Welcome to the Rightlook Video Blog! This is our Blog Post # 5.

Hey – it’s Stephen Powers – Founder and President of Rightlook.com and Rightlook Creative. 

I have a story today that turns into a small business lesson. The other day, I wanted to purchase a new Cannon DSLR camera. I am always upgrading equipment here at Rightlook Creative and Rightlook.com and also photography is a personal hobby of mine. Anyway, there was one particular camera I hadn’t played with yet so I went down to the camera store to take a look at the new camera before making the purchase. I was talking to the sales-person – who I happen to know from past business I have done with them and I know he is on commission. He was doing a decent job; he was answering all my questions, being very friendly and devoting his time and energy to me. However, at the end of the whole sales interaction – I was divided between whether I should buy it or go home and do a little bit more research before making a decision. I was really undecided, and in the end I told him I should hold off, do a little bit of research before buying and then I left. Point of the story is that the salesperson could have done one thing differently that probably would have swayed me into buying the camera right then and there. He could have asked me to buy the camera. It seems very simple – if he had just “asked for the sale” or in the sales book jargon – it’s called “closing the sale”. If he had just tried to close me on the sale – I was so close that I probably would have swayed and bought the camera. He did everything accurately up to that point – but at the end he didn’t say “I got a brand new one right here for you and you can go home with it and start shooting pictures with it tonight!” If he had just done something like that – I would have probably purchased the camera.

The message to you, as an auto appearance professional, is how often are you dealing with a client, answering questions and explaining your service and the customer says “I have to talk to my wife or I have to check my schedule” and has an excuse for leaving and not purchasing from you? A lot of times a client can be right between a “yes” or a “no”. Just a little bit of extra effort on your part in asking them for the sale and asking them to book the service can sway their response to a “yes”. When I had my stores – the retail stores I owned in mid-west – I used to always practice “asking for the sale” and I trained my sales staff to always “ask for the sale” as well. I can tell you from personal experience – many many times where the customers would be saying no – by simply asking for the sale, they changed their mind and said “Okay, let’s get the work done”.

Moral of the story: Ask For the Sale! If you want more information on how to do that – there are tons of books in the bookstore on closing sales and sales strategies and I highly recommend you go purchase some and read them. Sales can be a very a critical factor in growing your auto appearance business.

That’s it for today – ask for the sale! Let me know your thoughts and leave me your comments on what else you would like to have me talk about.

Welcome to the Rightlook Video Blog! This is our Blog Post # 4.

Hey – it’s Stephen Powers – Founder and President of Rightlook.com and Rightlook Creative.　

Today, I want to talk about another low-cost, no-cost marketing technique that you can use to help grow your business – Mini Menus or Mini Brochures. It’s about the size of a business card – just a little bit bigger than a traditional business card. Only it contains a lot more information and data. It’s a quad fold brochure– with four different panels – front and back. Fits four times more information than a two-sided business card. With all of this room – you can put all your pricing and menu information, testimonials, photos of your facility or your mobile rig and much more. Pretty much any kind of information that you think might be valuable to you and your customers. You can use these Mini Menus instead of business cards in many situations. Let’s say you go to a networking event – your local chamber of commerce meeting – while everyone is handing out business cards, you will be handing out mini menus. It’s different – everyone likes something unique. It draws attention, people tend to look at it and have questions about it – it’s a great conversation piece. It’s something they are less likely to throw away because it’s got more information in it. It does a lot more selling for you and your business!

You can put these in the glove box after every car you work on – or leave it on their seat. It’s a tiny brochure – doesn’t take up a lot of room and customers are likely to keep it in their glove box. And when they want to know where they got their car serviced or detailed – your mini menu will be right there in their glove box. You can mail one out with every invoice you send out if you have clients that are on account. If you are at a restaurant and are leaving a tip – drop in the mini menu in the envelope along with a tip. I have clients that are going through a thousand of these every two months – they get rid of them as quickly as they can. The goal is to pass them around as much as possible – get them into as many people’s hands as possible. Let’s say you are at a gas station – go up and introduce yourself to the people around you. “Hi I am Stephen Powers, from Steve’s Detail. I am a detailer – I noticed you got a nice car here. I wanted to just hand you one of my brochures…” – and give them your mini menu. You always keep them with you and use them everywhere! Us guys – we don’t have purses! Thankfully, right? So you can’t carry the bigger tri-fold brochures, flyers or postcards with you in your pocket – they are going to get wrinkled. Instead everywhere you go, take 10-15 of these mini menus. Put them in your back pocket or keep them in your wallet. It’s just like business cards – except it allows you to convey a lot more information – it’s a much more effective version of the business card. You are at the mall and you get talking to someone at the register – hand one out. You are at a party or a social event – hand one out! Always have your brochures handy! In marketing – it’s always important to stand out and do something different. That’s what these mini menus will allow you to do – be unique!

