You should have a good idea of what your competition is up too, but only to help improve your company. Lee explains what to look for in “Trash Talk”. Check us out at https://www.junkra.com Subscribe to this channel for all the best junk removal industry info Like and follow us on Facebook at Junk Removal Authority
What’s up guys? What’s going on? It is an Easter Sunday evening. I just pull out of the office. It’s about 7:45. My schedule’s kind of flip flopped around today. I don’t know if you all saw the video. Actually, I don’t know if I ever posted that video, so probably nobody saw it.
So, I went to Atlanta on Thursday. I took my wife down there, she had a volleyball tournament and then I had time to meeting with a very large, one billion dollars. It’s going to be one-billion-dollar valuation national contract that we’re looking at. It’s a company that provides dumpsters and trash solutions for retail businesses, restaurants, small businesses, manufacturing facilities and all across the country. So, I timed my meeting. I knew I was going to be down. I needed to take her, so I timed my meeting. So, I could take her down there.
It’s about an hour and 50-minute flight from Raleigh to Atlanta compared to her volleyball club. They were going to take a bus or she’ll be getting an airline. It’s going to be much longer in an airline by the time you check in and get through security. So, we flew down into Peachtree to DeKalb airport. We did our meeting. We went to the Atlanta Braves opening day game. They beat the Phillies and I flew back that night. She stayed and they did well on their volleyball tournament, but they came up a little short. They won this morning, she rode the bus back because they were in the gold bracket. They would have gone but they play the championship game which didn’t start until 4:00. Anyway, she would ride the bus back in that case. It ends up losing, so I went down there and I kind of flip flop my day around. I went down there, I picked her up and brought her back. She went home and she did a couple of private lessons this evening. Now, I’m getting ready. I’m heading to go pick her up and we’re going to go to grab a steak dinner. So that’s what I’m always talking about is being a business owner. You don’t expect to have a traditional schedule if you want great success. If you will have success, you’re not going to have a traditional Monday through Friday schedule. I work seven days a week, but I’ll make my schedule work for me. So, we did our Easter stuff yesterday. I was off for a couple of hours for that with my family and spent some time with them. I did Easter lunch today.
Today, I was able to fly down and pick up my wife from Atlanta. Still get my work done. We got back around 1:00. I played around with a dog. Grab lunch and then I head back to the office. I’m driving right now and it was about 7:45. We’re going to head to the long work. So, that’s the great thing about entrepreneurship and business ownership. It is a lot of work. Probably more work or at least as much work as working for somebody else. You know, this fallacy of being a successful business owner and not working very much and all that kind of stuff. Make your schedule work for you, but you got to be working all the time to make yourself a success.
So, what I’m going to talk about today and what this video is titled four. Hopefully you all stuck around this three minutes. Researching your competition, that is something a lot of people do, especially when they first start. You’ve got to be careful because you can actually get zoned in so much on what your competition is doing. That you’re not paying attention to the stuff you need to going to be done with your business. However, there are good reasons to research your competition. Sam Walton the founder of Walmart. He was notorious for taking a tape recorder like a voice recorder, and he would go into Kmart. They call this family vacations in their station wagon. The family always talked about they’d have to stop and every competitor in-between where they left, where they left from and where their destination was.
So, any Kmart that came in between. He stopped at Walmart too, but any Kmart that came in between at the time where Woolworths had some sort a large discount chain. They were a handful of them and I can’t remember them all. That’s listed in his biography. The Sam Walton biography I think it’s an American made, but anyway it’s the Sam Walton biography. Excellent read! If you get a chance to read it, read it. He’d always stop in his competition, and he’d look and see what are they pricing their items at? How are they going to display the merchandise? Walmart, back when they first founded. It was very creative on how they display their merchandise. They’d have this huge wall of Tide. So, I mean they literally would have Tide detergent that is used to wash clothing. They would stack it all the way to the ceiling. Just this massive pyramid of Tide.
