As anyone in business will tell you, starting a successful business is no easy feat. There are a lot of moving parts, and if any one of them isn't working properly, it can spell disaster for your company.
One of the most important aspects of starting a successful business is choosing the right niche. You need to find a niche that you're passionate about and that you can see yourself succeeding in.
If you're interested in starting a dustless blasting business, you're in luck. Dustless Blasting is a unique and versatile service that can be used for a variety of applications. It's also a growing industry, so now is the perfect time to get started!
To help you get started, we've put together this guide on how to start a business, and why we think it's a worthwhile endeavor. We'll cover everything from choosing the right equipment to marketing your business. But first:
What is Dustless Blasting?
Dustless Blasting is a form of wet abrasive blasting that efficiently removes paint, corrosion, and coatings from a variety of surfaces including metal, brick, and wood.
Benefits of Dustless Blasting:
- Easily switch between wet and dry blasting with one easy-to-use piece of equipment
- Eliminates the need for chemical strippers or paint thinners
- Wet blasting minimizes heat damage and warping
- Versatility of machine allows for the use of a wide variety of abrasives
- Wet blasting reduces cleanup time and cost
- Contains airborne dust particles, making it safer for both operators and bystanders
How it works:
Dustless Blasting equipment uses a combination of water and abrasive media to remove paint, corrosion, and coatings from surfaces. When wet blasting, the water cools and lubricates the surface while the abrasive media strips away the unwanted material.
Applications:
- Automotive restoration
- Boat hull cleaning
- Industrial paint removal
- Rust removal
- Graffiti removal
- Fire restoration
- Wood restoration
- Pool resurfacing
- Fleet vehicles
Dustless Blasting is the perfect solution for a variety of applications that require paint, corrosion, or coatings to be removed quickly and efficiently. Making it an excellent and versatile tool to utilize in starting your own blasting business.
Steps to Starting a Business
Here are some of the things you'll want to be thinking about when starting your business. First and foremost, the core tenants are to do your market research, create a marketing plan, develop your business plan, and of course select the right equipment! It doesn't matter what market or niche you find yourself in, these steps are vital for every startup. Dustless Blasting is no different.
Doing the Proper Market Research
As with any business, the first step is to do your homework and research your target market. This will help you better understand the needs of your potential customers and what they're looking for in a dustless blasting service. In the case of Dustless Blasting, while it may seem straightforward and self-explanatory, there are still various applications, case studies, and benefits to understand. After building knowledge and familiarity in those areas, you can begin to define what you believe your target market should be based on competitor research.
To actually know what your position is in your markets, local and otherwise, you need to know what your competition is doing. When it comes to our world of Dustless Blasting, a lot of our business owners start from a place of being concerned that if there are other blasting businesses around them, they won't find jobs. But this ties back to understanding the variety of applications our machines provide. You can service so many different industries, that there is plenty of room to find work and make money despite other blasting businesses being in your area! When doing competitor research, make sure you're searching for and identifying other mobile blasters in your area. Reach out too! Because there could be markets they don't have bandwidth for or aren't interested in serving.
Creating a Marketing Plan
Now that you know who your target market is and what their needs are, it's time to start thinking about how you're going to reach them. This is where creating a marketing plan comes in. Your marketing plan should be designed to reach your target market and promote your dustless blasting business in the most effective way possible. Creating a mobile-friendly website as a home base for your online presence, using social media to build brand trust to acquire new customers, and utilizing a Google Business Profile to let potential customers find out about you quick when they're in Google search results are all vital tools for success. When it comes to our Dustless Blasting contractors we like to offer help where we can! With one of our online presence packages, we can actually help create a more optimized and customized website for our contractors in addition to boosting traffic via paid digital ads.
Developing Your Business Plan
The next step is to develop your business plan. This will lay out all of the details of your business, including your goals, strategies, and financial projections. Having a well-developed business plan is essential for any successful business, and dustless blasting is no exception. Without a plan in place, there's no reliable way to secure funding or keep track of your progress as your business begins to grow.
