To achieve significant growth (over 10%), contractors should allocate 10-12% of their target revenue goal to marketing, not a percentage of last year's actual revenue. This forward-looking investment is scary but necessary to fund the growth you want to achieve, rather than just sustaining current levels.
A frequent mistake service businesses make is hiring a dedicated marketing employee and then gradually shifting their responsibilities to customer service or dispatching. This negates the role's strategic value and turns a key growth driver into an overpaid administrative position, ultimately stifling marketing efforts.
Business owners frequently treat a single anonymous post in a trade group—whether positive or negative—as the definitive truth about a vendor. This prevents them from doing their own research and finding the right fit, as they adopt one person's unverified and context-free experience as their own reality.
Many contractors plateau between $3 million and $5 million in revenue. This is the critical inflection point where hiring a dedicated internal marketer becomes necessary. This role provides the focused, intentional effort on branding and strategy required to break through this common growth ceiling.
Instead of growing slowly, a new contracting business can rapidly gain market share by committing to a high marketing spend (e.g., 14% of a revenue goal) before making the first sale. This aggressive, intentional brand-building strategy can make a new company seem like an overnight success and quickly overtake established but complacent competitors.
Clients often try to cherry-pick individual services from a vendor's integrated offering, believing they can save money or know better. This is like trying to bake a cake but leaving out the eggs; it disrupts the proven process and leads to poor results. True success comes from trusting the vendor’s holistic strategy.
Business owners should view AI not as a tool for replacement, but for multiplication. Instead of trying to force AI to replace core human functions, they should use it to make existing processes more efficient and to complement human capabilities. This reframes AI from a threat into a powerful efficiency lever.
Implementing online pricing isn't primarily about showing a price; it's about eliminating price objections before a lead ever contacts you. While it might result in fewer leads, those that come through are of much higher quality and intent because they already understand the potential investment, streamlining the sales process.