They did all kinds of crazy stuff to really promote their products. They did three for one women’s panties sale. Walton build this trailer. He put like seven-foot size or like a junk removal trailer. Like when people first start out, they put these really high sides. It was something like that. He found a vendor in Tennessee that sold women’s panties for cheap, super cheap. Every week he drives a station wagon and that trailer up to that place in Tennessee. He would fill up that trailer with panties and he would come back and sell women’s underwear. He does like a two for one or three for one special. He was just crazy on how he grows the stuff. People literally bought them as soon as he brought them in. They were buying them right off the shelf. It got to the point that he could not bring enough in. So, he had to work out some distribution and all or not actually getting into the store. But he would stop in how are they merchandising their items? What are their pricing amount? How is their customer service? What are they doing better than we are? What are we doing better than them? If we’re doing this better than them, how do we make sure the customers know we’re doing this better? So that would be a marketing or advertising thing. Somebody is always going to be doing something better for you. So, if I find something they’re doing better than you then correct it and make yourself better. That’s the beauty. That’s what you need to do with your competition. You need to research what they’re doing better than you and you need to put that into effect. With pricing, you don’t have to be the cheapest guy and the good person in the game. Especially if your site is cheap or if your presentations are cheap. If you haven’t been in business very long. If you don’t have as many reviews, then your service does not have a great selling point. Selling proposition appointment for customers. So, in that case you might want to play the cheap game at the store, but you got to be pushing real hard to get reviews. Make sure that you’ve got is professional.
It’s all about appearance guys. In Junk Removal, it’s all about appearance and reviews. So, get that professional appearance in image. Get lots of great reviews and then you can start jacking those prices up. You might not do a better job. Junk Removal, the actual task of Junk Removal. Most of the companies do it about the same. Most of the customers, they want to know if somebody is honest. You know, they’ve got a good reputation. They’re not going to steal from me. They’re not going to do just things vile things. Really the junk industry, kind of has that reputation or at least it used to. So, they want to make sure that you look professional. That you’ve got a good reputation and that’s all about appearance and reviews. That’s your key thing. Have a good appearance, good professional website and good reviews. Then don’t hide information from people to. If they go to your site I’m noticing more and more franchises. Maybe there’s a reason they’re doing it, but I am not going to do it. What they’re doing is they’re hiding their pricing. We haven’t tested this, but I just know myself as a consumer. If a damn company won’t put their fricking prices on their website then I’m going on with somebody else that will. I’m researching that company generally before I call them, unless it’s an emergency. If it’s a plumbing emergency and I know a plumber. It’s just some sort of “I don’t know who to call.” I might call the first company on there to get the hell out of here, get this thing fixed and if it’s an emergency. Otherwise, I’m researching before I make a call. These companies are making it either they’re not showing their pricing or they’re making it very difficult to find.
Make your pricing easy to find. Have a lot of great reviews. Have a great presentation, and you can raise those prices. You can charge more. You might not be able to charge a hundred percent more or 30 percent more, but you might be able to charge 10 or 20 percent more potentially. If you have that many great reviews and you got that great appearance, you can get away with it. One thing you want to look at is do they have an online booking system? Every single Junk Removal Company should have an online booking system. YouCanBook.me, I don’t make a penny off that. They don’t charge. There’s a free version of YouCanBook.me. Everybody should have an online booking system that links with your google calendar. If a business doesn’t, that’s an advantage that you might have over them. One of the nice things, if they have only one truck so they’re not running routes and they have an online booking system. You can actually periodically check and see how busy they are.
You know, that’s good information to know. If you’re slow especially you want to know if they are busy. Why are we busy and they’re slow or why are they busy? Especially if you’re slow and they’re busy, you’d like to know that. I don’t know if there’s a whole lot of changes you can put into effect to fix that, but I mean that’s something that generally you’ll check. You can do if they have an online booking system. Don’t book appointments though. Just find out the availability and don’t push the appointment through.
So again, don’t get fixated on your competition to the point where you’re not paying attention to what you’re doing because what you’re doing is much more important than what your competition is doing. But what your competition is doing better than you is extremely important and when you find out something they’re doing better. It needs to be corrected. If they do a better website and social media. That needs more reviews then you need to get on that and you need to get it corrected. That’s what we do with JRA. We could have franchise Junk Doctors, but it’s just not really. The problem with this junk removal franchises is there’s nothing really different about them. Most of us are a model whether you want to admit it or not. The majority of junk removal business is out there, are a model of 1-800-GOT-JUNK? or a copy of 1-800-GOT-JUNK? I’ll probably admit it. Now, there are certain things that we do, demolition work, concrete work and some other odds and ends on the Junk Doctors into things. There are a few things we do that 1-800-GOT-JUNK? does not. I believe wholeheartedly. Our North Carolina locations Raleigh, Charlotte and Greensboro do better than the Raleigh or a better customer service than the Raleigh, Charlotte and Greensboro 1-800-GOT-JUNK? That’s just because we’re more actively involved in managing and doing a great job. I’m not sure if they still are but at one point these locations in North Carolina, it was an absentee owner guy at the Michigan. They might have sold them since, but it was a guy out of Michigan. I just don’t think he was on top of what I was going on. He had one manager managing both locations, but for the most part we’re a copy of Got Junk. So, I could franchise this off. We could sell some Junk Doctor franchises but how are we different from stand-up guys?
