Plural plumbers are plumbers who have two websites. One for the ‘normal’ web surfer who is looking for a plumbing service from their desktop computer and the other website is one for mobile devices.

A mobile device website will suit project managers or work supervisors looking for plumbers using their mobile phone or their Blackberry or some other mobile phone device.   Any Plumber who is readily accessible at the push of a button will plunder projects left-right and centre.

How many project managers, work supervisors or foremen on a worksite urgently need a Plumber?

Every time something untoward happens and every time a previously organized Plumber suddenly becomes ‘unavailable’.  Or is understaffed and needs someone to help to complete a job section because another trade has been organized for the next day and a certain section of a job has to be completed before that trade or delivery can be commenced or completed.

The fact is that any plumbing business not being accessible 24 hours a day will lose work. There is a big difference between choosing between jobs and not being asked to do the job or to quote a job.

As difficult as it is to believe, there are still some Plumbing businesses that still don’t even have a website. Choosing not to have a website is fine if they are quite happy plodding along and are kept busy. But if they are continuing to rely on the classified ads in a local newspaper or the yellow pages to supply customers to them then their days may not be as busy as those who have a website.

Now having a plumbing website to advertise their business and services that is available on a desktop will suit many people who are looking for a plumber to fix a dripping tap or a blocked toilet. Or if they get lucky will have someone find them to do some renovations. By having a website will allow people to find your business and at least ask you to quote a job.

The technical fact is that these websites are not found easily on a mobile or cell phone. They don’t translate well over to the new medium and a website owner needs to have it converted or a separate cell/mobile/handheld device website configured.

The information that is needed on a mobile device (Here we will call all cell phones, mobile phones, iPads etc. a mobile device for the sake of brevity) is different to what you may want to include on your ‘normal’ website.

The truth is that you don’t need your mobile device to list your referrals, or your agency appointments in the same way that you do need to have them on your normal website. If you are the sole supplier of a certain and popular brand in a small town or city, then listing that you are the agent for them locally is important. But if you are just one of many agencies in a bigger city, there isn’t much point, in Australia at least, of taking up potential customer’s air time to browse.

Not all countries treat cell/mobile phones with the same call costs mechanism.

Australian Telecommunication companies charge their customers differently to the way that a phone call is charged in the US and Canada. In Australia, with the browsing packs data download costs starting at $0.25 cents or worse if using a pre-paid package at $2.00 p/MB, potential customers will appreciate not wasting their air time and data download by having to browse unnecessary information.

So if you are a plumbing business wanting to plunder the opportunities of project job opportunities, then you will need to become a plural plumber

Once you have found the best place, then you will need to know precisely and how to use the best tools to get the job done.

Plumbers are usually very good at plumbing but lousy at marketing their services economically.

Some plumbers though go in the opposite direction and they “rob themselves” of terrific business opportunities because their arms are too short or their pockets too long. Either way, all this is very bad for growing a small plumbing business.

The other problem many small plumbing businesses have is being ‘time-short’. Some will take on too many jobs and either run themselves ragged, or start to get a bad reputation for being unreliable. Both of these scenarios are also very bad for business. Here is a little secret my Grandad told me:

“It’s easy to get a bad reputation even when you don’t mean to…. but it’s really hard to make it good again”

People being what they are, will bad-mouth a plumbing business if only out of habit. Once they start to do this, it becomes very difficult to overcome simply because you will never know how far the talk has spread. I know it’s not fair and so do you, so the only way to combat it effectively is not to run the risk of any bad word-of-mouth happening to you in the first place.

Having an effective plumber marketing ditch witch digging through the latest and greatest marketing ideas, while keeping an eye out for you; I hope will be a help and a guide to stop this inadvertently happening to your business.

Plumber marketing ditch witch also plan on suggesting ways and means, along with the right tools, to suggest better ways of doing your plumbing business marketing, while learning new skills along the way.

