Every business owner should keep up to date with their local town, county or regions news to be able to capitalize on opportunities to get work.
Here are afew examples:
Just last week I saw this for Watsonville near Santa Cruz in California.
"Volunteers will be teamed with Watsonville Police and other community groups for Graffiti Cleanup Day to help remove graffiti from Main Street and other areas of the city from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on June 28.
During the event, the Adopt-A-Spot program will debut.
Members of the community will be invited to monitor specific areas in their neighborhoods and keep them free from graffiti. Areas will be marked with a sponsor sign.
Cleaning materials will be provided to volunteers, but organizers are asking for donations of graffiti remover, stripper pads, breathing masks, terry cloths, latex gloves, roller pads, roller frames, 5-gallon buckets, roller pans, roller frame extensions and drop cloths.
Training is required for participation. The deadline to pre-register is June 19.
To get involved: bryan.rodriguez@cityofwatsonville.org.
Santa Cruz"
What a great way to get your business name on a sign for free, on a local city Adopt-A-Spot sponsor sign. You can showcase your companies graffit removal products and skills which could allow for actual paying jobs to come out of doing community service. Feature the B&A photos of this service work on your website, put in for media attention from print or local news outlets when you perform the free work. And remember it is most likely tax deductable.
Earlier this year in Ashville NC the city put out a notice in the local paper for any pressure washers that wanted to participate in a graffiti removal program where they had reviced a Federal grant to pay for the cities clean up, all the business owners had to do was register their business, show that they could do the work and what their rate was and then would be given jobs to be paid from the grant funds.
Wouldn't you like to make easy grant money without having to go through a long bidding process? And this could have gotten the foot in the for future city projects.
I have been finding articles from all over the country talking about city, state and federal monies banked for local cleaning programs begging for applicants to apply and take the jobs. Check your local area and be the business that takes it.
I see on the formus and Facebook pages guys commenting on how their local city or government is taking paying work away from them buy doing it for free. Well I say go find and talk to them and see how you can get that work. Sure sometimes a city is using free prison or community service workers as the labor or even their own salary employees, using poor methods or products that do not cost them much to do the work but can take them a lot of time. You won't know unless you try, if you can show them your business and a better way, if you can get the jobs or not.
Here in my town the city recreation department was using community service and city workers just with their own pressure washers to try and clean the local park and rec properties. But a local contractor went to them and showed how much faster and better he could do the job and they opened up a bid for the work which he won. They actually spend less in time, paid labor and admisitrative salaries that use to have to go into the old program than paying him alone to do the work which he did faster and better.
I hope you will take the time to look or compete for the already bankrolled work that your business can cash in on.