Expand Your Business with Angie’s List!

Most of you who use Whistler are small businesses that offer some sort of service. Some of you are building contractors, professional cleaners, consultants and many more service professionals. You have no doubt recognized that you require a fairly large customer base to keep busy. The majority of businesses grow their customer base through referral of your current customers. Studies have shown that referrals account for as much as 80% of new customers for small business.

The power of the referral. Simply your future customers are far more likely to trust the opinion of the friend, business associate or co-worker. Studies show 1-2% of possible customers will respond to your advertisement through newspaper, flyers, or mailers. You would need to contact 100 people looking for your services to generate one or two customers. It is more likely that three referrals would generate two customers. Referrals are very effective! But how can you grow the number of people referring your business?

Try Angie’s List.What is Angie’s List? Angie's List was created by Angie Hicks back in 1995. When she moved to Columbus, Ohio that year, she was frustrated with the difficulty of finding contractors to use for home repairs and improvements. Angie decided to go door-to-door within her neighborhood and among friends to collect consumer reviews. Eventually, this list of consumer reviews grew and gained popularity. During her first year, Angie had 1,000 members throughout Columbus. Today, Angie's List serves cities and communities all over the US and their list of service categories and memberships just keeps on growing. Now there are millions of customers using Angie’s List to find service professionals.

Once you become a member of Angie’s List you will start to receive reviews from your customers. Once you build a bit of a reputation you will find it works the same way as your current customer referrals.

Does Angie’s List Cost Anything? It does. Seems like everything costs money these days! However Angie’s List is a great deal at $7.99 a month with a $10 signup fee. That’s very inexpensive compared to your typical advertising costs.

Bottom Line? As a service based business it’s critical that you get your good reputation in front of people that are looking for your services. Angie’s List is one of the most cost effective ways to grow your business and improve your reputation. Do any of you currently use Angie’s List? What are your thoughts? Let us know! Visit http://www.angieslist.com/AngiesList/

Take a Look at Your Job

How Whistler is different than other software. Whistler has a different approach to handling the challenges that your small business face. The typical business software groups all of your estimates, invoices, and finances by your customer. Whistler groups all of your estimates, invoices, and financials by the Job.

Why? How does that help you? As a service business you have several jobs you’ve done for your customer. You are not necessarily interested in seeing a gigantic list of invoices on job “A” when you’re working on job “B”. You are curious about how much money you’ve made on job “B”! How much profit did you make on job “B”? How many hours did your employee spend on job “B”? With your old business software that could be difficult to find out. But with Whistler everything is organized around your job. It is very easy to see how much profit was in job “B”. Just open the Job Screen and all your estimates, invoices, payments, credits, employee hours and billable items are at your finger tips!

Whistler was built from the ground up to support your jobs. Our roots are as general contractors in the home building industry. We understand that profits are made and lost on the job. So our goal was to build business software that would give you the advantage. Whenever you create an estimate, invoice, expense or track employee hours you select a job. Whistler can give you important information to make the right decisions that lead to your success. Perhaps you can afford to pay your employees overtime to wrap that job up quicker. Perhaps you can discount a change order. Customers are great. But the money is made on the job.

Here is kinda how it works

Visit http://www.whistlerco.com for your free trial!