Tag: Business Centre

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News & updates

5 ways tradies can beat inflation

Inflation hits small businesses and tradespeople harder than most. In addition to the increasing cost of living, they must also cope with rising material and labour costs, which can affect cash flow.

Small businesses and tradies are still recovering from the COVID-19 lockdown disruptions and skills shortages, while inflation in Australia is the highest it has been since 2001 at 6.1 percent. When money is tight, homeowners might put off a renovation or even major repairs. When you combine this with rising material costs, it is easy to see how it can take a chunk out of profits. While these factors can’t be controlled, you can take proactive action to put your business in a steady position during inflation.

Even though inflation creates challenging times, there are ways you can offset the effects and improve your cash flow. Here are five steps you can take to help your business stay afloat during these challenging times.

1. Rethink your offerings

Now is the best time to review your products and services. You need to explore what has interest now and what has lost traction. Focus on what is currently selling with high profit, and you might want to think about revamping your current offerings. For instance, can you bundle services to save customers money on larger projects? Perhaps, it might be possible to break services up into smaller components to allow customers to customise their services by getting only what they need. Helping to continue bringing customers in the door, even if the jobs are smaller and more varied in nature.

2. Audit your supply chain

The next thing you need to do is to do a supply chain audit. Supply chain disruption can mean that you are unable to fulfil obligations to your clients. It is sometimes easy to get into the habit of ordering from the same suppliers, even if they raise prices. Now is the time to explore all your alternatives and try to find suppliers who are less expensive and reliable. Doing a supply chain audit can help you save money now and assure that you can deliver to your customers on time at affordable rates.

3. Audit your finances 

If it has been some time since you did an audit of your operational costs, this is another task that can help your bottom line. You need to look for ways to save on everything from supplies to utilities. Conducting an advertising audit should also be a part of this process. Knowing which advertising channels are helping the most and which ones are not performing will help you streamline your marketing budget.

4. Invest in technology

Small businesses and trades tend to be the last to adopt technology to streamline their business. Finding technology bundles that allow you to consolidate and automate business processes will pay for itself in labour saved over time. This can help if your company is facing staffing shortages. It can also help your staff use their time more efficiently. When considering automation software, it is a good idea to consider your needs now and what you anticipate in the short and long-term future.

5. Retain valuable staff

Finding new employees is much more expensive than keeping the ones you have. The costs of recruiting and hiring new employees have more than doubled since last year, which makes staff retention one of the most important concerns. You need to focus on creating a work environment that fosters loyalty to the company. Make sure you are listening to what your employees have to say and focusing on creating a place where people want to come every day. Sometimes, giving current staff a small pay raise is less expensive than finding new employees, and it is worth it to treat your current employees well.

Bonus Tip

Now, you know a few practical ways your business can beat inflation. It is all about creating a balance between increasing revenues and lowering as many expenses as possible. One way to increase revenues is to list with a service, like Oneflare and Airtasker which have a customer base that is looking for services just like yours in your service area. By taking these steps, it is possible to survive and thrive, even in times of rampant inflation, and these are things you should put at the top of your list.

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News & updates

Tips and tricks from our Account Managers

Oneflare’s goal is to connect businesses with the right customers. With the help of our Account Managers, we’re able to meet that goal by providing business owners/operators with practical advice on how to win work, manage leads and grow a business. 

This article sums up the top tips and tricks from our Account Managers that have helped businesses see the most success.

