OT ish. Wodja Fink

[Bob Mannix]

But you probably wouldn't want someone who didn't want to have bus passengers as customers round your house, so both are happy!

[Stuart Noble]

Nothing worse than a stuck up handyman

[Andy Hall]

Never heard of the term "silver surfers"?

I don't think it necessarily is at all.

It's always important to qualify the customer to avoid time wasters.

It may be that Dave feels that elderly people without internet access are more likely to have an expectation of a lot for a little and doesn't want to address that market.....

[PJ]

I think that writing off the retired population as not being computer literate is also a mistake. This has not been my experience.

[The Medway Handyman]

The OAP market is a part of my target, the grey pound. But only the prosperous segment and they do tend to be web aware. I had an old dear phone the other day to ask what I charged for a day & I said "one sixty" she replied £1:60 an hour?

Certainly. The local unitary authority is Medway Council, all the road signs say 'Welcome to Medway', local paper is The Medway Messenger, Medway FM Radio station etc.

That's relatively new (6 years) so it may not be know nationally and you won't find Medway on a map, it's an amalgamation of Strood, Rochester, Chatham, Gillingham & Rainham.

> It's also useful because 20% of my local population work in London

Deliberately. I don't want to work for silly money.

Certainly never short of work - thankfully, but I'm always marketing, trying different things.

[The Medway Handyman]

I'm happy with the "woofs" - the well-off older folks, but I don't see any point in marketing to a market segment who can't afford what I charge.

You would round here mate, the bus service is bloody awful :-)

[The Medway Handyman]

I'd rather target the people in the Merc overtaking the bus :-)

Nor mine. But older people who are computer literate also tend to have move disposable income IME.

[The Medway Handyman]

Got it in one Andy.

There is only so much advertising you can do and indeed only so much work you can cope with. I specifically want to target those who will pay my level of charges.

I've recently ended a relationship with a letting agency simply because they take 5 weeks to pay. I see no point in working for them & waiting 5 weeks when I can work for a customer who will pay there & then.

[PJ]

Very sensible. Cash flow problems kill many businesses.

Actually this has been a very interesting thread.

[Stuart Noble]

So internet access is the new benchmark? I can think of at least 2 people in their 60s who have no interest in the internet but could probably buy the entire Medway with their loose change.

[nightjar]

As John Rumm pointed out, you have to consider what it looks like under different lighting conditions. The outline one at the bottom will be clearer under a wider range of lighting and particularly so when the colour is distorted, for example by sodium street lights.

Colin Bignell

[nightjar]

That would be me, but I wouldn't hire a handyman. I use a firm of builders, who have specialists in every trade.

Colin Bignell

[Andy Hall]

It's *a* benchmark.

In a business, at one end one has a very focussed product or service which is targetted at a very specific market or even well defined set of customers, or at the other a relatively generic product or service with theoretically wide appeal, and of course a spectrum in between.

In almost all cases, time is the most expensive factor, whether it be time that is being sold as the product/service, where the deliverable depends very largely on time (as in this case), or even where the effort involved in specifying and selling requires a lot of time on the part of the supplier.

Whichever way, one of the key things is to maximise the return on investment in time whether it be actual cost or opportunity cost.

One of the biggest factors in this is achieving balance between the number of customers, the amount of business from each and maintaining a flow of business in the short, medium and long term.

In order to do that, one has to be focussed on which factors among customers achieve that, but without spending inordinate amounts of time and money finding out.

I am sure that Dave could commission a Mori poll, pay for a leaflet drop to every house in the area, or even use retail demographic data. For his type of business, as he has indicated, it is people who are relatively cash rich and time poor or have reasonable disposable income but not the ability to do things themselves for one reason or another.

The challenge is to find and maintain the customer base with the least outlay of time and money.

Internet access is a way to do that that is relatively inexpensive. Undoubtedly there are people, as you say, with large incomes and no interest in the internet as there are people who, in advanced years haven't and may never use the internet.

The two questions that Dave has probably asked himself are a) how to find those people and market to them and b) is it worth it when he has.

If the answer to a) is difficult/expensive and to b) is not very; then it is completely reasonable to emphasise internet use as his prime means of reaching customers and not put as much effort into the less easy to reach especially since over the next 5-15 years, which is presumably his operational timeframe, an ever greater proportion of the population will be actively using the web to conduct daily business.

If he were operating a charitable service, then it would be reasonable that his marketing should target those likely to benefit from what he does; but he isn't.

[Stuart Noble]

Yeah, well, basic marketing stuff, but I can't see the internet being particularly fruitful for a local odd job man.

[dmc]

I know one of those as well. Far too tight to even consider paying fair rates for a handy man and would only argue over every last penny (which might explain why they are so rich - and miserable :))

I wouldn't want to work for them

Darren

[Andy Hall]

If nothing else, the name sticks.

- See sign on van

- Type any of

= medway handy man

= medway handyman

= medwayhandyman

into Google and up he comes as first entry

The phone numbers are reasonable, but in a two second snaphot in traffic or a carpark, the name is memorable, the phone numbers aren't.

[Bob Eager]

I suspect Dave's attitude was coloured by the job he did a while ago (fencing? can't remember). The woman did nothing but complain about the price. Think he was working opposite or something...

[The Medway Handyman]

You're right, on it's own it isn't. I get the occasional lead from my website, but as a pure advertising tool it ranks fairly low down - then again it's cost is minimal.

What a web site does is to provide an instant 24/7 full colour brochure that can be updated with the click of a mouse.

As others have said its easy to remember, so if they cant write down the number they can find me easily. It also gives full details of what I do and what it costs.

The contact is then usually made by phone. For example a while ago I got a call from a guy wanting various jobs done. He said "I've been on your site, I've seem what you can do, I know what you charge - when can you come"? That's exactly what I want to achieve.

BTW I certainly don't ignore the grey market. My advertising is a mix of local community magazines, magazine inserts, parish magazines, free publicity, the signwritten vehicle, the corporate clothing, fridge magnets, recommendations, the web, free listings on as many sites as I can find, mailshots etc.

A multi channel strategy I believe its called.

[Stuart Noble]

Isn't that what camera phones are for?

[nightjar]

Of the 68 possible variations of 'medway handyman' and 'the medway handyman' domain names, he has only the one registered. I usually get the hyphenated (if applicable) and unhyphenated versions of a name with both of the .co.uk .and .com suffixes as a minimum - about £5 per annum for the .co.uk and £12 for two years for the .com, which includes auto redirect to my main site and email addresses.

Colin Bignell