How Do I Start a Business
How to Start a Pavement Seal Coating Business
We've collected some good advice that is ideal for aspiring entrepreneurs who hope to start a pavement seal coating business. Read this before you begin your venture.
Thinking about opening a pavement seal coating business? We tell you what you need to know to get started.
With a few pieces of sealing equipment and basic supplies, you can launch a pavement seal coating business.
Pavement Seal Coating: Starting Small
The pavement seal coating industry offers attractive business opportunities for hands-on entrepreneurs taking their first steps in small business ownership. Compared to other contractor-based startups, a seal coating business requires much less capital and expertise to get off the ground.
Even better, it's relatively easy to start small and gradually scale up the business as your market presence increases. With a few pieces of sealing equipment and basic supplies, you can launch a pavement seal coating operation out of your home as an owner/operator.
Expanding a Pavement & Seal Coating Startup
Once you have too much business to handle by yourself, you'll know it's time to expand the operation. But the dark side of expansion is that once you grow, it's extremely difficult to go back. In other words, you'll need to maintain the growth your experiencing to cover your additional labor and capital costs.
A first-class business website is a must for growing seal coating businesses. At Gaebler, we advise all startups to invest in a quality website. But if you haven't created a website by the time you're ready to expand, you need to get on it ASAP. Combined with traditional marketing and advertising strategies, your website will drive business to your company and enable sustainable growth.
At a minimum, your website should include the following elements:
- User-friendliness. Business websites should create friendly user experiences -- easy-to-read and highly navigable websites consistently outperform sites that don't make the customers' online experience the first priority.
- Scope of services. Pavement seal coating business come in all shapes and sizes. For example, does your business handle residential jobs, commercial jobs or both?
- Great content. The images, words and features that appear on your website are called site content. Top pavement seal coating companies go out of their way to make sure their websites contain content that is accurate and genuinely useful to their customers.
How to Write a Simple Pavement Seal Coating Company Business Plan
Haven't created a business plan for your pavement seal coating business yet? You could be in big trouble.
At Gaebler, we advise new business owners to keep your business plan simple. Ultimately, your business plan is intended to be a resource for you, the business owner.
Instead of investing countless hours in a lengthy business plan, put pen to paper now and document the essentials with the understanding that your plan will be revised as you move forward.
Look Over Competitors
Prior to opening a pavement seal coating business in your town, it's a good idea to find out how strong the competition is. We've provided the link below to help you get a list of local competitors near you. Simply enter your city, state and zip code to get a list of pavement seal coating businesses in your town.
Is the established competition doing a good job? It's important to understand their strengths and weaknesses and think through how you'll stake up against those established businesses.
Learn from Others Who Are Already In This Space
After you've evaluated your local competitors, you really ought to learn from folks who are already in business. If you think owners of nearby pavement seal coating businesses will give you advice, think again. It'd be crazy for them to teach you the business.
Thankfully, an owner of a a pavement seal coating business on the other side of the country may be willing to share their entrepreneurial wisdom with you, once they realize that you are not going to directly compete with them in their community. Indeed, many experienced entrepreneurs enjoy offering advice to startup entrepreneurs. In my experience, you may have to call ten business owners in order to find one who is willing to share his wisdom with you.
How would you find a pavement seal coating business manager in another community?
It's easy. Here's a link you can use to find a mentor outside of your area.
Why You Should Buy (Instead of Start) a Pavement Seal Coating Business
We know . . . From the time you were a kid you dreamed about starting a business from scratch and growing it to a position of market dominance.
Yet a healthier and safer strategy may be to purchase an existing pavement seal coating business.
Most notably, a pavement seal coating business includes more than just assets - a brand identity and customer base come with the keys to the front door. When you buy, you also gain the ability to sidestep all of the trial-and-error that comes standard with any pavement seal coating business startup.
Franchising May Be a Better Way to Go
The odds of being a successful business owner go up significantly if you purchase a franchise and benefit from the prior work of others and their lessons learned.
Before opening a pavement seal coating business, a smart move is to check out whether franchise opportunities in your space might be worth investigating.
The link below gives you access to our franchise directory so you can see if there's a franchise opportunity for you. You might even find something that points you in a completely different direction.
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