Selecting the Right Equipment
Once you've done your market research, created a marketing plan, and developed your business plan, it's time to start thinking about the equipment you'll need to get your business up and running. In the case of Dustless Blasting, our machines come in a variety of sizes and models, so it's important to select the right one for your needs. You'll also need to purchase a supply of abrasive media, which is typically sand or other materials like crushed glass or walnut shells. Starting out can be a quick process by taking our smart equipment matcher!
Entrepreneurship is an ongoing learning process, so even if you can secure funding, find and order your blasting machine of choice, there will be unexpected things that come up. But if you take these steps, you can be much more confident to prepare to get started running your own business!
Structuring Your Business for Success
Now that you know the steps to success, how do you structure your business to maintain that success in the long term?
Where Do Businesses Fail?
Part of making an action plan is identifying the common pitfalls that new business owners will face.
We've been talking a lot about promoting your business and how important that is. Businesses that don't have an online presence or promote themselves prevent large amounts of prospects from finding them. That means less reviews, recommendations, and the opportunity to grow. People want to engage and work with companies they trust so having ads and social media content to engage them is a necessity.
Having an operational structure in place is also needed if you want to scale your business in the future. This means having an organizational chart with defined roles and responsibilities. This will help you understand where each team member's strengths lie and how they can best be utilized. Additionally, it establishes guidelines for how new team members should be trained when you're ready to grow. Structuring a team and roles around larger company goals will make everything easier for you and your business.
Another really difficult thing to keep in mind is that future planning is important when first starting your business. At the beginning you will be naturally overwhelmed with the craziness that comes when getting a startup off the ground, but if you don't start planning for you future goals at the beginning, you may not have the structure in place to actually capitalize on that once you get to the point of wanting to scale. For example, once the high demand starts to come into play, are you prepared with the right equipment or product to actually handle that? In the case of Dustless Blasting, this usually means getting a second machine or an additional team member to operate the existing machine.
Creating a Business Plan for a Thriving Business
In addition to knowing your goals, you need to draft steps for your business to actually get there. And not just for you, your management team need to have a structure in place so they can have a day-to-day and tasks to support those goals. Speaking of goals, your business will never grow without revenue. So what will your revenue goals be? You'll have to consider your costs to better establish these financial goals. That also ties into how you can more confidently price the jobs you do.
The Team
We've talked a little bit about the strength of a team when building toward success. But what actually makes a team? A group of people with different skillsets brought together to support a common goal.
When you're first starting out, it might just be you and one other person. And that's fine! You can grow your team as your business grows. The important part is making sure that everyone on the team understands their role and how it contributes to the business goals. Defining these roles from the beginning will help you avoid any confusion or conflict down the line.
Building a positive company culture is also important for team morale and motivation. This can be done in a number of ways, but some things you can do are have regular team meetings, create company values, or have team building activities.
When you have a strong team in place, it'll be easier to provide great customer service, increase productivity, and make your business thrive. This will improve your relationships with your customers as well. Which means more recommendations and referral opportunities.
These steps only scratch the surface when it comes to structuring your business. We hope it's helpful, and for those looking to start a Dustless Blasting business, check out our business checklist for more detail on how to achieve success through structure.
How to Create Identity For Your Business
Anyone can follow these steps and structure to create a startup business, so what will set you apart from the competition? Here are some things we recommend to help you create an identity for your blasting business! For more detail as well as real life examples of each, please be sure to check out this blog.
Step 1: Identify Your Audience
What are the common interests, characteristics, and descriptors in your potential clientele? These are just some of the qualifiers you'll need to think about and understand before you can give your business an identity. Doing the work to define your customers will in turn come to define your business in the future.
