The EstiMate Software Blog

Designed For Mac OS X and iPhone

RateMate Hourly Rate Calculator is a port of our ProfitWatch Software from Microsoft Windows to Mac OS X and the iPhone.  Mac and iPhone lovers can now determine their hourly rate in style using this new release.

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I recently read Jim Hingst’s “No Time To Hunker Down, Part Two” in his column Hingst’s Sign Post in SignBuilder Illustrated.  He presents several powerful strategies for drumming up business in a tough economy, including:

• Following up on old leads
• Sending mailers to your customers
• Networking
• Upselling
• Becoming a consultant
• Constantly closing sales
• Flexibility and leadership

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Are you concerned about the economy? Is business slowing down? A recession is a scary time for all businesses, and often it is hard to see the forest for the trees when making business decisions in a difficult economic climate.

At a time like this, it’s absolutely critical to be working with the best tools you possibly can to squeeze every ounce of profit out of each job that comes your way. Estimate 2 offers you extremely powerful features that allow you to identify the type of work you do that’s most profitable, and focus on that in your marketing.

You see, here’s a secret: when you do less of your low profit work and more of your high profit work, you make more money effortlessly and automatically. Estimate 2 gives you the tools you need to identify this type of work and give it your full attention.

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Good, Better, Best Pricing Is A Great Way To Upsell Customers

One really cool trick with EstiMate is to offer good, better, best pricing scenarios to your customers.  If you couple good, better, best pricing with decoy marketing you can usually capture more dollars for your work.

EstiMate makes good, better, best pricing very easy to do. In a nutshell, what you’re doing is presenting three levels of pricing to your customer — the “good” level is, essentially, what they came for. The “better” level can be used more as a stepping stone to the “best” level, which is what you want to sell them.

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Jennifer and I recently hung a cork board on the wall to start our very own dream board (a dream board is where you put up images, writing, drawings, etc of all the things you want to do or have, to look at every day – a pretty cool visualization tool).

Well.

After a day or so it was still empty and eventually she printed out all the specs of the car she wants and tacked it up on the board.

Damn.  She beat me to it.

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Note: This article is written from the sign shop perspective, but is applicably to any small business where time and materials are the bottom line.

The wrong hourly rate (or “shop rate”) can be like a hidden cancer for your business.

How do I know?  Because I almost killed my sign business this way in 1995. Obviously, now that EstiMate Software is my gig, I’m not making signs anymore.  I grew up in the business, though, and ran my own shop for 8 years — so I know a thing or two about how to keep it going and what matters.

One thing I know for sure is that the wrong shop rate can kill your business.  Especially in times like these. The very worst thing you can do is work for cheap.

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