Going Lean Within His Means
“In those cases, I will make a referral,” he says. “If I can’t explain myself well enough and we aren’t in agreement, then they need someone else to help them start the process and figure out exactly what they want.
“Hopefully, I’m in contact with them and I’ll be one of the contractors who will end up bidding on the job,” Woodhead adds.
Click photo to enlargeToday, a typical Woody’s job starts in the $3,500 range and goes up from there. He estimates an outdoor kitchen can easily fall in the $12,000-$15,000 range, “and they can go way beyond that.”
While most of the company’s work falls under the general heading of “outdoor room,” Woodhead says probably his most-common installation is an outdoor patio, often with seating walls. However, he’s not necessarily keen on seating walls.
“I tell people they’re in the range of a couple thousand dollars,” he says. “We can make the patio bigger and they can get patio furniture and put it wherever they like. Seating walls are quite popular and I don’t try not to sell them, but at the same time I try to be honest with people.”
Other elements he and his crew are installing regularly at present: water features and low-voltage lighting.
“It’s all LED low-voltage lighting these days,” Woodhead says. “I don’t like to put in the incandescent fixtures anymore. The LEDs use 75-percent-less energy and they’re easier to install.”
THE SALE’S THE THING
Not surprisingly, the time involved from start to finish on these jobs can vary from three weeks to three months. Some of that depends on who’s designing the job, and Woodhead estimates the user of a landscape designer or landscape architect can easily add a month to the process.
“During season, I might be a month-and-a-half out,” he says. “Otherwise, it’s anywhere from three weeks up. It depends on the job, too. During the summer, if it’s a paver patio, that’s going to get done in about six weeks. If it’s a large project, it might be three months.”
Click photo to enlargeWoodhead may have developed his masonry skills and business philosophy years ago, but when it comes to marketing Woody’s, he’s definitely on the cutting edge of today’s technology.
He’s a business owner who’s always believed in good marketing. He notes that his college minor was in business; when he relocated to the Portland area he developed his initial clientele fairly quickly with a heavy dose of advertising in the local paper.
“The next thing I knew, I was just as well known as the companies who’d been here awhile,” he says.
Fast forward more than two decades, and his marketing is definitely 21st century, even though he still is in the Yellow Pages (although “they hardly count anymore,” he says) and still likes those client referrals.
Today, a lot of his effort is electronic.
“I’ve written somewhere in the neighborhood of 450 blogs, which are posted on my website,” Woodhead says. “Then there’s the website itself, along with Google Maps and Google Mail™. And, I have quite a presence on Facebook and Twitter.”
He’s more-recently added Pinterest and Houzz to the list of sites Woody’s is on. And, his own website is optimized, so anyone doing a Google search is likely to find Woody’s in the top ten listings.
On the other hand, he says a more old-fashioned effort is also paying off for him. He’s a member of a contractors’ association that’s made up of smaller businesses that give out a generic brochure about the group to every client each member sees.
“It’s made up of window washers, plumbers, painters and the like,” he explains. “I just finished a $10,000 backyard where the job came from an electrician who had installed a couple plugs worth of work for the client. This year, probably 10 percent of my work has come from that.”
And, ultimately, it’s his old-fashioned virtues that keep Woodhead at the top of his game. For instance, much of his crew is made up of certified installers for either pavers or for retaining walls.