There are still many plumbing businesses “out there” that haven’t as yet got themselves a web site or a blog. There are others who haven’t become involved in social media marketing. While the jury is still out on the effectiveness of social media marketing, being the original ditch-witch, we will be keeping a very close eye out on this particular business marketing medium for you.

I can see a few good ways in which it could be handy. For example, if your office wanted to know where you were up to on your allocated jobs for the day, they could follow your Tweets from job-site to job-site.  The other advantage to this could be from the safety angle. There are occasionally some weird and wonderful clients living in the communities in which we operate and safety does need to be a consideration today.

If you like the idea of having a plumber marketing ditch witch digging on your behalf, why not sign up to get our RSS feed? That way, you won’t worry about getting put-onto someone’s list and you can receive our updates as and when they get published.

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Plumbers and Real Estate agents would seem like a match made in heaven but like many marriages, there are times when a divorce seems the preferable option. Not all love affairs last and when they turn toxic, it’s time for a divorce.

Plumbers are well aware of toxic cess pits that never seem to work and relationships with some Real Estate agents can be classified in the same category. There is a good reason why some Real Estate agents have a bad reputation as many Plumbers have already discovered to their loss.

Plumbers need to remember that a Real Estate Agent is an agent. An agent is someone who represents another person or company. That means, they are acting and representing a client and responsible to, someone else.

Yes, many Real Estate agents own property and manage it themselves and if you have found a client in that category and they are treating you and your plumbing business fairly, then you may have struck gold. But in the norm of the industry, they are very rare today.

The reason so many Plumbers have a love affair with Real Estate agents is because Real Estate Agents represent access and work for many properties.

The properties that Real Estate property managers manage are across all industries and not just the residential rental market. There are big commercial buildings, industrial properties, commercial properties like small shopping centres, Houses for Sale, and the often overlooked properties of industrial estates. Yes, all those small business tucked away in industrial areas around your local town are often rental properties managed by Real Estate agents. So now that you are aware of why Plumbers at some point in their business will chase Real Estate work.

Plumbers Toxicity Meter No. 1

They start holding up payment to your invoices citing “not enough money in the clients account”. If this is the case, then it should be a big red flag that the agent is not treating you fairly and is likely to be in breach of their responsibilities.

The Real Estate Property Managers laws vary from country to country and state to state so whether they are in actual breach of their contract to their client or not are something that depends on your local law. In Australia, in Queensland and the Northern Territory, they would be.

Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S) reasons for calling a plumber out to do a job knowing that there was not enough money in the clients account to pay for the call-out would be the only legally  acceptable reason.

Plumbers Toxicity Meter No. 2

As previously stated above, every Plumbing business in town at some point, has approached the local Real Estate agents and given them their card and contact details. If they have done a good job of notifying them about their plumbing business, they will also have left a short portfolio/brochure of their capabilities and specialties. If they have been super-organized they will also have left a small memento with their phone number blazoned in big letters sitting on the agent’s desk to save them looking up phone numbers in their Business card folders. But that is a story for another day and right now we are looking at avoiding a toxic relationship that will cost your plumbing business money.

When someone says they called you but couldn’t get hold of you and you know they are telling fibs.

Telling a lie at any time is despicable behaviour that should send your money-loss Geiger counter into over-drive.  If they lied about that then what else are they being untruthful about?

A Plumbers love affair with any Real Estate agent needs to be a cautionary one built on trust.

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There are a number of ways to do this and if you are to survive, you will need to implement some of these suggestions early. The earlier you install and prepare your plumbing business, the better you will survive it.

Without ranting too much about the shortcomings of our western Governments and their addiction to corporate capitalism, as a small business owner/operator, there are some things that you can implement in your plumbing business early that can act as a ‘buffer’ against some of the looming cash flow problems.

