No matter what your industry of choice may be, it’s important to get some business from fresh clients in addition to keeping your regular customers coming back. While repeat clients are a company’s bread and butter, it never hurts to have a new business that may turn into a regular business if you wow them with your business’s customer service, product quality, and exceptional services. If it’s been a while since you updated your business practices, you might not have a clue where you should start to attract new business and opportunities. Depending on your goals, you will have to make a game plan to bring in the business that you desire to help your bottom line and solidify your position as a front-runner in your industry.
The size of your business can impact the choices that you make to bring more business to your company’s doors. As a small business, it may be best for you to focus on bringing in a few more regular customers or creating a small number of loyal newfound customers instead of trying to flood your business with a lot of new customers before you’re ready to accommodate a large change in the number of transactions or the number of products you’re supplying on an average day in your business. If you’re a sole proprietor for a graphic design business that you’ve built yourself, you may only want to attract a handful of new customers, so you don’t overwhelm your schedule with work.
New Appliances
If you want to get some business coming into your restaurant or bakery, it may be time to consult with a specialized Viking oven repair service to improve your oven. If it’s not possible to fix your stove, oven, or other appliances after consulting with repair services, it may be time to replace it. Even though no business owner wants to shell out the money to replace an appliance, it’s a key part of the territory.
When you don’t replace your appliances regularly, this reluctance can lead to your appliances becoming less efficient than they used to be. This can increase wait times for customers and cause some customers to give up on spending time and money at your business. If you get a reputation for producing products slowly, you may lose out on potential customers who need something on a short timetable.
To avoid making new customers worry about how long it will take for your business to produce items, replace appliances as soon as they stop working as efficiently as you need them. When you notice that appliances seem to wear out quickly in your business, it may be a sign that you need more than one of that appliance. Then, you can handle the new customers and business as your company grows.
Maintain a Comfortable Space
Get some business by ensuring that the temperature of your space and the climate of your facilities are comfortable for those visiting your space. If you notice that your HVAC system seems like it’s not doing its job well, it may be time to call HVAC services and schedule an AC repair or forced air system repair. If people don’t feel comfortable in your business, they simply won’t spend enough time there to become customers. They may walk into your office and notice how sweltering it is in the summer or how freezing it is in the winter. Once they feel uncomfortable there, they may seek to take their business somewhere where they aren’t shivering or sweating it out.
Beyond the temperature of your business, you can make it a comfortable space that welcomes new customers by adding amenities that customers may like. For example, you could install a small coffee bar into your waiting room to make customers feel more at ease and happy in your waiting area. If you know that your customers usually like a certain kind of decor or seating, you can give your business’ interior a makeover that suits the sensibilities of the type of person you’d want to make your new customer.
Update Your Exterior
Beyond updating the interior decor and design of your business, you may be able to get some business coming into your storefront by paying some TLC to the exterior. One of the best ways to improve the appearance of the outside of your facilities while also serving a practical purpose in improving the safety and stability of your facilities would be hiring a roofing service to install a new roof or at least maintain your current roof. Things like loose shingles may not seem like a big deal, but they do pose a threat to your customers since they could fall off at any time and injure a customer.
This could lead to a nasty lawsuit if the injury caused by the faulty roof is bad enough. It can also cost you the faith and trust of your current customers and turn away potential business. In the worst case scenario, a business building that isn’t properly maintained could fail inspections and force you to shutter your doors as a company. Once that happens, there will be no way to get more customers. Then, you may face financial difficulties that are impossible to overcome without serious effort.
Offer Delivery
Sometimes, all it takes to get some business is detailing what your current or potential customers want and going from there. When your customers keep bringing up how convenient it would be if they didn’t have to come to your store to purchase items, listen to their suggestions and meet their needs by offering delivery. When customers feel heard and validated, they’re more likely to recommend your business to friends, family, and acquaintances. This kind of word-of-mouth marketing is one of the most effective ways to increase the amount of business that your company gets. Additionally, it’s a free type of advertising with minimal risks as long as people keep sharing their stories of how your company has treated them well and gone above and beyond to meet their preferences.
