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Pacificoutdoorlivingpro.com: Effective Marketing For Contractors
By Terry Morrill
Why does one contractor have work and another does not?
Why does one company succeed and another does not?
Why does one salesman always seem to sell more than another?
Could the answer be; the company that has more marketing leads than the next knows and is applying the technology of marketing better?
If this were true it would be easy, wouldn’t it? Then all one would have to do is find out what the other guy is doing and do that!
“But my company is different.” “I don’t do things that way.” “You know you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”
The guy doesn’t believe the idea that knowing the technology of something makes you more successful. So he assigns all kinds of reasons, like “The other guy went to college and I didn’t,” or “He’s better looking or he has a knack that I don’t,” or “He’s just in the right place at the right time.”
All these are not the reason. I’ll repeat, all these are not the reason!
There has to be a reason for success or failure, and there is. I would ask this of my salesmen all the time and they used to give all kinds of excuses. But I no longer accept the excuses. The reason is that the one who is consistently selling the most knows the technology of selling and can apply it better than the guy who is selling less. He also knows the product that he is selling better and exudes confidence.
The reason is there is some technology or skill that the guy on the bottom is not applying that the guy on the top is applying. And these skills are LEARNABLE.
If you don’t agree with that then there is no point continuing. This is about teaching OLD DOGS NEW TRICKS. The idea that one cannot learn and apply new ideas and is FALSE.
I really mean this - if you don’t believe you can learn new things and if you don’t believe you can duplicate what another successful person is doing, if you believe all is pre-determined and you can’t change anything, then quietly stop reading this article and go to a movie or go play golf.
THE ANSWER IS TOO SIMPLE. THE GUY AT THE TOP KNOWS AND IS APPLYING SOMETHING THAT YOU ARE NOT.
AND ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS LEARN AND THEN USE IT.
Rule 1: To learn something you must agree there IS something to learn and that you can learn it.
Why Not Copy Donald?
Find someone who is successful and do what they are doing but do it even better.
No matter what field of work you might be in there are
Blogging and Wiki-ing!
<p>As a followup to my previous post, I think this will be my last post into
the Blosxom section of my blog.</p>
<p>Instead, I've spent the last week or two feverishly coding plugins for a new
Wiki+Blog, using Kwiki as the engine. The end result is far nicer, both on the
administrative end, as well as the front-end and features as a whole.</p>
<p>The goal is to create more of an information repository, rather than just a
simple blog.</p>
<p>The new code is at: <a class="story-link" href="http://openthought.org">openthought.org</a></p>
<p>The RSS feed is at: <a class="story-link" href="http://openthought.org/?action=RSS">openthought.org/?action=RSS</a></p>
<p>Mostly none of the old site has been moved over, I may do that for some of
the more interesting entries. Also, I'll probably use mod_rewrite to redirect
the old RSS url, though I haven't added that yet.</p>
<p>Have fun :-)<br>-Eric</p>
Blogging
<p>As has been aptly pointed out, I haven't posted a thing in durn near a
month. Well, here's the problem.</p>
<p>Believe it or not, I've actually developed more of a desire to have more things
written down. Interesting links, pictures, and quotes. Not only my usual
mumblings about this or that in Linux, more even more of a general "I got X
working by doing Y". How life is going, with the ability to add onto it
later.</p>
<p>It's become clear to me that I don't just need a blog, I need a wiki. But I
don't want two seperate sites, as I'll often want to blog about what's it's in
the wiki, or wiki about what's in the blog.</p>
<p>As soon as I figured out what I really wanted, I completely lost the desire
to write at all, I feel like I'm wasting what I type. Instead, in the last few
weeks, I've been pounding out some code for the site that I really want.</p>
<p>I'm using Kwiki as a base, but building a number of plugins to get it to
function the way I want... Kwiki is a wiki, so I needed a blog and comments
plugin, and of course one for RSS. In all, I've written or modified 7 plugins,
and it's nearly ready for use.</p>
