Marketing an Excavation Business When Six People Decide Who Gets the Work

Dale Musser has an excavator, a skid steer, a dump truck and a fifteen year old website his nephew made. Somebody told him he needed to do marketing, so he looked it up. What he found was one pile of articles about running social media for a contracting business and another pile about marketing in rural areas, which turned out to be about coffee shops and boutiques.

Neither one described his business, because his business has a feature almost no marketing advice accounts for. Most of his work is decided by about six people.

Count your actual buyers before you market to anybody

Sit down and write out where last year's revenue came from. In most rural excavation outfits it sorts into four piles, and the piles are wildly different sizes.

Builders and general contractors. Usually the largest and steadiest pile. A handful of firms in the county, each with a run of jobs, each needing dirt work on a schedule.

Other trades who need a machine. Septic installers, well drillers, plumbers on a line replacement, the electric co-op on a service run. This work arrives by phone from people who already have your number and it is close to free to get.

Homeowners and farms. Driveways, ponds, drainage, foundations, demolition, a culvert that failed. The most visible pile and usually not the biggest one.

Municipal and township. Its own world with its own calendar.

That inventory is the whole strategy, because it tells you that a large share of your revenue comes from a group of people small enough to name individually. You do not need a campaign to reach six people. You need to be the one they call, which is a different problem entirely and is mostly solved on the job site rather than in an advertisement.

What builders actually buy, and it is not the lowest number

Ask a builder why they use one excavator over another and the answer is almost never price.

You show up on the day you said. A build is a chain of subs. The excavator is near the front of that chain, so when you slip everybody behind you slips and the builder eats it. A contractor who is where they said they would be is worth real money and builders know exactly what it is worth.

You finish clean and to grade. So the next trade does not have to fix your work first.

You answer the phone during the job and you flag problems early. The rock nobody expected, the water table, the buried tank. The builder does not need you to have no problems. They need to hear about the problem the same morning you find it, while there is still time to move the schedule.

You handle your own paperwork. Certificate of insurance without three reminders. Invoices that match the quote.

None of that is marketing in the usual sense, and all of it is why one outfit in a county has more work than it can do while another with the same iron waits by the phone. In a market where the buyers can be counted on two hands, delivery is the marketing.

The website has one job and it is verification

Nobody chooses an excavation contractor by browsing. The sequence is always: somebody says a name, and then the person who heard it looks you up.

So the site is not a sales pitch. It is a check, and it either passes or fails on a short list of things.

Do you look real and current. Photographs of your own machines on your own jobs, not stock images of equipment you do not own. A homeowner cannot judge grade work but they can absolutely tell whether the photograph is of your county.

Is the service area stated in words. Somebody two townships over needs to know whether to call. A map graphic does not answer this and a list of township names does.

Are you insured and licensed, stated plainly. For dirt work this is a real question in the customer's mind and most sites make it hard to find or leave it out entirely.

Does it open on a phone at a job site. Half of the people looking you up are standing outside on a weak signal. The free site check will tell you in a minute whether that works, and the five second test is the version you can run on your own.

What the site does not need is a blog, a chat widget or a quote calculator. Excavation quotes depend on things nobody can enter into a form.

Where the work is decided in a rural county

The unglamorous answer is that it is decided in a small number of physical places, and being in them is the closest thing this trade has to advertising.

The supply house and the equipment dealer, where you hear what is starting before it starts. The township meeting, where the road and culvert work for the year is discussed in public in front of almost nobody. The job site itself, where the other subs form an opinion of you that they will repeat for years. And the county or regional builders association, if there is one.

The point of being present is not to pitch. It is that in a county with a small number of buyers, information about upcoming work is worth more than exposure to strangers, and the information is free to anyone who turns up.

Your equipment is the sign

An excavator sitting on a lot beside a road is seen by every car that passes for the length of the job, which in a rural county is most of the people who live nearby. That is the largest piece of advertising you own, and it costs nothing beyond what you already spent.

Which means the lettering has to be readable at speed and from distance, on the machines as well as the trucks, and it means the state you leave a job in is a public statement. A neat site with the topsoil back and the tracks cleaned up is an advertisement. A rutted mess with a pile of spoil left over is also an advertisement.

The same logic covers a yard sign on residential jobs, and there is a fuller treatment in trucks, signs and shirts.

The number worth watching

Not jobs won. Machine hours billed as a share of machine hours available, tracked by month.

Excavation is a business where the cost is the iron and the iron costs the same whether it moves or not. A shop can be busy and unprofitable if the busy months are carried by idle ones, and the utilization number is what makes that visible. It also settles arguments about whether to buy another machine, which is the decision most likely to hurt a small outfit that is doing well.

Three readings to take this week

• List every source of last year's revenue by who decided it. If a handful of names accounts for most of the year, that is your customer list and it is short enough to manage by hand.
• Look up your own business on a phone the way a builder checking you out would, and see whether it answers insured, current and local.
• Pick the two builders you would most like to work for and find out who currently does their dirt work and why. In a county this size it is usually one phone call to somebody who will tell you.

Adapted from Small Town Strategy: Simple Marketing for People with Real Work to Do, out now on Amazon in paperback ($14.99) and Kindle ($6.99).