Mike Andes tells a handyman entrepreneur to pick residential or commercial work early, not both. Residential needs door-to-door outreach and home services branding. Commercial depends on relationships with property managers and landlords. Mixing them kills conversion.
I'm learning a lot and I'm actually looking at starting a handyman business. So maybe Matt could actually help with this. I guess my biggest thing right now is just getting started, just trying to get a client list going. And so any word of advice you can give me for that, I guess I do need to go door to door and kick some doors in and meet people for sure. But property managers, you know, going around and talking to all those people I need to do.
One of the things I think when it comes to handyman is you got to really determine, are you going commercial, you going residential? And so, because if you're doing residential, yeah, you're going to door knock, you're going to run ads. It's like you have to have a clear brand image. When the customer thinks, I need something, they find on Google, when they come to your site, it screams residential or commercial. Because the last— the best way to get rid of a customer and reduce your conversion rate is for them to think, this is not for me. And so I would choose one of those lanes. Doing both at the beginning can be very difficult. Uh, I would also think, I'm assuming you have tons of handyman skill, and if you didn't, I'd say go get a job because like handyman is one of those things, there's so much variety. And so I would really be very intentional about choosing residential versus commercial and then choosing your brand around that. So being very, even like the logo, the website, your ads, it needs to speak to either of those consumers.
I guess Any advice on which way I might, I might go on that?
Well, so if you go commercial, it's much more who you know, property managers, contractors, you know, large landlords, etc. If you're going the residential side, no one thinks about their broken toilet until they have one. And so then, then you are going to go much more traditional advertising route. And if you're like, well, I don't know which one to go, then you might just start running ads to a site and see what comes to you and what sticks and what you like, etc. That is usually a pretty unprofitable time because you're figuring so much out at the same time. And usually it's hard to show yourself as the professional or like the expert when you're kind of testing out all the waters.
If your personality is one that you like to— you'd like to meet a lot of people and you'd like to talk to a lot of people and you just get a lot of energy from that, I'd go the route of residential. If you are not so much a people person, you'd like to have a few, maybe 7 to 10 relationships that you can manage, I would go the route of property management because then you'll be able to have a lot of work from a few people, few relationships.
