One of my VCT accounts is a very high-end motorcycle dealership. Since they built their new store I’ve been taking care of the hard surface floor care for them. The Yellow Truck has cleaned their carpets at least three times in less than the year that they have been in their new building. A “stain” that appeared even before the customer took occupancy at best would only disappear for a couple of days when The Yellow Truck cleaned the carpet. It would then reappear as it wicked to the top again.
The last time we did the floors I asked if it would be okay if I cleaned for them, for free, this one small section of carpet that looked so bad. The owner said I could if I wanted to but she had already ordered a section of very expensive rubber flooring to replace that carpeted area because of the re-appearing stain/s that had become such a problem. I didn’t have with me a set of pad drivers for my Cimex so I used a slow machine with a tank on it and a pad. That was three weeks ago.
While my guy worked on the VCT I did this small section of carpet and measured out the rest of the carpeting in the building. Total square footage of carpeting in this building is about 10,081. Today the owner of the dealership called and asked me to do another much larger area as well as clean some carpeting in another business that she owns. After three weeks the stains have still not reappeared and the customer is not only happy with how the demo area turned out, she wants me to do more work for them.
Admittedly I don’t know much about carpet cleaning, that’s Rick’s department. My forte is hard flooring, i.e. marble, concrete, terrazzo, grouted flooring, VCT, etc. What I do know is that it was very easy for me to go in and fix a problem my customer was having with their carpeting using encapsulation. This was after the customer explicitly told me on at least two occasions that The Yellow Truck took care of all of their carpet cleaning and for me to just worry about the VCT. I also know that I should be able to clean all their carpeting in about five hours based on the production times I’ve seen here on the board. To me $.16 a foot sounds fare. That means if I am able to get them to go for at least an annual wall to wall cleaning and possibly 4 or 6 month maintenance cleanings, I should make pretty fair money on this account.

David Gelinas

Way to do David!

I am starting a new commercial campaign based on giving FREE demos such as you did.

I don't know if I will get many takers or not, but for anyone interested the following link is a PDF proof of an ad I mailed to several thousand businesses yesterday.

Click Here
to open in your browser... To download, Right click the link and select "Save as".

Commercial is a new arena for my company and I may be wasting my money using direct mail, but direct mail has worked extremely well for residential so I thought I would give it a try before pounding the pavement.

For commercial work, before the Cimex and encapsulation we mainly did a small amount of commercial work for our residential clients who owned businesses (only about 8% of our total business)... NOW I WANT A PIECE OF THE PIE! lol

Steve,
Killer looking ad!!!
Very well done.
I believe it will work.
Keep us posted.

Dave,
Here's an idea. If you can get the motorcycle shop at .16 - you could sub it out to me for .08 and never have to think about the carpet in there again Then you can just stick with the floors that you like best.




Rick Gelinas

Nice looking Ad, Way to go

That is one beautiful looking ad, Steve! Very Nice! No pressure, No obligation! Letting them decide with their own judgement & positive info, Win Win Win situation!
Gary Roland

Great work, Steve.

That should get the phone ringing.

Love the soft sell, no obligation, free demo approach. Custy has nothing to lose. The pix say it all.

Please keep us posted.

steve

That's probably one of the most impressive commercial mailers I've ever seen Steve. You have an amazing talent to clean and market. Great combination.

Rick Thode

I can't take credit for the ad... My good friend "Wayne Miller" created most of the ad copy on a 5.5 X 8.5 card. I simply rearranged it and added some pictures of our work... Wayne provided an excellent base ad to work from.

Steve Smith, Dirt & Ad Rearranger Extraordinaire
P.S. Wayne Miller is one of the most talented guys around when it comes to designing ads, computer graphics, websites, etc... Here are some examples of websites he has designed: http://www.carbonatorsexchange.org/millercreative/webs.htm
Check out Wayne's own carpet cleaning website at: www.Drynamic.com