Recently I was chatting with a current customer about business. He was astonished as to how quickly the Filta name was getting out and around the Birmingham area. His immediate response was “you must be doing a lot of advertisement?” For a second I had to think about how to answer that question. Let’s first define advertisement. Conventional advertising is: a paid announcement, as of goods for sale, in newspapers or magazines, on radio or television, etc. – dictionary.com.
This is all good, but as you can see this involves money and I don’t think you need to spend one cent. Instead, I am a firm believer that the best advertisement is simple, its you.
Yes, you are the best advertisement and its priceless. How do you become that type of “priceless” advertisement you ask? I’ll tell you.
- Get to know your customers. Your business is meant to be a long term relationship with each client. You should be deeply interested and equally knowledgeable about their business and their industry they compete in each day. My background has been Information Technology for the past 13 years. When I got into this industry I was an infant. Forget about crawling, I was doing my best to just roll over! A lot of reading and a lot of time speaking with each client about their business actually gained me an amazing amount of insight into this industry. But I gained so much more. Respect. Friendships. And the list continues. As business owners our job is to yes grow our business, be profitable, etc.. but its also about the client. Having the best interest of your client first and not your bank account will make you more profitable than you can imagine.
- Get to know your product. Don’t just clean fryers, be a freakin madman expert of it!! Know about cooking foods at different temperatures, learn about oil structure…..know it all! I don’t think I need to go any further, but if you need some help in this category youtube.com has a pile of videos on everything from deep frying and how good it is for you if done right to how oil breaks down. The Internet is your Oyster!
- Be one of the team! I was speaking with another customer about our service. He laughed and said “ I don’t know what to do with the fryers, you make this so easy we don’t have to do anything but cook in them!” He continued to tell me how “awesome” this service is and that if he had his own restaurant he would have us service immediately. He also noted, that although “Filta service cost them in the short term” in the long term it saves them on costly insurance hikes due to burns, workman comp, etc.. Of course I was grateful for the kind words and am genuinely excited that they get, well..…excited! During that time we discussed proper cooking of french fries and I spoke with one of his cooks about low oil level in a fryer and to it would be best to just turn off the fryer and use another. My point: Im one of the team! They all look up to me, not down on me. AND, I don’t wonder when I might lose them as a client, instead I think about what great service I can offer them next. (Matter of fact, this one client is currently demoing FiltaCool. If all goes well, I will be installing about 100 panels by the end of the month.)
Bottomline: be a team player and you won’t need to advertise, your clients will hand you business.
Enough said.