Low-cost marketing – doesn’t cost a lot of money. Order them – go through them. The more you hand out – the more money you’ll be making. Cost is about 25cents a piece once the design is done. At Rightlook Creative, we do all the design and the printing. If you want us to do it – give us a call. We can walk you through it. We do work for auto appearance businesses every day – all day. We can make it really simple and give you something that looks fantastic. Take a look at some of the different ones we have designed and how we laid them out.

Dynamic marketing pieces! You got to do it! Let me know what you think!

Transcript:

Welcome to the Rightlook Video Blog! This is our Blog Post # 3.

Hey – it’s Stephen Powers – Founder and President of Rightlook.com and Rightlook Creative.　

It’s March! Almost middle of March. Spring is around the corner. We can always tell when Spring is around the corner at Rightlook because January and February are typically slower months for us. Let’s face it – more than half the country is frozen with snow and ice. It’s just not a busy time for the automotive appearance and auto detailing industry like the rest of the year. But, all of a sudden there is a buzz in the air. The phones have been ringing off the hook! We have people that are expanding their businesses, people getting into lucrative services, and starting new businesses. On the Rightlook Creative side, we are working with a lot of companies who are doing some new exciting things. They want to create a new auto detailing brochure for the year, make a new website or wrap their mobile auto detailing vehicle to get ready for the busy season! People are just making things happen and it made me realize again how exciting this industry is and why I got in this business many years ago and have stayed in it ever since. There are just great opportunities in the automotive appearance field!

Today, I want to go over the five reasons why I feel this is a great business to be in!

# 1 – Low start-up costs. There are a lot of different businesses out there. You can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars to open a business today. I have a friend who owns a juice bar. He spent about $350,000 to open up a juice bar franchise in a mall location. The best he is ever going to do out of that location maybe is going to be $60-$70,000 a year. The key in that business is to open multiple locations. The same with sandwich franchises – you can’t really make money opening one. You have to open and own multiples to really make the serious money – but you have to put a couple of hundred thousand dollars into owning just one. But in the auto detailing and appearance business, you can get started in a couple to few thousand dollars – $2000, $3000, $4000, $10,000 or $15,000. For less than a price of a good used car, you can get started in a professional mobile or shop business in the auto detailing field! Of course, there is some variance depending on which service or services you get in. But as a whole, this is an industry that requires low start-up costs.

# 2 – High margins. This is a business with excellent margins. Your product costs are very low! Generally in the 4-8% range as it relates to product cost – whether you are auto detailing, doing interior repairs, wheel repair or what have you. High margins in any business is very important.

# 3 – Low overhead. You can operate this out of your home on a mobile business and have almost no overhead and be profitable almost from day one. Or you can operate out of a shop. I know many Rightlook customers who operate out of a two bay shop that really doesn’t cost them more than a few thousand dollars a month in rent. And they kill it – they are doing thousands of dollars every day in business in this auto detailing and appearance industry.

# 4 – Huge market. There is a huge market for auto detailing and appearance services. If you have any doubt – go down to the local mall parking or office complex and just look at the cars. There are scuffed bumpers, door dings, chips, cracked windshields and dirty cars needing auto detailing everywhere. There is no lack of business out there. People are getting damages on their cars all the time. This is a great repeat, residual and referral type of business. Once people find you and realize you offer these alternatives to expensive body shop repairs or buying a new car or repainting a car – they are going to want to use your services!

# 5 –This is a relatively easy business to kill it in! And by kill it, I mean you can easily dominate the marketplace. A lot of people in the auto detailing and appearance business are technicians first and they are business people second, third or fourth. If you take a professional business approach to this business, you can stand miles ahead of your competitors. If you go at this and get professional training, operate with professional equipment and you have great branding – with great looking marketing materials, literature, uniforms, wrapped vehicles, great websites and go out there looking like a million bucks. It’s pretty easy with the right business philosophy and approach to really blow away the competition.