<p>I have not yet decided how exactly I want to migrate stuff from the existing
blog. I certainly don't want to lose it. But do I migrate as is? Or maybe I
can migrate a few at a time and make them fit in better with the whole
wiki+blog thing. I guess option #3 is to migrate everything, then slowly
modify them. I dunno.</p>
<p>Anyhow, things are comming along... in the not too distant future something
cooler should be online.</p>
Wooshing Sound
<p>I get FIOS installed today. What's that wooshing sound? That's the sound my
massive bandwidth makes! Heh.</p>
<p>The installation was certainly amusing. He asked to see where the line
needed to go in the house. I showed him the server closet, and then another
room full of spare parts. He stared for a little bit, then asked "Are you into
computers or something?"</p>
<p>He later asked what I did. I mentioned something about Linux... he had never
heard of it. I tried explaining that it was an OS just like Windows or a Mac
with OS X, then told him I did Linux at work. At which point he said "So you
work for Linux?"</p>
<p>Hah. Well, something like that.</p>
<p>After he got everything setup, we went out to my laptop to try it all out. I
was able to connect to the DLink Router they setup with no problem, the next
thing he wanted to do was configure the router. He told me to do it since I
could probably do it faster than him anyway :-)</p>
<p>So, the first thing we did is get rid of the PPPoe, and go straight to
"Dynamic". I'd of course prefer a static IP, but dynamic with dyndns (I use
dnsexit, actually) isn't too far off.</p>
<p>I went with the 15Mb down / 2Mb up... and I seem to be able to get fairly
close to that on the so called "bandwidth testing sites". Now for the real
test... downloading an ISO. I tried a .edu site, and was seeing a little over
1.3MB/s down. Which is a bit closer to 10Mb, rather than 15... probably a
limitation of the server I was pulling it from.</p>
<p>So is it worth it to get the full 15Mb, over the 5Mb service, for the
additional $10/month? I'm not sure ATM, I'll think about it over the next month
or so and see what all I download. I certainly see a difference in downloading
files. Maybe I'll just do it to annoy the AT&T COO who said this:</p>
<ul>
"In the foreseeable future, having a 15 Mbps Internet capability is irrelevant
because the backbone doesn't transport at those speeds," he told the conference
attendees. Stephenson said that AT&T's field tests have shown "no discernable
difference" between AT&T's 1.5 Mbps service and Comcast's 6 Mbps because the
problem is not in the last mile but in the backbone."
</ul>
<p>I would just like to say that the above is untrue, as I believe I've just
proven... and I reiterate my stance that he's simply jealous because he's stuck
at lousy download speeds of DSL :-)</p>
Politician Removal Service
<p><a class="story-link" href="http://www.lp.org/flash/removal.html">A classic from the LP</a>.</p>
<ul>"With your vote, we'll remove you're politician, and release him into the
wild, unharmed. Relatively."</ul>
<p>Hah. Nice :-)</p>
Did Someone Say Perl? (Updated Thrice!)
<p>So, in a bold and brash move, someone actually mentioned Perl at the Perl
Mongers Meeting last night. In fact, in addition to Patrick talking about
Parrot, we actually <i>wrote</i> Perl code as well. It must be a first.</p>
<p>Jeff had an issue where the wonderful admins at his workplace weren't
getting the DNS straight on a new DNS server. So, given several hundred names,
and a list of the correct IP's, how does one show the admin's which names don't
have correct IP's on the new DNS server? Why, you use Perl of course.</p>
<p>The simple, boring, 10 minute answer is this code:</p>
<pre>
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Net::DNS;
my = or die "First argument should be the nameserver\n";
my = or die "Second argument should be the file\n";
open FH, or die "Can't open ]\n";
my = Net::DNS::Resolver->new( nameservers => );
while (my = <FH>) {
my (, ) = split /,/, ;
chomp ;
check_dns(, );
}
sub check_dns {
my (, ) = @_;
my = ->query(, "A");
if () {
my () = ->answer;
if (->address ne ) {
print " is off! Says , should be \n";
}
}
else {
warn "Query on failed: ", ->errorstring, "\n";
}
}
</pre>
<p>That takes a nameserver, and file, as arguments. The file has one name / ip
per line. It then looks up the hostname at the specified nameserver... and if
the IP the nameserver returns is not the same as the IP listen in the file, it
displays an error.</p>
<p>The real fun was, how little code can one use to perform this task? Golf, as
they say!</p>
<p>Todd used a bunch of shell commands, and had it in some 75 characters.