Every plumber loves a “cashie”. So what is a “cashie”? A ‘cashie’ is a cash job. That is, they get a callout to a job and the customer pays them in cash money.  Cash is not the usual payment method these days as the majority of jobs are done on a credit card or for good or frequent customers, it is an invoice.

A good Reason to avoid invoicing customers:

Invoicing clients means that it costs you a bookkeeper’s wages or your own time to do up the books every month. When a customer insists on an invoice but doesn’t pay you for three months, this is costing you a great deal of money not to mention time and postage stamps.  If you used that outstanding money in your own bank account, you could be earning interest on it.

So now (I hope) you have realised that you are a plumbing business and not a banking business you will realize that if you continue to allow your customers to have outstanding accounts that they are using your money to do their repairs and maintenance.

If you absolutely, positively have to invoice a customer, please use online systems that allow you to send the invoice by email. At least this way you won’t have to pay for the postage costs which in Australia is $0.55 cents per letter, mounts up really fast. Snail-mail is fast becoming prohibitively expensive and is one cost that can very easily be cut-out.

Be Careful with Credit Card Customers

Credit card payments seem to be a common payment option but even this costs your plumbing business money as you have to pay the charges. I can only hope that you have built in these charges into your pricing structure.  Bank charges mount up over a twelve month period as you no doubt have noticed by reading through your balance sheet every month.  Still, they are a more profitable payment method to invoicing.

A simple and Affordable Payment System for every Plumbing Business:

There is no way around avoiding paperwork unless it is a “cashie” and not recoding that anywhere is an offence under Australia’s GST laws and not one that we recommend.

The alternative is the simplest, most cost effective way of getting paid. Give clients your BSB and bank account details for them to do a direct transfer.  When you write up your bill at the end of a job, and they ask for an invoice, get them to sign the invoice with your payment details clearly written along with the terms of payment. Ask them to deposit the money directly into your back account within 7 days. As they have signed the invoice you have proof of service so that if they want to turn nasty and refuse to pay, you have a signature on a signed agreement to pay.  It’s always necessary to have all the ‘I’s dotted and‘t’s crossed.

Direct deposit saves your plumbing business money, time and is a great convenience to you and your customer. This is one way to protect your plumbing business from financial crises.

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For any plumbing business able to come up with a unique and humorous advertising slogan will have so much business in their town they won’t be able to scratch themselves!

And all it really takes is a bit of brain-power!

plumber marketing ideas

One example of good marketing I well remember from childhood was on the back of a night cart! Remember those days before indoor plumbing? Ok, so I’m showing my age here but that is all to your benefit. Good ideas last decades and I’m quite sure that with a bit of brain-storming, I will be able to jog your memory into action.

What was it I saw on the back of a night truck emptying toilet pans? Remember they used to go around collecting all the pans from the toilets in the backyard? Well, on the back of his truck in big yellow lettering was “Your loss is our Gain”. Crude but highly effective.

In retrospect though, I think it was more to do with their sense of humour rather than advertising because there wasn’t exactly a lot of competition for the job.

But there are similar things that you can do if you can relate the idea to something local in your area that people are familiar with.  Plumbing is very much a ‘local’ business because the main part of your income is derived from people in your town or your local area.

There are jobs (like web design) that you can get done from anywhere in the world but when it comes to marketing your own plumbing business you need it to relate to your local market because that is where the work is for you.

Now this is where Google comes in handy. Did you know that with a Google account you can get your plumbing business listed for your local area?  Better than that you can even get it shown on a map so that people know where your business is actually located. So if someone in a neighbouring town needed a Plumber urgently or wanted to get a better quote, they can find you.  If you live in a bigger city then they can still find you.

All you need to do is get a Google account (sign up is free) and apply to have your plumbing business listed in the local business directory/maps. They will send you a text message on your mobile/cell phone for confirmation and give you a code to put in to your listing and…that’s it. Your Plumbing business will now be listed on Google maps on the front page whenever anyone searches for a Plumber in your area.

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