Ash, an ocean-dwelling, pilates-loving, wine enthusiast shares her top tips

  • Be consistent & keep it simple – Have a stand-out profile and an engaging message to first reach out to clients with, and tell them when you will try to contact them (and actually stick to it)
  • Don’t devalue the small leads – I have had a bathroom renovator complete a $70 tile repair and end up coming back with 2 full bathroom renovations and a laundry renovation from that single lead
  • Harness the power of word-of-mouth – I’ve had a renderer complete a $100 job and the neighbour saw this guy’s work and booked him for a $21,000 lead
  • Back yourself! – As a small business owner, you’ve already spent the time and money backing yourself to get to where you are, making sure your customers and potential customers know why they should choose you

Fred, the gym and football fanatic’s two cents on winning work

  • Follow up – Make sure you always follow up with a phone call when quoting on a job, you want to make sure you are the customer 1st choice and not others, make sure your profile is up to date so it stands out
  • Start small – Quoting on smaller jobs can land you bigger jobs in the future

Temika, a coffee and animal-loving member of the Oneflare team shares her greatest bits of advice

  • A win is a win – Don’t close the door on smaller jobs – they have less competition, less idealism, and can often lead to bigger things. If you make someone feel valued on the small jobs, they’re more likely to come back to you for a larger project.
  • Call, call, call – A voice on the end of the phone is so much more powerful than a text, and it’s really the most effective way to sell your expertise.

Sammy, our sunshine state AM, who spends her time at her local freshwater creek when she’s not helping her businesses

  • Invest in your profile – The best thing a business can do is have a stand-out profile. This gives them the best opportunity to be chosen by the customer when all the profile details are completed and verified, with photos and reviews. 
  • Stand out with images – include a picture of yourself and/or your team.  Customers want to see the faces behind the business and it gives them confidence in choosing a business for their job, particularly if that person is coming to their home. Family pics and anything with a pet involved is a great way to connect with your clients and show them who you are.  It also stands out from the sea of logos.
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Success stories

Video testimonial | Joseph from Simba Cleaning Services

Hello, I’m Joseph, we run a family-based cleaning business called Simba Cleaning Services.

We do all aspects of domestic and commercial cleaning. Being trained as a microbiologist,  I understand the essence of cleaning. We use eco-friendly detergents to make every home and office clean and germ-free, it’s the cleaning and also total disinfection.

Joseph, the owner and operator of Simba Cleaning Services.

Marketing in every business is major. I needed marketing but the channels and platforms I was using weren’t giving me exactly what I required.  I wasn’t getting that correspondence, I was not getting that support to build my young business. Until I got Oneflare, where I was given products, that were useful for my business I was given a dedicated account manager who held my hands and I can say held my hand is a toddler to where I am now, my business has grown through to Oneflare. 

Seventy-five per cent of my leads come from Oneflare, which makes me think this is really an investment. Customers can see us on the Oneflare platform and contact us and that is also because of the reviews that are published on Oneflare. The app is very user friendly because if I am so busy doing some work,  I can just put on the auto quoting feature and when my hands are free, I just need to go to the app and go to the messages. I believe this is a product that is going to take your business to the next level. I have seen where Oneflare has taken me, to where we are today in a span of 2 years. Try it, you will not regret it, it’s worth it. 

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News & updates

How to write effective proposals

Running a small business is challenging and very competitive. So what’s a quick and effective way to stand out from competitors who are after the same customers? The key to getting ahead is through proposals.

Proposals are an essential tool to win customers and differentiate your business from the rest. A well structured written proposal can be time-consuming and requires a lot of effort to put together, but it’s worth it. It’s an essential tool to show your understanding of the project, highlight your expertise and demonstrate the reasons why you should be trusted for the job! This article will guide you through how to write an effective proposal that wins customers.

Quotes vs Proposals

Quotes can help a customer understand the cost of the jobs while proposals provide more information on your solution to their problem. It’s important to decide whether a simple quote could suffice or if a detailed proposal will give you a better chance of securing the job.

Automated quotes that are immediately sent to a lead’s job request is effective because you’d be the first one considered. On the other hand, a proposal proves to a lead that you have a proper understanding of their job requirements and that your business has the best solution.