Well, that doesn't really count, that's like being on a different golf course,
but saying you finished with fewer strokes ;-)</p>
<p>At the meeting last night, I was able to get it down to 95 characters of
pure Perl:</p>
<pre>
perl -MSocket -nle '($x,$y)=split/,/;$y;$z=inet_ntoa((gethostbyname($x)));print if$z ne$y' h
</pre>
<p>I've since shortened it to 81 characters by using a different method to
perform the DNS lookup:</p>
<pre>perl -MSocket -nle '($x,$y)=split/,/;$z=inet_ntoa inet_aton $x;print if$z ne$y' h</pre>
<p>And then, 75 characters by dropping the need for $z, and getting rid of
some spaces:</p>
<pre>perl -MSocket -nle'($x,$y)=split/,/;print if(inet_ntoa inet_aton $x)ne$y' h</pre>
<p>Is it possible to not assign variables in the split? I'm not sure, but I
think that may be the only avenue left for shortening it more :-)</p>
<p><b>Update:</b> Okay, we can in fact drop the variable assignment in split,
and use the default array, @_. I was originally hoping split set $a and $b the
way sort does... it doesn't seem to. But, using @_. we can get it down to 73
characters:</p>
<pre>perl -MSocket -nle'split/,/;print if(inet_ntoa inet_aton $_)ne$_' h</pre>
<p><b>Update 2:</b> Aha! We can get rid of split, with a good 'ol regex,
bringing us in at 69 characters:</p>
<pre>perl -MSocket -nle'/(.*),(.*)/;print if(inet_ntoa inet_aton$1)ne$2' h</pre>
<p><b>Update 3:</b> Woo! Save a char by using -p instead of -n, 68
chars:</p>
<pre>perl -MSocket -ple'/(.*),(.*)/;$_=""if(inet_ntoa inet_aton$1)eq$2' h</pre>
Cell Phones
<p>I'm a late bloomer when it comes to cell phones. I've never really needed or
wanted one. I tend to enjoy being away from the world when I'm eating out for
dinner, for example. Yeah, I guess I can turn off the phone. But afterwards,
I'd immediatly turn it back on, and want to deal with any messages there. If I
*can't* check messages or email, I tend not to care... if I know one is there,
or have the ability to check them, it bothers me until I do :-)</p>
<p>Alas, for various reasons, I'm giving in, some of the reasons being:</p>
<ul>
<li>The occasional desire to get in touch with someone while I'm not at
home</li>
<li>I run a business, where I do consulting and hosting. People like being able
to get in touch with you, not just when you're next to a landline</li>
<li>If something goes wrong with the hosting, I need to be able to fix it,
where ever it is I am</li>
</ul>
<p>So, I've begun poking my head around the various offerings. I've been
learning about things like GSM and CDMA. Apparently, CDMA allows for more users
on a single tower, and has a broader range per tower. But, GSM is more popular
internationally, and claims a higher digital voice quality.</p>
<p>Then there's all the providers... Verizon and Spring use CDMA. Verizon has a
large presence in the North-East, where I spent most of my time. Cingular and
T-Mobile, using GSM, do have coverage as well. T-Mobile tends to be more-so
near highways, but otherwise, often considered to be rather poor coverage.