Before you start to offer delivery for your business, it’s wise to look into the logistics of how you would make this happen. Some companies in certain industries will have an easier time trying to provide delivery services than others. For example, if your company produces small, lightweight products like stickers or pens, you’ll probably find it relatively easy to offer delivery to your customers.
On the other hand, if your company is a bakery that makes perishable baked goods or frozen treats, you’ll need to do a lot more planning and research to ensure that delivery is possible. You’ll also have to look into local and federal laws for shipping products. Additionally, you’ll need to figure out if you’ll offer free shipping or put the burden of paying for shipping on your customer. If you offer free shipping, the cost of your products may have to go up to adjust to this change. You’ll need to prepare for how you’ll handle pushback if offering delivery affects your pricing and the products you offer.
Keep a Tidy Property
In the same way that you wouldn’t want to visit a friend who lives in a filthy house, customers won’t want to patronize your business if it has a disgusting interior or exterior. If your property hasn’t scheduled a gutter cleaning in a while, you may be missing out on potential customers by driving them away with an unsightly mess. You should also clear out any seasonal debris like fall leaves or dead insects in the summer.
It can help to give yourself a cleaning schedule and pass a chore chart down to your staff so that everyone knows your team can help keep your store or facilities looking presentable enough to get some business for your company. If you think about it, it is much better to have a company that is known for being excessive about the cleanliness of their facilities than to have a company that is notorious for being unclean. If you own a company that handles food or consumable products, cleanliness and sanitary practices are all the more important to implement.
Invest in Signage
To get some business coming into your store, you need to entice and excite potential customers enough for them to stop at your storefront and look at your sign for a while. This might mean calling up a storefront glass service and redoing your storefront signage even if you’ve fixed it recently. If you want your sign to stand out from the crowd, you could install a bright neon sign to replace a boring banner.
Provide Rental Service
If you want to get some business in your venue, you may want to think about how you can tap into the potential of unused space in your business property and start hosting event rentals like birthday parties, wedding receptions, religious ceremonies, and more. Since everyone needs somewhere to schedule events, this can be a guaranteed source of business for your company. If your business sells products, you can offer test products and samples to those who book your event space to drum up more business.
Ensure Security
These days, businesses who want to get some business from new customers need to convince their customers that they’ll be safe in the business facilities. This may involve contacting a security gate company to install a security gate that shows customers you take their safety concerns seriously. It might also mean hiring security staff to patrol the premises of your business facilities to not only deter crime but also signal to new and existing customers that you take security to the next level when faced with the potential threats in this changing landscape.
Sell New Products
Sometimes, the best way to get some business is to roll out new products. Pick products that interest customers. These could be a custom tailored hat if you’re an apparel company or a new vinyl figure if you’re a vinyl art toy producer.
Update Your Interior
Beyond making sure the interior spaces in your facilities are comfortable, you can also attract new customers by hiring a commercial construction company to freshen up the space’s interior design. You could make your facilities feel more open by taking down walls. You can also increase your hiring capacity by adding more cubicles to an office setting.
When you have a small business, every customer counts and adds extra work to your business while also adding extra joy to it. When you have more customers than what your business can handle as a small business or sole proprietorship, you may find that the quality of your work will end up slipping eventually under the crushing load of work. This slip in quality can cause customers to take their business elsewhere and hurt your bottom line.
At times when your business is struggling to get some business, it may seem like having too many customers would be a good problem to have. At first glance, it’s certainly a better issue to handle than struggling to even make one sale or take on one project for your business. As they say, though, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. The number of customers you have should be within a range that your business can handle. Scaling your business too quickly in a positive trajectory can cause your business to collapse as you and your employees struggle to keep up with an impossible volume of work.
Still, if your business is going through a lean time and you want to add some fresh faces to your customer list, you should consider how you can incorporate the tips above into a business plan. Although these suggestions may not work for every type of business to produce the results you desire, they offer a starting point for thinking about what you could do as a business owner to improve the number of customers that engage with your company. Even if they work too well and you get too many new customers, we’re confident that you’ll be able to handle that problem with grace and expand your business to meet the demand in this exciting new chapter for your company.