How Can I Help? Send Your Ideas

I have to admit that I was really close to sending out a post on Thursday, but I wasn't 100% sure that it was that different from other posts. It may or may not have impacted the people I care about (honest and legitimate flooring contractors who are in tough times). I was coming back today from a marathon day of floor coating and it struck me that I would rather ask all of the people who are reading this exactly what could I talk about.

According to the editors at Hardwood Floors magazine, approximately 14,000 people read the HF E-News, which includes the Contractor Blog. I suspect that there must be a few thousand flooring contractors within that number who read the newsletter. My question is: How can I help you all? What is it that I might be able to share to send you on a path from doing okay to "Wow, we're killing it"?

Before you answer, I want to fill you in on what I'm like, the company that we are and what I know well. We're not a huge company with 20 employees. I have three employees, and we do two to three projects per week. Primarily we refinish floors and repair floors in older homes, but occasionally we install a brand-new floor. We're not big on trying to win Floor of the Year like some of the big names in the NWFA, but we did win an NWFA Xtreme Makeover award in 2008 for a floor. I thought that win might change the rotation of the earth somehow. I was convinced that having my name in lights was going to fill my bank account. I learned six months later that was a case of delusion rather than what really happens when you win awards.

When my phone literally went dead in late 2008 six months after we won the award, I ran into a few of the right people (marketing experts) in early 2009, while in a really tough time with the family due to money problems. Given that my family matters more to me than anything, I adopted a "nothing to lose attitude" and decided to implement that advice to restore my home life and help my phone. All that I've learned since then through advice, reading, and implementing has turned me from just a guy with a bunch of tools into what I jokingly call "a floor guy turned into a marketer."

I'm fascinated not by buzzwords associated with acronyms like SEO, PPC, and SEM, but rather with how elucidating what your company is like via the Internet drives the growth of a business with real results, which is why we are thriving instead of struggling.

I am 100% sure that the Internet has leveled the playing field regardless of the size of a business or the number of years in business for a flooring contractor.

Over the last three years we've learned that:

• Content is king. The Internet is simply a portal that allows you to view what a business is like, and the post-recession consumer simply wants to evaluate the value of service providers discreetly, which the Internet allows. No content, boring content, or bad content = no phone calls.
• Marketing "experts" aren't contractors. Despite how much you rank at the top of the Internet, if you're bad at making a good presentation during an estimate it doesn't matter. You have to go from A to B to C, and no skipping. If you have a lot of phone calls, stumble on your communication, or have quality issues with your floors, it doesn't matter what your Google ranking is, you will ultimately have problems that destroy profitability.
• Increase your quality. There is simply no way to differentiate from a suffering market besides always striving to be better. On every single job you should be learning how to improve, end of story. "Good enough for government work" just doesn't work anymore.

All that said, I want to hear from you all. I'm presenting on content marketing at the NWFA Expo in April in Orlando. (Take a look at the seminar schedule here.) What would you like to know about before then? What specific questions do you have that I could answer without you having to wait two more months? I write for you all, run a flooring business and love this industry. Write a comment with your thoughts on topics for the blog, your detailed questions about business procedure, or web marketing PLEASE. Who knows, maybe there's a topic for a webinar in there, too (hint, hint, NWFA).