How To Market Your Private Investigation Business: Less Than 5 Hours A Week, Really!

How To Market Your Private Investigation Business

Less Than 5 Hours A Week, Really!

John Hoda (CLI, CFE)

How To Market Your Private Investigation Business: Less Than 5 Hours A Week, Really!

Copyright John A. Hoda (2019)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means with the prior written permission of the publisher.

Requests to publish work from this book should be sent to [email protected].

Cover and Interior Illustrations, Titling, and Layout: Creative Jay (creativejay.com)

Contents

How to Market Your Private Investigation Business

Overview

I. The Honeymoon Is Over

Don’t Get Swallowed Up in Your Success

Checklist

S.M.A.R.T. Goals

II. Keeping Score

What Gets Measured, Gets Done

III. Branding

What Does Your Website Really Say?

What Does Your Collateral Really Say?

Testimonials

Summary

IV. Targeting the Right Audience

Where does your target audience drink?

General versus Specific

User versus Buyer

Going Wide versus Going Deep

Our Three PIs Track Down Their Audiences

Summary

Checklist

V. Guess What? You Are Always Closing.

Basics of Selling

A.I.D.A.

VI. When You Are a Hammer, You Are Always In Search of Nails

In Search of Nails

Summary

VII. You can market less than 5 hours a week. Really!

Why Less Than 5 Hours a Week?

VIII. Flying Fortress

The B-17 Flying Fortress

Afterword

Need More Help?

About John A. Hoda, CFE, CLI

Also by John Hoda (CLI, CFE)

Acknowledgments

How to Market Your Private Investigation Business

Less than Five Hours Per Week, Really!

Overview

Section I - The Honeymoon is Over

Six Months To Two Years After Launch

Examples From Our Characters

Reasons Why Sales Go Flat

Marketing Plan Revisited

Checklist

Why

How

What

Target Audience

Pricing

Services

SMART Goals

Competition

Section II - Keeping score

Paragraph

Time Management

Critical Items First Thing In The Morning.

Crm For B2C, B2C, P2P

Saturday Morning Projects

Old-Fashioned Flip Chart

Section III. Branding

What Does Your Website Really Say?

What Does Your Collateral Really Say?

Section IV. Targeting the Right Audience

General V Specific

User Versus Buyer

Go Wide Or Go Deep

Examples Of Targeted Audiences

Summary

Checklist

Section V. Guess what? You Are Always Closing.

Basics Of Selling AIDA

Selling Steps

Example

Resources

Section VI. When You Are a Hammer, You Are Always in Search of Nails

What I Learned From The Parachute

Examples Of Transferrable Skill Sets.

I Don’t Do That.

Refer It Or Learn It

Beware Bright Shiny Objects

Beth’s Side Hustle

Summary

Section VII. Really, You Can Market Less than Five Hours a Week

Why Less Than 5 Hours A Week?

Examples Of 5 Hour Marketing Habits

Your Plan

Section VIII. Flying Fortress

Section I

The Honeymoon Is Over

Don’t Get Swallowed Up in Your Success

After you launch your business, regardless of whether it is a soft or a hard launch, you can get swallowed up in minutiae of your own success. You might take on a weekend case for a new customer, or offer a discount to someone that could give you more work or a great testimonial or both. You might be swamped with the fulfillment part of the business (services), all the while thinking, this is great!

You don’t realize how much time it takes to log a case in, set it up, work it, report on it and bill it, enter it into your accounting software, receive payment, make the deposit, and close the file. You might be taking on new work that requires slightly different skill sets that has a steep learning curve.

Back in the day when you were mining someone else’s gold, you might not have returned to a faraway location until the next time you were out there in the hinterlands. Now, you make special trips just to impress your new customers.

It’s fun, it’s new, and it’s exciting. You are building up the checkbook. You are paying your bills. Your family and friends are impressed. You pinch yourself. Is this real?

Then reality sets in. You bust your butt to get that impossible video shot of Mr. Smith and Mrs. Jones who have a thing going on. You send in the video with your bill, and the client complains that the video is jiggly. You patiently explain the difficulty of obtaining the shot, but you can’t get them to understand that this is not Hollywood. The client wants to negotiate your bill—the nerve.

Your virus software didn’t catch the latest attack from those zany guys in Eastern Europe and you are staring at tons of work to be input, and at least 2 days of having to re-enter data because you thought you were backing up to the cloud, only to find out, unfortunately, that you never tested your back-up plan.

The associate who was scheduled to work with you tomorrow calls you at the last minute, while you are staring at the blue screen of death, and says they can’t work with you. You hang up the phone muttering and cursing that ten-year-old nephew of your associate who had to have a birthday party on the same day as your big case.

You have more unplanned work. You have to cancel the big case or throw another warm body at it and to add insult to injury, you notice that you haven’t received a new case in a while. You were so mired in fulfillment and the business of your business, you failed to notice that by the end of next week, you will hear crickets when the work dries up. It’s then when you slam the new desk drawer closed (and it breaks) you realize the honeymoon is over.

I am about to tell you how Private Investigation marketing is really done. Raise your hand if this applies to you:

You market when you run out of work.

You take all comers.

You discount pricing to keep people on the payroll.

You wait until after you do everything else, including taking out the trash, before you lift up a phone and dial a prospect.

Alternatively, follow-up with that prospect from the other day, oops it was last week, ugh no, it was two weeks ago. Fat chance for that one, bunky!

It’s been a long day, and you’re tired. The launch adrenaline has worn off. The long nights and days have caught up with you.

I’ll do it tomorrow, you say, but you don’t.

You don’t have a plan.

You haven’t done any marketing in a while, and it feels awkward trying to ask for business again.

You had gotten so busy you turned off the Live Chat button on your website.

You haven’t put up the new video testimonial that is just sitting there waiting to be uploaded.

Let’s check in with Tony, Beth, and John.

Russo & Associates has gotten off to a good start. He is hitting his numbers from day one thanks to a