Well, Junk Kings is mostly sold out. College Hunks is mostly settled out. They still have some markets available. Got Junk is sold out, but how are we different from stand-up guys? How are we different from Junkluggers? How are we different from the company with a guy that’s going with a business system with us? Researching company out of Ohio, I think it’s called Junk Away. Jdog Junk Removal and 123Junk, there’s just a handful of junk removal companies out there offering franchises that exactly the same. They don’t have national name recognition. There’s no national name recognition at all. So, why franchise when we could sell what we know. What we know is that we have the expertise so we can provide services to new prospective junk removal business owners as far as full systems. Then we provide supporting systems as well like the call center. Net access to national contracts and customer acquisition management. We can provide all that to both current business owners as well as prospective business owners and there’s no commitment to us. So, as soon as they’re able to operate a business without our assistance. If they don’t want to use our assistance, they don’t have to. The services we provide, I think it would be smart for businesses to use them for years but they don’t have to. That’s the nice thing about us. They don’t have to use something like our call center. They don’t have to use our call center once they get to a point that they’re busy enough. That it benefits them to have somebody answer the phones because that person who answers the phones can also do bookkeeping.
Well, the franchises require you to use their call center. A lot of them do anyway. Not all, but a lot of them do. So, it provides them with so much flexibility. The amount they’re going to pay us in services. Those fees are going to be less than the royalties up to a certain point. So, when it first starting out with our business system. We’re more expensive if you’re using all of our supporting services. We include a lot of it. We include years with consultation and three months with CAM. Once that stuff is expired, we’ll be a bit more expensive than the royalties but once your business has grown, then we’re cheaper than the royalties. So, it was a unique way for us to do something that nobody else has done and we can help more people.
Yes, I do believe we can make more money doing this and selling franchises. I do because we can help more people. Not that we’re getting more money from individuals, but the fact that there’s a greater number of people that we have access to. That we can provide assistance. Help them make more money. Help them create a better business to serve their customers. Help them gain freedom in their life. That’s something that I believe that the JRA is just a much better vehicle to be able to help more people than franchising Junk Doctors. Nobody knows who Junk Doctors is outside of the state of North Carolina. No customers do. You get no name recognition. Why not have a business that is hundred percent yours, but partner with a company that’s done it before so you can learn what you’re doing. You’ll ultimately spend. It’ll be a lot less money you’ll spend when you buy a package from us or partner with us because of the less mistakes you are going to make. So, I know this kind of run on almost like this has been a long advertisement for JRA but I’m just showing you an example of a researcher competition.
Figure out what they’re doing, what they’re not doing and what you need to do to provide a better service to your customers. Any questions at all? Call me on my office number 1 919-466-9322. Email me at [email protected]. Please subscribe to this feed. This has been an episode of a Trash Talk. It’s been a long one of though. It’s almost Junk Removal Made Simple length right here, but I just had a lot to talk about. Hope everybody found a little bit of value. We will have a Junk Removal Made Simple episode coming up on recycling, disposing and donating your stuff. As well as selling stuff, and fixing stuff. You know, when is the right time to sell stuff? When you should just be moving it on so you can get as much jobs done as possible.
How do you donate stuff? How do you deal with customers expecting donation receipts when the donation place didn’t accept it? All that, it’s going to be covered in this week’s episode of Junk Removal Made Simple. It’ll be uploaded on YouTube, available on Tuesday. Everybody, have a wonderful evening. Hope everybody had a great Easter. We’re kicking off spring here. Spring’s coming up. So, we all have a very busy week. Let’s make lots of money, lots of profits and really blow up our junk removal businesses in 2018.