Construction Marketing: Under or out of your control

You can't control the overall economy. Nor can you control how individual clients will respond to your marketing strategies.

You can control your attitude, your personal and business finances, and your overall business strategies and individual business decisions.

Your marketing challenge is to ensure the qualities you can control have enough power and effectiveness to overcome (or at least manage) the things you can't control.

Say, for example, that in good times you "relied" on referrals. You never had to go looking for new business, "I never had to market or advertise", because you always had an abundance of clients, in fact a backlog.

Now things have slowed down for reasons over which you have no control. You can survive in business by taking charge of the things you can control. You can cut costs and staff, live on less, and manage.

Or you can understand that if you were doing things well enough in good times that you had a backlog of work, you probably have an overall excellent reputation, and you can work to capture the referral and repeat business through systematic marketing and advertising now.

Remember, as well, that you don't want to be in the position where you are relying on one (or just a few) potential clients to say 'yes' to bring in your new business. If you are desperately hoping for something to work out, it often doesn't -- the potential client can almost sense your anxiety. Even if that isn't the case, you simply don't have that much power to ensure everyone behaves just the way you want, no matter how much you try. You need to have several possible clients wishing to do with you at the same time to be comfortable, so you need to use your talents under your control to ensure you have enough future business in the pipeline.

Take charge of the things you can control, and the things you can't control won't defeat you.