There are a lot of doors that may be a little more difficult to open as a carpet cleaner. Let’s face it, from most consumer’s minds (not all but this is a common attitude), carpet cleaners and carpet cleaning’s values are thought of as ‘a dime a dozen’. Some doors are difficult to get into due to the fact that at any given time the consumer or property manager has a line of countless carpet cleaners to bid on any work they may want done as to carpet cleaning. We as an industry have made it this way.

Yet, if we approach it differently from what everyone else is doing, go in from the ‘back door’ so to speak, things can be quite different in our marketing approach. For example: How easyz is it to get a carpet cleaner to bid on work for a consumer? Pretty easy, but, if they need carpet repair, where will they find a ‘Carpet Repair Specialist’?

Now, if we approach the market differently and lead in with our Carpet Repair work, it now becomes much easier to get the door open so as to speak with them about repairing carpet. Once we repair their carpet and now have a relationship with them, it is easy to market our cleaning services to them. We now have a relationship with them and it is a proven fact, people like to work with someone they know and trust.

Here is an example, and I have many of these to prove this very easily; I went into a hospitality property knowing what type of problems would likely be there. I then approach the proper person about the matter and explain to him we can ‘fix his broken carpet’. We then proceed to perform 9 full days of carpet repair in this property.

Here is an example of some of the seam repair work that needed to be done:

Here is the seam after repair:

Now this in itself is very good work to have and it can be much more profitable in itself than just carpet cleaning in general. Yet, what occurred after the repair work was finished, the GM now wanted to know if we could clean the carpet because they did not want some carpet cleaner to re-damage their carpet that had just been repaired. This is a VERY IMPORTANT point of this post and the need to learn, not only carpet repair, but also how to use it to open new doors for ourselves and our businesses!

Here we are cleaning over 10,000 sq ft of ballroom carpet we had just repaired:

That is just phase one. The next step is to learn how to use advanced repair work to lead into whatever work we may want to market to. How nice would it be to locate a property that we would like to work for? Say, Country Clubs, Gated Communities, Hospitality, Property Management Companies? How nice would it be to go to the front of the line and get to talk with the real person that makes the decision on if we get hired or not? How nice would it be to instantly make a deep impression on them the moment we meet them?

We use our skills we learned in Carpet Repair Class to do just this. How? Make them a fabulous present to give to them as we meet them for the first time. I made a custom logo rug for this business and presented it as a gift to the owner of the store that is a designer style store and has the in with many home owners that frequent their shop and that she has the ear of, and she can tell them about many of the types of work we do.

This custom rug sits on her wall for all to see. She is constantly reminded we Gave this to her. Hopefully you get the idea of how this can help open doors from referrals. Do this over and over again and many doors may open for you.

I will stop here but hopefully you will realize there are a lot of doors that can be opened with Carpet Repair and with advance work as well. Consider the bigger picture as well as the smaller one, you can go either way with repair work. Just think if you added only two repairs a week with your current base of customers, how much would that be in just one year? It could easily add 10-20K a year with little effort alone, the add on sales of this is great.

Anyway, I hope this helps some to think outside the box a little. Whether anyone every takes one of my classes or someone Else’s, if you want to increase your opportunity for business, Carpet Repair has a lot of possibilities. After all what is the number one complaint of the carpet industry from the consumer? The installation part of it. With proper training, we can repair a lot of the work that is just ‘laying out there’ for us to take advantage of.

I hope this helps give some ideas,
Steve Andrews