So that’s it – the five reasons why I think this is a great business – let me know what you think!

Transcript:

Welcome to the Rightlook Video Blog! This is our Blog Post # 2.

Hi Everyone! Stephen Powers – Founder and President of Rightlook.com and Rightlook Creative.　It’s Sunday night and I am in the office here – cranking out some work! Half the key to being successful is simply to work hard, right?

Next to me on my desk – I had a little stack of these Auto Detailing Static Clings. I was showing these to a client earlier in the week and this gave me an idea for my next video blog post. Static Clings are a little marketing idea. If you do a lot of little marketing things – it can have some big results. Static Clings are a little marketing idea that really works! We have been selling them through Rightlook Creative for years now.

You know when you go get your car’s oil changed – after the service, they leave a small static cling reminder on your windshield that tells you when your next oil change or service is due? That’s what these are – Static Cling Reminders. Only, you don’t have to be an oil change business to use these. A great marketing tool!

Think about it: a typical customer drives their car anywhere from 5 hours to 20 hours a week. You can put a mini billboard with your company information right there on their vehicle – for them to see everyday! You can use it for a coupon, or for a “next detail due” – we do a lot of those. As simple as your company name, your phone #, your website address and maybe a due date for the customer to bring in their car again or even a coupon – an incentive for them to come back. The static clings can be printed in 1, 2,3 or full-color. You can make it horizontally or vertically and we can print a little white part so you can write in a due date or another message if you want. They come on a white card so it’s easy to just peel them off and stick them on the windshield. Wherever there is not any ink, it’s just a clear material.

Great, easy marketing – only about 25 cents apiece. The customer can’t be mad at you, because if they don’t want it there, they just peel it off and throw it out. Think about it! Your customer gets their car auto detailed, and drives home and their neighbor mentions the next day how his car looks great and asks where he got it done – and there it is! Or say you fixed someone’s dent with paintless dent repair and a few months down the road they have another ding. They don’t remember your name or where they put your phone number – there it is – on their windshield!

Great marketing – Do it! You have to do this one! .

Transcript:

Welcome to the Rightlook Video Blog! This is Blog Post # 1.

I am Stephen Powers – Founder and President of Rightlook.com.　I want to take this first post and take the opportunity to talk about what the Rightlook Video Blog is going to be about.

First of all, what the Rightlook Video Blog is NOT going to be about is selling Rightlook products, equipment and supplies. Information regarding our products and equipment can be found at our website www.rightlook.com or by calling Rightlook at 800-883-3446. The blog will also not be about training and technical questions. The blog will not discuss any technical aspects of detailing such as how to detail a car or how to remove a difficult dent. Rightlook.com has lots of resources for this type of information, which can be found at www.rightlook.com.

The purpose of this video blog is one thing: Information! We will discuss tips, tricks, secrets and information revolving around one thing, which is: “how to make money in the automotive detailing and automotive appearance industry”. There is never been a better time to grow a business in this industry. The blog will discuss such topics as: business building strategies, growth strategies, pricing, packaging, promotions, networking, marketing for detailers, branding, low-cost marketing, traditional marketing, non-traditional marketing, no-cost marketing, sales strategies, and more! Through these blog posts, I hope you’ll learn many things: how to market your detailing business, how to start a detailing business, how to harvest the power of the Internet to grow your business, how to build your business through social media, how to go from a small business to a large business and most importantly how to make more money – lots of money!

I have been in the industry now for over 20 years now. I had my first shop providing automotive appearance services when I was 17 and I have built and grown several businesses since then. I have learned from my mistakes and successes. I have also learned a lot from Rightlook students and Rightlook customers and their successes. I have always been a big fan of education: attending seminars, reading books and participating in training programs. My goal through the Rightlook Video Blog is to build a community, where I can share great information with you to help you grow your business. I want to help the industry grow and raise the bar in the industry – and provide a resource for those who are new to the business or trying to grow an existing business. In every video post there will be a little comment button – please leave your comments and let me know what your thoughts are on a topic. Please post your responses, post questions, share any additional thoughts, ideas or suggestions you have. I want this to be a platform for everyone to share their ideas so we can all learn and grow together!

Again – this is　video blog post # 1 and I hope you come back for more.

Let’s make some money!