That’s right! Every floor you stain is a selling tool in and of itself. Stained concrete is still largely unheard of, and people that see a well-stained floor for the first time are often blown away.

A great looking floor will become the topic of many conversations and you can bet that the name of the stainer will be mentioned over and over again. There is simply no way to compete with this type of word of mouth advertising.

Let me tell you about an experience of mine that will help to illustrate the point.

Here in our hometown of Albuquerque, there is an annual home show called the Parade of Homes. It’s a pretty big deal, and many of the local contractors and architects pay it serious attention.

A few years ago, we were asked to stain the floors of a home that would be entering into the Parade of Homes. We pride ourselves on the quality of our work, and provided a stunning floor that was in perfect harmony with the space.

When the Parade began, our floors became the most talked about part of this fabulous home. Everyone who entered had to remark on the beauty of the floors, especially those who had never seen quality stained concrete before.

The owner later told us that the floors were a major contribution to the home becoming a prize-winner. What blew us away, however, was how many people wanted to know who provided the staining.

We literally got dozens of referrals. These referrals led the several new jobs (the high-end ones that we really like).

At that time we didn’t fully understand the power of word of mouth advertising and hadn’t left any business cards behind. The poor homeowner had to scribble our phone number down every time someone asked for the information.

Now, we know better. At this year’s Parade of Homes, we had several entries with our stained concrete floors. Each had some marketing material left behind about our company, as well as a large stack of business cards.

Not a single card was left after the home show was over.

This story illustrates the awesome marketing power that referrals can bring your company. The key is in creating floors that are worth talking about.

If your are having trouble with this, I suggest you get information on my training manuals for creating fabulous floors because that isn’t what this letter is about.

This letter discusses another aspect of the word-of-mouth advertising that troubles lots of stainers out there. Great stained concrete is our business and creating great floors is not the problem.

Over the past couple of years, my crew and I have been working on creative ways to keep this from happening. First, we made a lot of progress in finding the best ways to not only maintain floors, but also to fix any marring or discoloration that has occurred.

We have also toyed with the idea of a extended ‘warranty’ type service, where we send out a crew at regularly scheduled intervals to perform maintenance and ‘touch-ups’.

However, the most important step we’ve made has just happened in the last 90 days. We realized that telling people how to maintain their floors just wasn’t good enough. They forget or misplace the instructions. They buy the wrong products. And, if they hire someone else to do it for them, they end up passing on second-hand information which usually gets garbled.

We decided that we needed a better way to instruct our clients on the proper maintenance of their stained concrete floors. A way that would also work for our large commercial clients that have a janitorial service to perform the maintenance.

It contains a complete walkthrough of the maintenance process for stained concrete floors. We address floors that have been finished with both water- and solvent-based sealers, and also discuss how to perform touch-up work for areas that have experienced excessive wear-and-tear.

The DVD is in both English and Spanish and has a running time of over 11 minutes. We now give a copy to every client we work with.

I was initially going to recommend that everyone shoot a DVD like this for their business. But then the project ended up costing over $6,000, and why should I tell everyone to reinvent the wheel. I already have a publisher with a good distribution program, why not just make this DVD available to my network of stainers? If you would like a copy of the maintenance DVD that I use in my own staining company, it is now available for purchase through my publisher Bridgeworks for $24.95. Even better, we’ve put together a deal where you can buy them in bulk at reduced prices to use them like I do – as a handout for your clients. If you are interested in bulk pricing, click here. Click on the link below or the picture to the right to order.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER GAYE’S NEW DVD, HOW TO MAINTAIN ACID STAINED CONCRETE.

Happy Staining!

Gaye Goodman

PS. Let your best marketing tool do its work for years to come. It will ensure not only great looking floors, but happy customers and word of mouth advertising for the life of you business. Click here to order now.