How to write proposals efficiently

Whether you’re a new or established business it’s important to capture what makes your services unique. Put aside some time to create a proposal template that you can easily fill out when a customer approaches you for a job. Information such as: 

  • The services you provide
  • Unique selling proposition (USP) – what makes you different to your competitors 
  • A story about why you’re in business
  • Reviews and ratings

How to structure your proposal

  1. Executive Summary
  2. Define the problem
  3. Present your solution
  4. Outline the project schedule and budget
  5. Conclusion: Tie it all together
  6. Terms and conditions (optional)

Use a customer focus perspective

A customer-focused perspective means putting your customers’ needs first. This way of writing shows that you not only value, but have an understanding of what is important to them.

When creating your proposal, explain what the problem is and provide solutions that align with what’s important to the customer. Include personalised solutions to set you apart from your competitors.

To assess if you have understood your customer’s perspective, ask yourself the following questions:

  • Who is the decision-maker?
  • What is the problem? What are the issues?
  • What motivated them to find a solution?
  • What is important to them? What do they care about?
  • Are they familiar with your company?
  • What are your strengths in relation to their problem?

Once you have answered these questions, you can get to work on your proposal.

Here are some conciseness rules you can follow to make a winning proposal:

  • Write conversationally
  • Begin with an executive summary of fewer than four sentences
  • Keep sentences short and crisp
  • Keep paragraphs short
  • Use bullet points, numbers, and white space
  • Avoid using a passive voice
  • Tell a story
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Success stories

Video testimonial | Natalie from EventZen

Meet Natalie, a vibrant event planner and celebrant who has thrived on Oneflare.

My name is Natalie and I have a business called EventZen. I am a wedding, events planner and celebrant. I decided to become a celebrant because I love, love. There is a lot of joy surrounding weddings, there is a lot of stress too but I come in because I don’t want people to feel that stress. I like it to be a nice relaxed environment for them to enjoy the planning process.

Oneflare has made it really easy for me. I don’t think about marketing because I know I’ve got Oneflare there. I find it hard to work on marketing when I’d much rather be planning weddings and it’s difficult to get your business out there so Oneflare has been great. It’s brought the right clients to me at the right time. I would say about 80% of my clients come from Oneflare, which is amazing. I have so many leads come in every day and I’ve been led to some incredible clients, there have been some really amazing people that I’ve met. 

I like I quickly you get emails and texts when a lead comes up. I also love that the reviews are there and the reviews are taken from Google as well. The advice I would give to anyone wanting to try Oneflare is to absolutely go for it. It’s amazing how quickly you get the jobs and it pays for itself straight away so it’s totally worth it. 

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Success stories

Success story | Wayne from WM Painting

Here we share Wayne’s story

Wayne has worked in the painting industry for over 20 years. In the beginning, he worked full-time for large companies, and on the weekends he would work privately to supplement his income for things like family holidays. Wayne’s skill and experience in the larger companies landed him as site supervisor,  where he continued to grow his industry knowledge and people management skills. 

After many years, he realised he had the experience to run his own business and more importantly, be his own boss. In 2015, Wayne had a good amount of clients from his weekend work to feel confident enough to start building his business, W&M Painting. 5 years on, Wayne grew to a team of 3 and managed to simultaneously run up to 3 jobs in different locations all across Brisbane and surrounding areas. 

The W&M team in action / Source: W&M Painting

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Challenges before Oneflare

As a first-time small business owner, Wayne “wasn’t sure how to get himself out there”. He started by hiring a designer to create a website but later found out about the need for search engine optimisation (SEO), a task that is complex and expensive to maintain. 

Wayne needed more avenues to find leads and more ways to secure work. He understood that he needed to invest in a service platform like Oneflare to find these opportunities. 

Experience on Oneflare

Since joining Oneflare over 4 years ago, Wayne has managed to build his business and employ a team of painters, all without having to think about marketing or SEO. The volume of leads brought to Wayne by Oneflare has been great enough to sustain steady business growth for W&M Painting. He recently received a 2021 Service Award, an accolade that has attributed to an even greater demand for his services. 

