HOW BUILDERS AND TRADESMEN CAN BEAT THE RECESSION

Recession is here. No-one knows how long it will last and employment is suffering. Many people have cancelled contracts with tradesmen and builders all over the country, and more and more people are turning to DIY. This is not good news for builders and tradesmen.

Or is it?

Let's say that the unemployment rate reaches 10%. We can focus on that and talk ourselves into doom and gloom statistics quite easily. We can hibernate, stop our advertising and virtually sit back and wait for the collapse of our business.

Or we can look at the obvious fact that 90% of people still have their same jobs, with the same salary, the same disposable income and a market which is a lot cheaper because everyone else is dropping their prices. When we look at the positive side, we can begin to see some potential for growth.

If you are like us, you started your business to make money. Our vision was to be successful and be able to take it easy and relax in time for a graceful, early retirement. Sometimes things don't go entirely to plan and we are forestalled by things outside of our control. In marketing terms these things are called our Macro Environment.

When life dictates; we need to change our plans. The focus is still the same, we want to be successful; so we need to look at other ways of doing it.

Two questions:

You have a building company or you are a tradesman or tradeswoman. Your business has slowed down because people are spending less (with you) on their homes. They are turning to DIY, so how can you cash in on this market?
Do you have a website?

If you have no website, you need to get one. See our marketing page on website's for builders and tradesmen. A website, properly built, can be turned into an on-line shop which can sell tools, building materials and other building related products. Other than the website itself (which is cheaper than any other advertising you will ever undertake) there is no outlay. You simply add other companies products to your website and sell them. You then receive a percentage of the value every time a sale is made.

To enable your website to handle this type of selling you need to have a Content Management System (CMS). With this you can manage the content yourself, adding images of the things you want to sell in your shop and writing up product reviews to add content to your website. The postage, packing and delivery is done by the other company and you just sit back and collect the profit. You even earn money while you are asleep. Take a look at the image below to see a screenshot of part of the DIY Doctor Content Management System (Part of the Springboard System built by Boson Media).

You can see clearly we have the ability to manage every section of our website. We can add and edit pages, add tools and products and even adjust the necessary words and codes necessary to get a good search engine placement. Your own CMS may not be as detailed as this, but the functions will be the same and the cost is included with your website.

Springboard Content Management

This type of relationship with other companies is called an Affiliation, or Association and you become an Affiliate or Associate. Companies such as Screwfix and Amazon (the most well known) run affiliate schemes paying anywhere between 3 and 5% for every sale made. Doesn't sound like a lot but when you understand you have free access to over 1 million products with both companies, it begins to add up!

As a plasterer you can sell plastering tools and plastering books. There are hundreds of carpentry books and literally thousands of books on how to build and extension or garden wall. There are Affiliates who sell building materials, fake grass, garden sheds and any number of other products which can earn you money from a website.

Take a look at the tools we sell on the DIY Doctor website. These are all owned by Screwfix and we sell on behalf of them. We get paid every month and have been for almost 10 years. The system we use for our shop is built by Boson Media's Springboard system. We simply go to the Screwfix site, choose the tools we want to put on our website, click a button in the Content Management System and they appear.

This is one of the many ways DIY Doctor can help you market your building business. Click into any of the links below for more help.