Getting the Momentum Going

Starting and running your own business is tough. According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 20% of U.S. small businesses fail within the first year. By the end of their fifth year, roughly 50% have faltered. After 10 years, only around a third of businesses have survived.

When it comes to starting your business, you will have many more expenses than actual profit, and it may take two or three years to actually earn a profit. Among other expenses, advertisement is important to your growth. When I was just starting out, when I would put up lawn bag signs, people would be calling me within the hour.

Now at this point, I don’t often advertise with lawn signs anymore, or spend that much money on it. I’ve built up a large number of clients that keep returning to me every year, and my website ranks really well for the competitive keywords that get me business. There is also a factor of word of mouth, although it’s difficult for me to tell how big of a factor it is.

And my clients seem to have a similar experience. Once, when a returning customer was quite unhappy about a production delay, he told me “I need these signs, because when I put them up I get customers, and don’t have any right now”. So lawn signs work very well for in demand services.  

Last year I did put up some signs for both my advertising business and also for house addresses. The house addresses are doing very well as the trend has caught on and everyone wants one. Even though the pandemic broke out, I still got a lot of response for the advertising signs. Actually, advertising is a business that does well when the economy isn’t doing that well, since when people don’t have clients they have to advertise.

But I generally don’t spend much time advertising, because I’m at a size that I am comfortable with. After about ten years, it’s a very smooth refined process. Bigger business means more employees, more and complex business processes, more headache – and very little profit increase proportionally, in my opinion. Not only that, but as you grow, you need to delegate more, and I quite like the hands on aspects of my job.

However, I’m also not very young and ambitious. I have a client for example, who comes in every year in spring to do a massive flyer/doorhanger/postcard campaign for his landscaping business. They work extremely well for him. I’m not sure how much repeat customers are a factor in landscaping business, but I also know people in one-time-customer kinds of businesses that are getting by mostly through referrals. But the landscaping guy is expanding his business, constantly adding trucks to his fleet, so it makes sense for him to go all out in trying to get more customers. It all depends on your goals in life, and how ambitious you are with your business. It takes a lot of effort to get to a certain point of revenue/client flow, but once you are there, provided you provide a quality service, it’s easy to maintain that level, and have small growth naturally.