller they need our specific product to do the job right, then once they get it find out by the label, MSDS or other ways that they already had an item just as good, so they just wasted time and money waiting for ours. That contractor would most likely never want to buy from us again and would bad mouth us all over the place.

Same with your customer and the competition. If a customer asks if so and so also soft washes? or some one told them that using bleach is bad, or why are you more than so and so? Just honestly answer the question with what you know, educated them on the pro's and con's of a certain method or why your price also comes with added benefits and be ready to list them.

That customer will be much more likely to go ahead and use you and feel good about hiring you, your company and about passing along a great review to their friends and family.

Just like what the writer of the travel blog said. "Guests won't think less of Disney if its cast members answer questions about Universal. Quite the opposite: it reflects well on Disney when its cast members answer questions even when Disney doesn't stand to make buck from the response. Great customer service is work that creates value for a guest. If you're working only to create value for your company, you're not providing great customer service. But smart business managers know that if they and their employees provide great customer service, their business often ends up making more money in the long run than companies that put themselves ahead of their customers."

Be the bigger, better company and answer any question your customer asks, even if it is about the competition.

Well the Summer Solstice has just come and gone so this means half the year is already pasted us by. What have you accomplished in your business and what is still on your to do list that you haven't even started?

It is not too late to begin even some major business projects that will still add to this years bottom line. And do not let this busy time of year stop you from doing a fast 30 minute evaluation.

Get out our business plan, your business calendar, your to do list and any of the other helpers you have made to use as a method to gauge your progress so far.

Print out a year to date comparison from your accounting software like Quickbooks and see how you are doing. This is something you should already be doing every month. Are you ahead of last year, or the year before, are you where you projected you needed to be?

With these tools go over the positives and negatives and use them to change or update your business plan for the upcoming six months.

Are you doing the necessary social media connections that you should be doing to bring in new organic business? Not enough time, then try to delegate some or all of these tasks.

Is your referral program bringing you the number of jobs you planned so far? If not how can you improve it or expand it?

Are you noticing too many of our quoted jobs are going to your competition?

Is your pricing structure not giving you the profit you need?

If you need to review some of our past blog posts to create the tools you should be using here are some to check out:

What is a business plan. http://info.soapwarehouse.biz/blog-0/bid/102796/What-really-is-a-Business-Plan-and-Why-should-I-make-one

Building Success in 20 min's a day. http://info.soapwarehouse.biz/blog-0/bid/92822/Building-Success-in-Twenty-Minutes-a-Day

How to monitor your Social Media Footprint. http://info.soapwarehouse.biz/blog-0/bid/71888/How-to-monitor-your-Social-Media-Footprint-in-10-minutes-a-day

Referral Programs, why they work. http://info.soapwarehouse.biz/blog-0/bid/63253/Referral-Programs-Why-they-work

How to use and analysis a referral program. http://info.soapwarehouse.biz/blog-0/bid/79408/How-to-use-and-analysis-a-referral-program

Competitor Comparison to see where you stand. http://info.soapwarehouse.biz/blog-0/bid/78895/Competitor-Comparison

How to avoid pricing mistakes. http://info.soapwarehouse.biz/blog-0/bid/60013/How-to-avoid-pricing-mistakes

I hope this year has been a good one for you so far and if not I hope some of these ideas will help you make improvements. Have a great day.

This question came up recently on a contractor Facebook page and I think it is a good one to address since it effects almost all pressure washing contractors.

How do you pass the cost of credit card processing on to customers?

First you must look at how much business you do each year that is paid by credit cards, and what cards are being used. This way you will know if you should even bother with it.

If you are doing say $250,000 dollars a year of business and only about $10,000 of that is charged on cards so is that $300 or .0012% of your total sales worth that much for you to change your whole way of doing business?

Because legally that is what you have to do. Did you know it is illegal (against your signed contract) to charge any customer a credit card processing fee just for them to pay with a credit card? Well it is. Credit Card companies lobbied for this years ago to stop retailers from deterring their card carrying customers into paying via other methods, thus losing them money. It is part of every credit card contract except Discover. You must sign these before you are able to process these companies cards and if you are found to have broken them, it can cost to a lot in fines and loss of excepting them as payment. It is also part of the Truth in Lending Act. The Federal Truth in Lending Act states: 167, (2) “No seller in any sales transaction may impose a surcharge on a cardholder who elects to use a credit card in lieu of payment by cash, check, or similar means.”

The way around this is easy but not always simple. You must offer a cash or check discount instead. In other words you must build in the 3% or what ever your processing fee is going to be, some cards are higher, like AMEX, and then give the majority of your customers the discount off the total when they pay. This can make for added headaches in bookkeeping and with automated bookkeeping systems like QuickBooks. This means you must build a line item for a cash or non-credit card discount for each invoice that is not paid by credit card.

The only other way around this is to build the 3%, as a cost of doing business, into your normal pricing to cover any instances when a card would be used. But if the majority of your customers do not pay by CC, do you want your other customers to shoulder that burden and extra cost? Plus it would not be a fact you would want to advertise to your cash customers.

When I first came to Soap Warehouse this is what was done but it caused so much book keeping trouble and since a large number of our customers already paid by credit card it was not worth trying to do the cash discount route. Last year we spent just over $4,000 in all merchant and banking fees connected with credit card processing. A small amount when figured against sale totals, so this cost is just one of others like product packaging that is worked into total product cost from the beginning so we do not even have to think about it later on. For most 5 gallons of items the amount figures out to be less than 30 cents each. Not an amount I feel would cause a customer not to buy a product. Product packaging far out weighs that small cost usually running $2.50 to $10 per item of added cost. But you can not sell or ship a soap product with out the bottle, jug, pail, box or drum. These costs are just as necessary as the cost of the ingredients to make them, and the labor to produce them.

Here is an article to continue reading about this issue:

http://www.merchantcouncil.org/merchant-account/operation/pass-fee-customer.php