Growth in a Town That Isn't Getting Any Bigger

Danny had run Earle & Son for two years the March he decided the business had stopped growing, and he brought the case to the diner the way his father used to, with a number written on a napkin.

"Same revenue as last year. Give or take four hundred dollars."

Walt Brennan, who had paid eleven thousand dollars for a website nobody could read, considered this with the calm of a man who had already made every mistake available. "Town's the same size it was in 1970," he said. "Six thousand and change. Where exactly were the new customers supposed to come from?"

That question is the whole problem, and almost every piece of growth advice ever written quietly assumes it away. Grow your audience. Expand your market. Reach new customers. In a town of six thousand people there are no new customers. There are only the same households, the same furnaces, the same forty-year-old cast iron, and whatever share of them you currently hold.

Growth in a fixed town is arithmetic, not magic

Write your revenue as a chain and the whole thing becomes visible. Jobs done times average job value. Jobs done is calls received times the share you convert. Calls received is households in range times how often they need you times how often they think of you first.

Nothing in that chain requires the town to grow. Four of the five terms are things you control, and most owners have never measured a single one of them.

That is the actual state of a stalled small-town business. Not a shortage of customers. A shortage of information about a machine that is running at maybe half capacity in ways nobody has looked at.

The four levers, in the order they pay

Win more of the calls you already get. This is first because it is free and because the numbers are usually shocking. Count the calls that come in over one month and count the jobs that come out. If you are converting six of ten, the four you lost cost nothing to chase, and most of them were lost to something mechanical: nobody picked up, the callback came Tuesday, the price was quoted vaguely and the customer got a firm number from someone else. An owner who moves six in ten to eight in ten has grown a third without meeting a single new person.

Get called again by the same households. A furnace customer is a water heater customer and a frozen pipe customer and, in nine years, a furnace customer again. Most service businesses are one-call businesses purely by neglect: nothing in the operation reminds a satisfied household that you also do the other thing. A yearly service reminder, a magnet that outlives the invoice, and simply telling people at the end of the job what else you do will separate you from every competitor who does not bother.

Get referred more often. In a small town this decides more jobs than everything else combined, and it responds to habit rather than luck. It has its own article in this series, because it deserves one.

Charge what the work is worth. The most direct lever and the most avoided, because in a small town you have to look the customer in the eye at the hardware store afterwards. It also deserves its own article, and it is the one where a single afternoon's decision can outperform a year of marketing.

Why expansion is usually the wrong first answer

The instinct when a town stops producing growth is to drive to the next one. Sometimes that is right. It is almost never right first.

Thirty minutes each way is an hour of billable time gone from every job, and the fuel is the smaller half of that cost. Worse, everything that makes you strong at home is missing there. Nobody knows the name. Nobody's brother-in-law vouches for you. The reviews are from a town the reader does not live in. You arrive as the outsider competing against somebody else's thirty years, which is exactly the position you spent thirty years making other people occupy in your own town.

Expand when the four levers at home are genuinely used up, and you will know that because you measured them. Expanding to avoid measuring is just moving the problem somewhere it costs more.

Three readings to take this week

• Count calls and jobs for one month. Two tally marks on a pad by the phone. The gap between them is your cheapest growth, and you cannot see it until it is counted.
• Write down the last twenty invoices and mark which households you had served before. If that number is low in a town this size, repeat work is the lever to pull, not advertising.
• Say out loud what you would have to believe for expansion to beat those two. If you cannot make the case with numbers you actually have, it is not a strategy yet.

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).