Results on Oneflare

W&M Painting Services now has 

  • A stellar 5-star review rating 
  • Steady, high-quality leads
  • A team of professional painters with the ability to service 3 jobs at once 
  • The freedom to choose the type of clients, jobs and locations to service

Wayne’s advice for any business looking to sign up with Oneflare is: “To get yourself out there, you need a platform. Oneflare is like a trampoline to getting yourself out there”

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Exterior house painting / Source: W&M Painting

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Success stories

Video testimonial | Alex from GT Plumbing

Learn about Alex’s journey with Oneflare, how together we’ve achieved great things for his small Aussie business.

My name is Alex and I’m the owner of GT Plumbing. I’m basically here to provide a very high-level service to our customers. What I love about being a plumber is it’s a continuation of helping people. You’ve got a set of skills and when you really good at it then it’s easy and you make things look easy.  I enjoy getting up every single day. It’s what I always want to do. 

Everyone helps and everyone needs honesty and everyone needs someone that’s going to be genuine with them and we’re here for honesty. I’ve been on Oneflare for about 3 years, 3 years running strong. We’ve used other platforms but the support around the other platforms are not there. They’re more about the sales, more about numbers, whereas Oneflare is more about your relationship. 

Oneflare provides you with all the analytics that you need, they give you live date updates, they can even tell you how many people actually looked at your profile and how many people actually reached out to you or made a phone call. You don’t get that information elsewhere and if you do, you got to chase it. This is zero effort. 

Because we’re on Oneflare, we don’t have a Google presence. There’s no need for it. Oneflare will manage the reviews honestly and they’ll vet it honestly. So you’re not going to have your competition come along and then give you a really bad rating when the customer is not verified. I’m sorry but Google does not do that, Oneflare does. This is a really big benefit, so you are going to get genuine reviews. We’ve got 131 reviews at the moment, the majority are 5-star, they’ll go look for that review and say ok these guys have amazing reviews and we’ll get direct phone calls coming through.

You want to be spending the time on the tools and time with the customers and making the money and the more time you spend off the tools you’re not making any money. So Oneflare will help you. It’s a very good platform to come in, build your customer base up, keep working and also make it presents online. It’ll work really well.  

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Success stories

Video testimonial | Georgio from Gerain Group

Watch how Oneflare has helped Georgio find 80% of his customers.

The Gerain Group story… we started work in 2017 and we are a home renovation company specialising in bathrooms, kitchens and home modifications.  There are a lot of horror stories we hear of clients that cannot find a reliable builder and that is where we want to step in.
We intend to be very honest with our clients from the beginning to the end of the project as well as we are a very family orientated company. 

The challenges faced prior to joining Oneflare was that a lot of companies we engaged for marketing and sourcing out work were just after capital and quantity of members on their platform.  The good thing about Oneflare is that you get paired up with an Account manager.  The best thing about that is if any questions or any queries about where your business is heading that account manager will be able to help you with that. 

The benefit of using the Oneflare app is that you don’t need to be waiting for that one phone call to come through for you to find a job. For all our leads, I’ll say that 75 to 80% of our leads that we generate are from Oneflare.  You get a push notification when a new job pops up and you have the option to click quote and go and meet the client. I find that to be such a great way of expanding your business. 

The next best thing about using the Oneflare app is that you can target certain specific areas.  Now for us we like the service all of New South Wales, we are actually in the process of opening up a division in Queensland so hopefully, Oneflare can help us out there. I meet trades every day that are looking for new work and that are struggling to get that phone call and I always recommend Oneflare. Oneflare will and has helped my company and will help your company as well. 

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Success stories

Video testimonial | Saurabh from Supportsoft Technologies

See how Oneflare has helped Supportsoft land big clients like NSW Health and Centrelink.