Step 2: Brand Creation
Now that you know who your audience is, you can create content to connect and engage them specifically. This all starts with the literal "identity" of your business, the actual name of it. We caution our Dustless Blasting contractors from using "LLC" or "Inc." in their names because the professional sound is great but it will make you harder to differentiate from competitors in their mind. Try and use something that communicates what you and your business actually do.
Step 3: Purposeful and Consistent Branding
What do you want the average prospective business owner out there to identify with when they see your content? Logo, color palette, typography, and your visual identity in general need to have consistency. Not working toward that is the number one branding mistakes companies make. Being recognizable online or wherever your clients will come to find you is vital.
Step 4: Find Your Branding Voice
So now that you have consistent branding in place, you can begin to develop the tone of voice for your company. You'll be utilizing a website, social media, emails, ads, and so much more. You want consistency in how you communicate through all those platforms as well. When developing that voice, try and consider how an ideal conversation between a prospective customer and your business representative would go. The voice your customers encounter when they first discover you will become what they expect and resonate with you going forward.
Step 5: Market Your Business Online
The internet is not only a tool for you to reach future clients, but it is how those same prospects look for businesses like you. This is why you have to have a professional, mobile-friendly website and quality ads. Without them, you're limiting your ability to reach people and preventing them from finding you. For our Dustless Blasting owners, we recommend utilizing our marketing services for growth opportunities!
Again, for more tips and real life examples to better understand how to craft your business identity, head to this blog!
Tips for Promoting Your Business
One of the the additional, and likely final, steps you'll need to think when it comes to the identity of your business is: How are you going to actually promote it? Just because it set up and technically running, that isn't going to bring customers to you by itself. Marketing your company is crucial! We've already mentioned having a well-thought-out marketing plan to add to that successful business structure, but here are some tips to ramp up and help grow your business even more! For more, be sure to head to this blog.
Create an Online Presence for Your Business
These days, online is the go-to for people when it comes to finding information. So make sure you are set up to capitalize on that! A website and knowledge of online and Google positioning is important to building credibility and business professionalism when compared to your competitors. You need a reason after all for people searching to pick you among the others in your field that they find. After you start getting searched more regularly, that's where a strong and consistent social media presence comes in. Facebook, Tik Tok, and Instagram are just a few of the great opportunities available to you. Remember to promote your work and highlight company culture to expand your audience. For Dustless Blasting businesses, like all startups, we recommend posting regularly to build better rapport with potential clients as well as those that are first discovering your online presence.
Let Clients Find You with Paid Search and Social Ads
There is also a way to reach customers without them searching for your business in the first place. Paid Search Ads on Google and Social Ads on Facebook are ways to increase traffic to your website or receive additional inquiries about the services you offer. For one, you'll automatically be ahead of the competition because many of your competitors won't be advertising at all online. And then you'll also be the one in charge of selecting your target audience and what they will actually see in the ad. The video, images, verbiage, it's all up to you! Don't spread yourself too thin by trying to capitalize on every social media platform, start by focusing in on a couple before expanding your reach. For those in the Dustless Blasting industry, we offer marketing packages to do all this for you.
Take Advantage of Word-of-Mouth Marketing
The above is important, but don't make the mistake of only focusing on them and neglecting word-of-mouth promotion. Maybe you acquire customers via your online presence or paid ads, but what do they think about you and the product you offered? Referrals from business owners are a powerful tool and key to acquiring additional customers down the line. Satisfied customers are usually happy to recommend you to others.
These are just a few of the many tips to help you and your business expand awareness and reach among potential clients. And don't forget that for Dustless Blasting businesses, we provide marketing services and packages to help you better market your business.
In Conclusion
Starting a successful business takes time. Not only will it take time to get off the ground, but it will take time to grow and reach your goals. But with this guide in mind, you can get there! We believe Dustless Blasting is the perfect startup business opportunity, due to the versatility it can provide. These steps will help you create either a Dustless Blasting business or a business in a completely different field!
