Taking the Offense: How to Grow Your Concrete Pumping Business

By Brad Humphrey

Come to this year’s ACPA Conference in Dallas to learn how to become aggressive on growing your concrete pumping business through two energetic and creative workshops: Never Back – Always Forward: Sales Techniques for Expanding your Market, and Call for Leaders: Practical Skills for Inspiring and Communicating to Your Team.

If you get the distinct feeling that we will be addressing assertive, proactive and “offense-minded” strategies for growing our businesses, you’re right!

Where’s the benefit in addressing these two subjects?

First, in Never Back, we want to discuss how concrete pumpers should have a clear understanding of what their customers need, and how to meet those same needs with other prospects. This workshop is focused on giving you and your sales-oriented folks the tools to win more work by staying hot, focused and organized.

The pumper must take the offense in his or her approach. Designing strategies to retain existing customers and winning those that need to work with us should be a constant drive. An assertive pumper always works to create new business. Knowing what your competitors are doing is critical, not only to avoid repeating their mistakes, but by being first to do what they’re not doing, which is key to winning more business.

To succeed in a market that is so much “hard-bid,” we must move past this mentality and strive to impress and excite, helping more potential customers to see the benefits of using our organization to meet their needs. Sounds challenging, right? Yes, it is, but that’s why you sell!

In the process of converting more customers to making us their preferred pumper, we must take a strategic approach to winning them over, making them aware of the advantages of working with us to meet every concrete pumping need imaginable.

Such offense-minded efforts do not stop with sales, but extend to leading the actual business. In Call for Leaders, you’ll learn the added value of leading your team well. Leaders, not managers, are needed to drive your company to greater results.

Leaders inspire through vision casting, leveraging strengths of the workforce for the right tasks, engaging workers to be better strategic thinkers, and elevating company culture to the degree that accountability, responsibility and teamwork are part of everyone’s “work DNA.” Is it possible? YES!

As our workforce changes, integrating more young people than ever, many with different attitudes toward work and loyalty, it’s time to go on the offense by creating a culture of leadership and teamwork that the “new kids” are attracted to.

Remember, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance!” You may need to rethink your approach to onboarding, training, retaining and growing the people in your organization. Why? Because it is these same workers who will take your company to better days ahead!

Come to these sessions with a “no bad job” mindset. We want to address how to communicate our company’s advantages, strengths and superiority to customers who only think of us when needing a concrete pumping contractor. Likewise, “no bad jobs” thinking can also inspire our operation to take our quality, safety and productivity to heights never before achieved.

Bring your energy and open-mindedness to explore techniques that will empower you to unleash greater results!

Visit the 2017 ACPA Education Conference event page to learn more.