My name is Saurabh Bhatt and this is my business partner Sandeep Singh. At Supportsoft we provide all kinds of IT services, like server maintenance, software development, software applications, database applications. Today, we are dealing with clients like NSW Health, Centrelink, Medicare, clients dealing with universities all across and Science Labs. 

We both started the company back in 2014 initially under a different name, and then, later on, we moved to Supportsoft Technologies. As a business starting off with no background in marketing, it’s difficult, you just can’t do it. Either you pay a consultant a hefty fee every month to do it or you do it yourself and trust me I was not able to do it either way.

The most challenging part of any industry is getting genuine customers, we spent a lot of money on Facebook and on Google ads as well, the problem was we were not getting genuine leads, genuine enquiries or genuine customers.

We haven’t seen this problem with Oneflare. I have been using Oneflare every month, every day, in fact from 7 a.m. since I start getting leads, until the time I sleep at 11 p.m. Getting quality leads and the leads that I want. It’s not just small leads we are getting, in fact big, the kind of leads I’m talking about today is NSW Health, government leads and large clients, all have come from Oneflare. 

On Oneflare if take a lead and I’m not able to contact the customer contact of x,y, z reason, Oneflare simply refund my money.  Which is very vital for a business like ours, in the budding stage because we can’t afford to spend money on something which is not usable for us. Oneflare as a business has made sure that our money is not being wasted. We have auto quoting set up, which I really like. Being a premium customer, we enjoy this facility wherein, let’s say if we are sleeping and they’re customers out there who put the jobs up at 3 am in the night, we don’t lose out on those deals. 

There are heaps of clients looking for long term relationships and I’m talking from government and universities and large clients, who can be with you for 5 years contracts and 10-year contracts. I can admit being a client of Oneflare we have achieved it, so yes I think if you think that Oneflare is only going to provide small leads, that’s not true, I have obtained big numbers from them.

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Success stories

Success story | Alison from Alison Pringle CMC

Here we share Alison’s story

It all began in 2017 when Alison became a registered celebrant. Her background in the corporate sector, leading large groups and functions, made this an easy transition. Her main motivation behind becoming a celebrant wasn’t to start a business but simply to marry her loved ones, family and friends.

From this close-knit circle, Alison began to get referrals and job requests from mutual friends and connections. Naturally, her work began to grow and so did her customer base. In 2021, Alison decided to commit to newly engaged couples and make herself available as a celebrant beyond her network. She understood the way COVID-19 impacted couples and weddings and wanted to help create happily ever afters, at a reasonable price that catered for the different environment. 

From here, she officially became Alison Pringle CMC.

Happy newlyweds / Source: Alison Pringle CMC

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Challenges before Oneflare

Alison began her search for quality customers and joined three different lead generation service platforms. She hoped to find regular, genuine leads, but after some time, received an underwhelming amount of leads, which never generated profitable work. 

Being new to the celebrant scene made it difficult, especially during the pandemic. Alison offers remote and face-to-face meetings, to offer her customers the best possible service. However, she still needed to get her new business out in the market to build her brand. 

Experience on Oneflare 

Alison found Oneflare to be a user-friendly and effective lead generation tool. The capabilities of the platform make it very easy for her to engage with customers. She has set up communication templates that help her respond quickly and easily to leads when she is out of the office. This feature ensures that she connects with potential customers via email and SMS to make the most out of each opportunity. 

For Alison, the support from Oneflare has been great, and the genuine customer guarantee gives her peace of mind. She knows that if a customer has not interacted with their job request and has not responded to her quote, she will be refunded any credits spent on them.  

“Oneflare has provided more leads and weddings than I can manage. There are times I don’t quote as I am already booked.”

Results on Oneflare

Alison Pringle CMC now has 

  • A stellar 5-star rating 
  • Steady, high-quality leads
  • A thriving new business

Alison’s advice for any business looking to sign up with Oneflare is: “Do it, it will work if you take the direction they give you”

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Alison of Alison Pringle CMC / Source: Alison Pringle CMC