Your Business in 60 Seconds
As Director of Aire Serv London North West one of my duties is to meet regularly with diverse local businesses with a view to providing mutual support to enable business growth. During the meeting we are each given 60 seconds (yes only 60 seconds) to describe our business and identify a referral / opportunity that we are looking for.
When first asked to summarise Aire Serv’s services in 60 seconds my reaction was “this might be possible for businesses in other industries, but I don’t think 60 seconds is enough time to do our business any justice!” However we were stuck with the 60 seconds so I decided to have a meeting with the Aire Serv team to see how they understood the business and what they thought were the salient points.
During the brainstorming session a number of points came out (listed below in no particular order):
The technicians thought we should explain the depth of our experience and the professional qualifications required in order to legally work on air-conditioning and refrigeration systems, including a certificate to handle refrigerant gases, as well as the requirement to hold a waste carrying licence issued by the Environment Agency and public liability insurance. One also suggested that the 60 seconds could include the fact that heat pumps are one of the cheapest ways of generating heat and providing hot water as well as having a low carbon footprint.
My PA reminded me that perhaps we should mention that we provide services to domestic as well as commercial clients, and that ultimately it was all about comfort.
Our head of sales thought it was important that people understood that we are a “life cycle” business – i.e. we work with the customer from the initial design of the system through its installation and subsequent servicing. From experience this is not as common as it sounds as many players in the industry are content after the installation stage and not too concerned with the servicing, which means that clients are left to find someone else to do this, or worse still, do not realise that if the systems are not serviced regularly the warranty is voided (warranty periods this can be up to 5 years).
My own emphasis was on educating clients that it might be possible to obtain interest free funding from the Carbon Trust as well as the availability of certain equipment that could attract 100% first year capital allowances for tax purposes. Also, for domestic customers, most of the air conditioning solutions now attract 5% VAT due to the application of energy efficient technology. Again this is an area that is not considered enough, particularly in the current climate where funding capital investment is challenging.
At this point there was quite a buzz in the office as we all had a great feeling about the organisation we were working for. However the question still remained - how do we get the key points in 60 seconds and still make an impact? This was a separate exercise that I’ll cover in next week’s blog.
If you run a local business and are interested in obtaining referrals /opportunities for growth, see http://bit.ly/droplC for details of the next meeting.
