The past week, I decided that I was going to start offering simple services as a local service business, drawing on my 10 years on experience in marketing to help. I have quickly discovered that much of it is irrelevant for a brand new local service business start-up and mostly applies to established businesses looking to make incremental improvements. Let me explain.

I have quickly seen that what is needed are simple and straight to the point actions that get customers, for me to then do the work, and then earn a living.

This all at this stage seems to require old school tried and tested actions; such as direct emails, leaflet creation and distribution, and in person conversations.

Now this seems obvious when I say it, but coming from my background of spending many hours optimising websites for on page SEO, technical SEO, email optimisation and segmentation, hours in analytics dashboards, social media posts and PPC ads, I am realising how so much of this is disconnected from what is needed with local service businesses in particular at the early stage. They are the long game, and what I need right now are customers who trust me based on well performed work, so that they become regulars,

So, with the help of codex, I built a free custom CRM with baserow.io, integrated it for free into a new website using Netlify, and all I paid for was the domain name. I figured at this stage all i really need is a way to keep track of any future replies, so that after I get a good amount, I can extract the data for analysis in Excel, to see which customer acquisition method works the best.

My only real skills are marketing, and a background in hospitality before that. My years working as a chef and head bar man built my practical side, then moving into marketing, I started working freelance with an SEO agency, after which I started going it alone, marketing my own marketing services to others. I really felt the desire to start work that was active again like I did in my days of hospitality, yet I didn't want to completely leave my office work and marketing skills behind, I wanted to combine both elements in some way.

So I recently decided to start my own local service business, where I can use my marketing skills to get clients for work I can perform physically. But I will need to start simple and work up. As mentioned, a lot of the analytical and strategy I have worked with is of no use, I need a direct approach to build a network fast. The Crazy Quilt method is really where I needed to start - building a network, like stitching together a patchwork quilt that eventually becomes so large, that the coverage reaches far enough to get a network of partners and clients - hopefully!

At this stage, I decided the most direct methods are to sent direct emails, and to create and print a couple of flyers in Canva. I made 2 designs, one offering seasonal Autumn leaf raking, another offering a wider range of simple handyman or gardener type work. I'm looking to start this from the ground up and I have always wanted to mix office work with hands on work. I printed 60 of these full colour prints at home, and the ink cartridge started running low - this is going to be expensive at about £11 per refurbished ink cartridge from ebay, in the future I'll have to bulk order 500 at a time as this works out cheaper, I also wont need to cut the a4 in half to create 2 a5's from each, but I shall see how they fair after I deliver them this week.

I have identifies residential homes where my services are most likely to be needed, my initial thoughts are for around homes where older people live and need a hand with this practical work, so this is where I'll start, I have made a list in Excel of where bungalows are located near by and I shall deliver here first and start recording what types of leaflets get a response from what areas. I'll record any responses in the CRM.

For my email campaign, I short listed 27 parish councils, estate agents and sports centres and checked I could legally sent cold emails within the rules of PECR (Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations). Here in the UK, I can only generally send unsolicited emails to Limited companies and LLP'c, for Sole traders and many ordinary partnerships I need prior consent. I need to move fast to get clients quick so my origional list of 50 was almost halved after removing the latter. Each email identified myself and I ended each email saying to reply "not interested" and I wont email again - this made me comply with the rules.

After sending all 27 emails, after the first day I have one reply from a parish council saying they have nothing at the moment but will keep me on file for future work. A small result I have entered into my CRM, but I need clients, so I have short listed another 15 contacts, 5 estate agents / property managers to hopefully get work on multiple homes as a contract, like making places presentable before sale. 5 gardening and landscaping businesses who might have overflow work, and 5 hotels / pubs that might require simple gardening work.

However, 1 response from 27 so quickly seems to somewhat confirm the 3% cold email reply rate, although more may come in later. I added a pie chart below showing expected reply rates to keep my expectations in check!

The above are all my best guesses at who might need my simple services, and I can only find out through contacting them what is and is not needed by who. I have recently taken on the Effectuation mindset created by a PHD in entrepreneurial mindset research. I really advice to have a look at her stuff at https://effectuation.org/learn-effectuation-page.

And this is where I am at in my journey. I will keep updating this as I progress over time as I discover what does and doesn't work, and I hope its all of some use to someone out there.

Thanks for reading!

James Jackson.