Cingular seems to have an even network around the US... maybe not as good in
the North East as Verizon, but better in other areas.</p>
<p>It gets tough though, as you can run into pockets of people who will suggest
any of the above. Some people love Verizons network and connectivity. Others
love Cingular for the same reason. Some like TMobile because it works well
enough, but is cheaper.... especially when including data into the plan.</p>
<p>The thing that gets me with all this is cost... it kills me that I'll end up
spending so much to be able to have a phone that allows me to connect to the
Net in the case of an emergency.</p>
<p>We'll probably get a phone for Shana at the same time... so, for the both of
us, family plans tend to start at $60/month. Data, for one user, is at least
another $20. So, we're suddenly spending $80/month. And then there's at least
another $5-$10 in taxes. Yay! So, we're almost at $100 for two people to carry
around phones, one of whom can use it to get on the Net for a brief period of
time. Ugh!</p>
<p>Anyhow... the next issue at hand is in choosing a phone. There's a ton of
them out there. And if you look at say, the CNet reviews, you can find at
least 5 things wrong with each one, and an additional 2-3 if you read what the
users have to say in addition to the actual review.</p>
<p>So, what level of imperfection are you willing to tolerate in order to gain
the privilage of spending $100 a month to be able to have people interrupt you
during dinner?</p>
<p>Well, in any case, if I'm going to be doing Internet work, it's going to be
over ssh. And with ssh, a keyboard is nice. The Treo's and such are tempting,
but they're quite large, and they run Windows. I was really just considering
dealing with one of the standard LG phones, or perhaps a flipout keyboardthat
the
<a class="story-link" href="http://www.engadget.com/2005/08/03/the-lg9800-lgs-upper-class-qwerty-phone/">LG-9800</a>
offers. With it, you can use the free <a class="story-link" href="http://www.bitpim.org/">BitPim</a> to upload
wallpapers and ringtones, modify the filesystem, and other goodies that seem to
come disabled (so not only am I spending $100 on phones, I'm spending that much
on phones with features taken out!).</p>
<p>But, in poking around the Net, I ran across this rather
<a class="story-link" href="http://www.phonescoop.com/phones/phone.php?p=836">cool looking Nokia</a>, the E70.
It sports not just a keyboard, but over 7 hours of talk time, WiFi access (b,
g, e, and i), a 2MB camera, a 352 x 416 screen with 16 million colors, 75MB of
space and a mini-sd card slot, and it supports Java so I should have no
trouble getting my ssh client.</p>
<p>After all is said and done, it seems like a winner of a phone. I'm leaning
towards going with Cingular... as Tmobile doesn't really seem to be cheaper,
you just get more features for your money (ie, it's still $60 for a family
plan, but you get 700 minutes, instead of 550). So, I'm leaning towards the
better coverage, since I don't really need the extra minutes.</p>
<p>The unfortunate part of all this is that the Nokia E70 isn't available
yet... Nokia claims it's fixing some software bugs it discovered, they claim
it'll be out later this quarter. We'll see how that goes :-)</p>
New CD
<p>I ordered a slick alternativy CD from Amazon called
<a class="story-link" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0007TFHYI/sr=8-1/qid=1147051376/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-2778438-5151332?%5Fencoding=UTF8">Copeland
/ In Motion</a>. I popped it in the CD player on the way home from work, and was a
bit surprised to hear what appeared to be a "country twang".</p>
<p>I was a little unsympathetic with the plight described in the first song
about winding up in jail... but I knew something wasn't right when I learned
the name of the song was "My Cellmate Finds me Sexy". Hrm.</p>
<p>It turns out that they sent me the right CD case, but the actual CD
contained therein was something from a group called "Cletus Judd".
