Capturing Special Event Work

What tactics do you employ to land prized contracts to serve fairs, festivals and concerts?

With the drop-off of new construction customers, pumpers who offer portable restrooms are eyeing special events to stabilize the bottom line. To that end, some creativity may be called for in promoting these services.

While some are making use of the Internet to build special events business, others seem to have fallen back on tried-and-true, traditional producers like cold-calling in person and on the phone. Regardless the tactic, all these efforts seem to have one thing in common: They’re proactive in nature. Everyone seems to understand that the busy bee will be making the most honey in today’s shrinking hive, and that’s the latest marketing buzz.

Bob Bond says the foundation for success in portable restroom rental is pretty basic: “You have to be competitive in this day and age, and you have to offer good service. There are so many companies out there that are cutting prices that if you don’t have a good price, you won’t get the job. And if you don’t give good service, you won’t be working very long. You have to show the customer you’re willing to work.”

Bond’s father-in-law started offering portables in 1990, and promotion of the new service was all by word-of-mouth for the first 10 years. Then the company began running local newspaper ads and launched a Yellow Pages presence.

The current economy has proven quite a challenge, he says, by way of explaining how most of Barnes’ portable restroom business is now in special events. “Normally, we’re pretty busy through the winter months with construction, and we hardly have any of that going on right now.”

They’ve gone back to former clients on a continual basis, asking if there are any new projects coming up. It doesn’t hurt that the company has almost two decades of presence in the area, so people have an awareness of the business. Yet even that history doesn’t preclude some aggressive cold-calling when business drops off as sharply as it has in the past few years.

“We go through local chambers (of commerce) and ask around among people we know (to find new customers),” Bond says. It doesn’t help much to go through phone or other business directories, since the company’s territory only reaches out about 45 miles, and they already know most of the businesses in their service area.

How to grow his portable restroom business is more than a simple theoretical exercise for Clint Martin. A solo operator who’s slowly growing his operation as he gets more time to devote to it, he often considers what he’ll do when he’s ready to go full steam ahead.

To gain more special events customers, he says, “I would do more advertising in the newspaper where regular consumers — not necessarily contractors — are reading.” He doesn’t yet have a Web site, but plans to launch one. In the meantime, he takes advantage of online directory listings that come as part of a package offered by the local Yellow Pages, so he can have some kind of Web presence.

Since he’s located in a college town, he’s also got his eye on serving the portable restroom needs of Shippensburg University for sporting events and outdoor gatherings when he’s large enough. He says he’d be willing to grow quickly if he knew he could secure a large gig like this with the school, adding units permanently to accommodate their needs and contacting event organizers in any way possible to let them know he could help.

Portables join septic pumping, drain cleaning and repair in the service lineup of American Environmental Waste. Located not quite halfway between Peoria and Illinois’ state capital of Springfield, American is still a small company in startup mode.

“I think that service is the number one key to promotion,” Ron Helton says. “What we do at all our special events is keep an employee on-site during the busy times. That way, the units are always clean, serviced and we know everything is going right. I think customers are just looking for more for their money.” He believes this extra visibility of service personnel adds to perceived value.

Helton is a hands-on manager, and takes pride in being able to say that when there’s work to be done and decisions to be made, “I’m there. We service first thing in the morning, so the units start out the day nice and clean. We may service again in the afternoon at a big event. Then we leave someone there through the day to go around and check on things. We also leave a few reserve units there so if things get real busy and we don’t have time to clean one as good as it should be, we’ll just take it out of service, slide the new one in, and everybody’s happy.”

As far as marketing these special events services, Helton leans heavily on the Internet to make his mark. He researches online, looking for listings of upcoming events, then gets on the phone to find out who the key decision-makers are.

“I contact them and schedule a meeting to sit down, face-to-face. It gives me the chance to explain what we do and how we’re going to take care of them better than our competitors.” He leaves his new contacts with a business card and a magnet containing contact information.

Helton takes what he calls “a more human approach” to promoting his services. Despite his use of the Internet, he shows a traditional streak by making sure his company trucks are clean and shiny to properly represent his company in hometown parades. Again, planned high-level visibility is a hallmark of his strategy.



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