A 30-something year old guy, clearly a contractor, knocks at the door of my little car warehouse.

He introduces himself, hands me a card and explains that he is the General Contractor building the Waffle House restaurant across the street, as he does across 3 southern states. He politely asks if his guys could park their trucks in front of my place for the day, as big equipment has squeezed them off-site.

“Long as they don’t block the door, that’s fine,” I replied.

I’m half shocked they’re building at all. The restaurant sector is in steep decline, and staff turn-over is always an issue. In the case of the 24 hour short-order Waffle House, inexpensive greasy fare doesn’t generally attract the highest quality servers. They’ve a long reputation as a hangout for smoker’s swilling endless coffee refills. I figure this guy keeps one eye on Monster.com for anything with more promise – such as cleaning aquarium tanks.

I venture a question about work. “Oh my gosh,” he replied. “Things are the best they’ve ever been, and here’s why.” I am beyond shocked at his answer…

Your contracting business is about sales. If you do not sell, your business dies. You do not sell without leads. Your marketing and advertising's only real job is to produce leads or sales for you.

That simple connection of powerful facts is very important to both of us.

Hudson Ink exists to bring you more leads, in less time, from more people, at a lower cost. Yes, that's a tall order. But if you've been on this website awhile or read our other articles or books, hopefully you agree we're up to the task.

What would you do without your customers?  Are you really trying to find out?  All you have to do is forget about them – and let them forget about you.  And if that’s what’s going on, it’ll be clear soon enough what you’ll do without your customers!

What’s your company’s biggest asset? (I said “asset” so quit looking in your chair.)

Some might say “equipment” and given the explosive costs for some of it, it’s big, but not THE big one. A few of you sensitive, caring types might say “employees”. Aww. True, another huge one for sure, but neither they nor the equipment nor your paycheck would exist without the real gold mine:

Faster than a speeding Moped, more powerful than a 60-watt bulb, able to leap small children in a single bound…it’s me, Market Man! 

Ok, maybe it takes me two leaps, but children are growing bigger and bigger these days.  Have you looked at the size of these things they’re calling kindergartners?  It’s like they’ve all been eating their Wheaties…or else there’s something in everyone’s water but mine!

We recently read a major online study citing that “94% of small businesses haven’t claimed their local listing”. Since an “unclaimed” listing would send a company’s search results far down the list, we felt that number was too high, especially for contractors who’d be giving up a significant lead source.

So we queried 9,800 contractors from our list who granted us behind-the-scenes permission to check their listing, completeness, and ranking.

According to Internet Marketing Trends “…the rate of change in web marketing has exceeded business’ capacity to absorb it.” In other words:

Overwhelm. You simply cannot go chasing after every new web marketing gizmo and feature that comes out. You can’t spend the time or the dollars to test each new techno-tidbit to see if it works as “promised”. It’s too much. Plus, you’ve got a contracting business to run.

You just want your web marketing do 3 basic things: