Hello All. I’ve been thinking about this for a while now & still am up in the air about it. I live and work in N.Y. So Powerwashing is not a 12 month gig for me ( residential guy ). When I do a print add I run in my local Pennysaver & get an excellent response and ROI. Wondering if it would be worth it to stay in there throughout the year at $69 per week. reason is to keep my name out there & bury it in people’s head. Any thought’s?
Depends, that’s $276 a month what kind of return are you getting for that. What’s your avg. job run…$300…$500…$800??? How many per month…5…10…15…20???
From here it looks like a good investment.
Hey John-- I used to do around 10 zones a week of pennysavers and it was running me around $170wk=aprox $700 month. I also was doing yellow page ads that I was locked into on a yearly bases where I was up to a little over $800/month=$10,000+yr. The best sales person I ever had was Laurie who was my pennysaver sales rep. I had her from year 1 in this business in 1996 until 3 yrs ago when I cut her loose. It was sad because we connected and she was very fair with me. She grandfathered stuff in for me and always kept me informed.
But unfortunately the bottom line is money. On a good year back in the day we would make around $12-$15 dollars for every $1 spent with Pennysaver. I also built a good continuous residential base which I am thankful for. The last 2 yrs were rough with pennysaver. I always had business card size ads and not just a few lines. The last year we spent $7000 on pennysavers which included some special mass mailings thru them. Our return was a shocker. Less money made then spent. Now include workers in here and I lost the full $7000.
Yellow pages I would get most of my commercial work from including 2 large movie theaters in one year which paid around $40,000. I haven’t done the books yet for this year because where still working but the guess is I’m lucky if I made $15,000 off of them and then paying the workers probably at best broke even. So since I have to pay them for a full year my last payment monthly payment to them is this month. I had them with many different sales reps and owners of the yellow pages who went bankrupt on a couple of occasions now for at least 15 consecutive yrs.
On the other hand without counting all the repeats I have built up, last year we made over $900 for every $1 spent to host our website and if you do the math our website cost $110/yr to be hosted.
This year it will be much higher since just between to new garages we got over $60,000 this yr. Then of course all the residential and other commercial Work we had this year will add to that total. We still do mailings to all of our customers for them to get discounts on their next Cleanings and we also do mailings to certain zip codes we target. Those two take alot of work and to my steady customer base there good. The others are a crackshot.
Maybe your area is different but print media is getting outdated very fast here and it’s not cheap which doesn’t make this a bad thing but the return going lower and lower its best for me to spend my money earned to where everyone is going and print media is no longer where it at. It’s the Internet and of course networking,referrals and of course repeats. This is my experience.
If the $69/week price is due to the frequency, then keep it going. But if dropping and re-starting doesn’t causes you to have a higher rate, then stopping won’t hurt. Just do the math and determine if the cost still produces a good ROI when factoring the months of zero response. Do you get enough revenue during peak times to balance the cost during non-peak is the question you look at.
