4 Tips to Keep in Mind When Running a Mobile Business
When you think of owning a business, your mind will often divert to a shop or an office space. What you don’t often think about is those businesses that don’t necessarily have a “hub” for their operations. For example, hairdressers might not have an office per se and in fact, they make their money by travelling to and from their clients’ homes. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a hairdresser or you’ve got a food van that you travel around with – you still need to make sure you’re doing things right so you can make as much money as possible. With that in mind, here are some tips on running a mobile business.
Make it easy to contact you
One of the biggest problems you might be facing is a lack of communication, especially if you have staff members that are with other clients or customers. This can quickly lead to important information getting lost, or even services being confused, which is something you want to avoid. Providing your team with a company mobile phone is one option, but if you can’t justify the price of that right now, you should consider downloading and using a platform like Slack to easily keep in touch with your team. It’ll allow you to keep all things business related on the app rather than mixing it with personal messages, such as on What’s App.
Offer different payment methods
If you’re visiting clients in their home to do their hair, then there’s a chance they’ll want to pay you with cash. However, if you’re offering a service to them like cleaning their home or grooming their dog, they might want to pay by card instead. Did you know that you can get card readers for cell phones? It will give you another option to provide to your customers, which will work in your favour if they only have one method of paying!
Keep your vehicles serviced
If your business relies on you travelling to the client, then the last thing you want is to get into your car to find that something is wrong. Not only will you miss your appointment, but you could end up losing the customer for good. That’s why it’s important to make sure that all vehicles that are related to your business are regularly serviced. Between MOTs, make sure you take them in for a quick service so that you can rest assured you’ll be making all of the appointments you’ve booked.
Brush up on local SEO knowledge
Finally, just because your business doesn’t have a solid location, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t advertise and market yourself in the same way. If lots of your customers are local and that’s how you make your money, then it’s a good idea to brush up on local SEO knowledge. This will mean creating and maintaining a Google My Business account and claiming your business online. Here you can monitor reviews, update your information, add pictures and generally make yourself known so that when people search for keywords within your industry in your area, you’ll be the first given result.