4 Tips to Expand Small LED Indoor & Outdoor Lighting Business
As a small American startup company owner, you might be very frustated sometimes and curious to ask, is there any insightful & constructive ideas to expand my LED lighting business to larger size as reference on Internet ?
We’ve searched through various search engine and the answer is unfortunately no.
Most articles are mainly focusing on fundamental guideline on
- how to find reliable supplier,
- how to avoid not to be tricked by Chinese company
- how to familarize with LED industry in order to be successful in LED business.
Therefore, in order to create some value to our own customer or other potential customer, we prepare this post.
Nowadays competition become quite fierce because more and more Chinese factories open online retailing store in the name of a totally different brand from their usual brand in order to avoid their wholesalers/distributors’ complaint over direct competition against them, middleman’s survival chance is becoming very small if you don’t revolutionize your reselling business model.
Therefore, we as a expert vendor wish to bring up some ideas to small LED lighting business owners including Chiuer’s own customers so your sales revenue can be growing to medium-sized or large-scale LED lighting business.
Below are 4 tips on how to expand your small LED lighting business to medium or large size, which we hope helpful for your business or you can inspire more ways to boost your business turnover.
1. Working with electricians or electrical contractors in different states
Individual cannot go for a long way, while team can.
You can team up with general contractors and sub-contractors in construction & building industry or licensed & assured electricians (apprentice or journey electrician), though you are not working in the same office, you are fighting together like a team.
You can cooperate with them or recruit them, because they can solve your after-sales problem like testing, repairing, maintenance or replacing the bad light, which can greatly help to get a “A+” review & feedback from your customer especially new customer and introduce you more business if your service is beyond their expectation. Why not do that ?
You can even find energy consultant(they are knowledgeable about lighting and HAVC energy assessment) who has the ability to conduct energy audit (FREE or charge), no matter you hire them or partner with them, your team then, can offer energy audit service and can find the best product within your customer budget. With these advantages over other rivals, your customer is more likely to assign job to your team to complete.
Another good way to get business is that you can find the top 200 electrical supply distributors branch or their daughter company in your district, as far as we know, these giant companies like Sonepar, Graybar Electric, CED, CES have hundreds or thousands of branches across United States and Canada, their purchasing is handled individually by their own branch, not by the headquarter, so that is a great chance to seek business from them
2. Recruit sales Reps in different states or provinces
These doesn’t mean that you have to pay them hourly, Let’s take a new way to consider it, you don’t have to pay hour wage to them.
Instead, you offer commission to them at high level, say, 20% of the sales revenue, you just resolve supply chain problem, and prepare all upfront work, website showcase, business card, marketing papers( like catalog/brochures/flyers) and mail to these sales Reps, on which the brochures bear your company logo, contact, website etc, they can use these paper to promote your product in their living areas, visit their customer to have a face-to-face talk, or giving a cold call to ask property owner if they have plan to upgrade their lighting system.
And here is a guide on how to hire 100% commission sales Reps
Of course, these sales representatives should be have some knowledge about LED, or should be in LED lighting industry for some years, so they can be trusted by potential customers.
The problem is that how you find these qualified people and which State to start from ?
Nowadays, as Internet gives us so much convenience to do market research & analysis, you may start from Google search engine.
e.g. If you are offering lighting solutions for commercial outdoor parking lot, car dealerships, the first thing you need to figure out is that which state has the largest number of parking lots (you might happen to find these places in your travel during holiday, or you can search the largest 3 populated cities in each State to start) or which state has the highest search volume relavent “LED parking lot fixtures” on Google trend, such as “parking lot light upgrade” “parking lot light retrofit” “parking lot lighting repair” etc.
After knowing where your potential market is, we can go to the next step.
You can find these sales representative on Linkedin or other job-seeking platform and see anybody is interested in join your team.
In this way, your sales channel will extend to larger region.
3. Find some funds company who can offer funds for customer
Some end customer don’t want to pay the high LED upfront cost or they are afraid that the ROI time could take too long, so they are in dilemma wheather to follow the trend shift to LED or not.
What will you do if you have met such kind of customer, how to get their business ?
We’ve noticed that now there are many funding companies emerging recently to offer fund to LED lighting upgrade for commercial and government customers.
Funds firms like “Graybar Financial“, “Oklahoma National Gas” assistance program, are what our existing customers are using, you can search such kind of fund company in your surrounding area.
When you get one, I am very excited to tell you, you can fix many stubborn customers because of this attractive, risk free services really makes your business unrefusable.
These funds companies work like this, they pay the LED fixtures first for the end customer according to the signed contract, customer only need to pay them the savings of electricity bill each month, compared with old HID fixture consumption before upgrade. Which means your customer paid at ZERO cost.
For instance. for 50pcs 1,000W metal halide, 50pcs 300W LED should be used, but upfront cost is 188USD/pc, that is 9,400USD totally.
0.1USD/KW.h*(1KW-0.3KW)*10hrs*50pcs*30days=1,050USD per month.
Your customer only need to pay these saving amount 1,050USD to funds company each month, in about 9-10 months, all front cost 9,400USD can be paid off.
As you can see, your customer doesn’t pay anything on LED remodel. The saving part should have paid to main power company because MH waste these energy, but now it is billed to fund company.
Therefore, your customer does have NO economic pressure and would be happy to do that.
4. Looking for executive recruiter company in lighting & electrical solutions
When your company grows to 5-10 staff, it is better to hunt for some executive staff to make your job run into flow operation. They usually have rich experience in marketing and promotion, business developement or enpower his team members. When you assign the job or task to them, they can help you to achieve the goal.
How to find these these fabulous human resources in Lighting industry ?
Here we introduce you an American executive recruiter company like “Pompeo Group“, they have resourceful human resources in LED Lighting, Electrical and Controls fields and we believe you will find right people from them for your company, or you can use ESPpro Search to find different levels of executive team, which will facilitate your company growth exponentially.
If you have other ways on the topic “ideas to expand my LED lighting business”, welcome to share with us or email us sales@sct-lighting.com.
We are willing and feel delighted to help customers to get more sales and leads during our meaningful conversation.