In this episode of Ask Evan, Evan Carmichael answers a newsletter reader, Ronnie, who runs a building‑materials business and plans to launch consumer products. Evan advises Ronnie to concentrate first on business‑to‑business (B2B) customers because they provide repeat, larger orders and reliable cash flow, whereas consumer sales are costly, risky, and generate one‑off purchases. He recommends building around customers with real budgets and pain points, and postponing the consumer‑product launch until the core business is financially stable. To win B2B accounts, Evan suggests starting with a small, low‑risk trial order that is essentially risk‑free for the client, then overdelivering with exceptional service, training, and support—using service quality rather than price to displace existing suppliers. This approach helps secure larger, repeat orders, improves cash flow, and creates a foundation for future consumer‑product expansion.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael.
Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. Today's question comes from one of my newsletter readers, Ronnie, who wrote in asking about helping to grow his business. So, I love your story. I'm a young entrepreneur and I'm trying to market and finance my business. I sell building materials and soon I'm starting consumer products. Please help. So thanks for the question, Ronnie. A challenge a lot of entrepreneurs face: how do I grow my business, get more companies and more customers coming in to buy what I'm selling? In your case, I would think the main thing for you is trying to build around your customers. So I don't know how many clients you already have, but I would focus on the customers who you can add meaningful, tangible results to, who also have a budget. So build around their problems, build around their pain points, and I would focus on the business customers. You mentioned you sell building materials and you're going to launch a consumer product line. Consumer products are really, really tough. It's not that it's not possible, it's just really hard. It's expensive to launch, expensive to market, and every time you're selling, you're selling one-offs. So it's really hard to get the cash flow coming in. So a lot of companies get bled dry because they're, you know, blowing their brains out trying to create that marketing engine to sell to the consumer market. I would first, if you're having financing issues and marketing issues, I would first focus on the business market. So if you're already selling to business clients for your building materials, focus on them more. What more can you do to help them? Business customers are great because they'll do repeat orders. If you, if you can become a vital part of their business, they're going to want to make you a part of their business, right? They're going to want to keep ordering from you on an ongoing basis as they need more in your case, materials, but whatever you're selling, they're going to need more of it. Ideally, it's a consumable that they can use on a, you know, keep ordering on a regular basis from you. That's great. They also make bigger orders. So if you are talking to business owners, hopefully some bigger companies, they're going to order a lot more quantity than the consumer market will on an individual basis. So, you know, you might have a bigger overall opportunity going after consumer market, but it's again expensive and really risky to go after. When they make an order, it's one order, two orders. It's really small. Where if you go to business, you might sell 100, 1,000, 10,000, right? It's a lot easier to make the bigger quantities and to bring in the cash flow. And again, when you're starting a business and you're at the brink of, you know, failure because you're running out of money, you gotta get cash flow coming in. And that's easier to get from business market than from the consumer market. So you can get, you know, bigger orders coming in Awesome way to build a business if you can. So I would focus on the building material business and not so much the consumer market until you're able to get to the point where you're supporting yourself. You may have big dreams of what you want to sell as an awesome consumer product marketing idea for you in the future, but I'd put that on hold. Keep that in mind, definitely, but get your business to the point where you're able to survive, support yourself, you have some cash flow coming in from your business clients, that then you can afford to spend a little time, energy, resources, money to build this consumer side of the business. For the business side, my favorite strategy to get in is start on a small order. So make it really, you know, friendly towards them, small order, test you out, almost risk-free for them, and then overdeliver like crazy. So you're going in, you're providing crazy amount of value, you're giving them training, you're giving them support, whatever you can think of to give them amazing service beyond anything that your competitors are going to do. Because that, that sets you up. So that first trial you're coming in on, you may not be making a lot of money, you may not be making any money, maybe it's break-even, maybe it'll be a small loss for you. But you're getting in the door to prove yourself. This is your chance, this is your trial. It's a great way to get into these big companies because you know they're going to be wanting to buy more from you ideally. If it's an ideal target market, target business where they have big orders that they could potentially give you, start small, get in there, make it easy, and then overdeliver like crazy. So you're providing awesome service, whatever you can think of to really stand out in their mind— training, support, going in, walk them through how to use your product, even things not related to your business, whatever you can think of again to stand out. Because when it comes time to reorder, if they've had an amazing experience with you and an okay experience with the guys they're already buying from, then they're going to give you more business and give them less business, right? Most of these guys are probably already dealing with a supplier, so you have to displace the existing supplier. So you do that ideally not on price, because that's a hard way to make a business, but you do it on the service. And if you can provide amazing service and stand out, the business customers will want to make repeat orders from you. Bigger quantities and hopefully tell their business colleagues about you as well. So hopefully that helps. If you guys like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. I love seeing those come in. It makes me want to do more of these videos for you guys. And if you have a thought to add to this video or you have a question for me, I always read the comments below, so I really appreciate it if you want to leave a comment underneath. So thank you, and we'll see you on the next episode.
