Setting Up Your Marketing Database In Your Handyman Business

Let’s jump right into the more technical side of setting up your database for your handyman business. There are lots of different ways to set up a database. There’s a variety of software applications and strategies for setting it up. I’m going to walk you through a relatively basic set up. If you need additional help realize that you can always outsource this either to someone locally – a high school kid that knows how to use some of these programs – you can also outsource it using some of the outsourcing and delegation tools that we’re going to be talking about later or you can also hire us to do some of it for you.

Here’s some of the different software you can use in order to keep a database of people. A lot of people don’t normally think of Excel as a place to store names and numbers and things of that nature, but it can. It’s relatively functional as far as that goes; it’s not fully feature packed for doing that, but you can put someone’s name, address, telephone number, email address all on different fields in an Excel spreadsheet and keep them all there. I don’t recommend it, but if all you’ve got out of this list is Excel and you want to keep your budget low, Excel will work short-term. As you get a much bigger list, you’re going to want to upgrade to something else.

You can use Outlook. Outlook is Microsoft’s product for doing primarily email, contacts, calendar, things to do list, and they have a really nice address book and contact list that you can add people in, put in their name, their telephone number, their mailing address, their email address. You can put in notes about what they’ve got going on and you can use all that in Outlook in order to store their names. Then whenever you need to do an export for a mailing, it’s relatively easy for you to export that into a spreadsheet or a comma separated value field.

By the way, if you’re not understanding what I’m saying, you don’t need to understand the principles in order to turn on a light switch, you don’t need to understand all the technical stuff I’m talking about in order to run a database. You can hire someone else to do the heavy lifting for you at a very low cost. You can outsource locally or you can hire us to do it. Don’t be overwhelmed; just listen and get the ideas.

You could also use ACT, which is another software application for managing contacts, keeping track of schedules and sales processes. It’s a very popular tool for sales people. You can use the address book on the Mac operating system. Mac comes with an address book feature; you can put all your contacts in there and then you can export those.

There’s a whole other bunch of software packages for maintaining databases of people. Go look in your office supply store; they’ve got tons of them in there. You can look online for a lot of different ones. There are lots of ways to do this; those are the main ones you’re probably going to come across.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. Setting up your database for your handyman business is just one small piece of the entire puzzle. Get the whole plan with “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course”.

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