Interesting.</p>
Inside a Hard Drive
<p>What exactly is inside a hard drive? Well, I let myself be talked into
manually destroying some hard drives, rather than using the simple
<a class="story-link" href="http://dban.sourceforge.net/">Derek's Book and Nuke</a>.</p>
<p>So, we pop all the cases off, then do some terrible things to the platters
which hopefully prevent most people from being interested in the Word documents
we send around here at work.</p>
<p>The one thing I found interesting was that... in addition to the head,
platters, and some other gizmos and gadgets, there's not one, but two rather
powerful magnets inside. And they're attached to the base of the head, a few
millimeters away from the platters.</p>
<p>I had never really known how careful one had to be with magnets around hard
drives. Well, I don't think I own a single magnet anywhere near as strong as
the ones I pulled out from inside of the drives.</p>
<p>They make great toys though, I have a chain of them now to dangle off various
metal objects :-)</p>
Tidbits about Heat Pumps
<p>So my heat pump / air conditioner decided to continuously run the fan. Even
when the heat/air was turned off. Well, I'm lucky enough that my next door
neighbor runs a full time business repairing those sorts of things. In the
meantime, I figured I'd like to make the fan stop running.</p>
<p>You'd think that would be simple... but no button on the thermostat affected
it's desire to keep running... and it even kept going after I turned off all
the power on the circuit breaker it was on.</p>
<p>Or, so I thought. I ended up just wondering over to chat with my neighbor,
and discovered that heatpumps have their own circuitbreaker, outside. Probably
so that they can be turned off, and when someone sticks their head in the unit,
they don't have any fear that it'll get turned back on :-)</p>
Alexander Graham Bell
<p>Most folks remember him as the inventor of the telephone. And, having
invented something interesting, he also must have been a US citizen. Only
partial truths!</p>
<p>Below contains a number of tidbits I picked up largely from Wikipedia.</p>
<p>First, Bell was born it Great Britian. At 23, he went off to Canada. And
3-4 years later, then began researching at Boston University.</p>
<p>It's debatable whether he was the first inventor of the telephone. Outside
of the US and Canada, many countries credit the telephone invention with the
Italian inventor, <a class="story-link" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Meucci">Antonio Santi
Giuseppe Meucci</a>.</p>
<p>But, that by no means makes Bell a dunce, this was a bright dude.</p>
<p>Bell is listed in the 100 Greatest Britians, 100 Greatest Americans, and 10
Greatest Canadians (they don't get so many people up there ;-)</p>
<p>One of his inventions is a photophone, which sent sound over a beam of
light. He didn't really go far with it due to poor communication quality.</p>
<p>He also invented the metal detector and
<a class="story-link" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrofoil">HydroFoil</a>.</p>
<p>He was also a big proponent of Eugenics, a philosophy which promotes
compulsory sterilization of those who, as Bell put it, were a "defective variety
of the human race." These ideas were adopted by many states -- in fact, by the
1930's, half of all states in the US had eugenics laws. The ones from
California were used as a model for Eugenics in Nazi Germany.</p>
<p>Bell did a lot of work with deaf education, but that was exactly the
population he didn't feel should be allowed to procreate.</p>
<p>Ironicly, his wife was deaf, and they had kids. None of his kids were
deaf.</p>
<p>Bell labs, and the decibel, were named after Alexander Graham Bell.</p>
the folks out in front leading the way. It would be wise to find out everything that you can about them, what are they doing that has made them successful
Many times it’s not a bad idea to work for one of these leaders and really get down in the trenches and observe what is going on. What do they do and why are they doing it? What systems do they have in place? What is it that makes them successful?
There are books written on just this subject, books by authors who have studied very successful people and what they did to become success.
As contractors, my company Pacific Outdoor Living has had a certain amount of success. We went from one crew doing under $100,000 a month or about 1 million dollars in sales after our first year to 20 million dollars in sales per year, 8 years later.
We recently made the decision to become a distributor of pond products and sell to other contractors, some of the same contractors who we were bidding against before. In doing so we also decided that we would help these contractors become more successful. We decided that that was part of our product as a distributor. Our job was not just getting pond equipment in the hands of our contractors but working with them to make them the best. It’s a big industry and big marketplace and there is plenty of business out there for everyone.
In doing this we found that there were many, many areas where we needed to improve ourselves. We had many job descriptions written up for our crews and crew chief and supervisors, but we found that we could do much better in many areas ourselves.
We have rewritten many of these job descriptions. I have looked and studied what we did to get in sales. How did I go about it? What method did I use? How can I explain that to others?
We are in a phase as a company where we are codifying all that we have done so that others can really get it. In doing so it is benefiting us greatly because we are refining, correcting, revising and reconstructing many of our policies and hats.
All of which we are willing to share with other contractors.
The in this article series is on marketing and what we did and how it was successful for us. This information has been through several stages of evolution to get to where it is today. It focuses primarily on very specific things that a specialty contractor, such as a pond or paving stone contractor, can do to sell directly to the homeowner.
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