How to grow a fencing business

Growing a fencing business is about finding new opportunities to help you reach your goals. This article shows you how to look and offers tips on effective growth strategies for your business.

What does growth look like for you?

Growing your trade business is a personal thing. You’ll probably already have an instinct for how you’d like to expand. That includes the pace and direction of your fencing business.

It all comes down to your priorities. These can include personal, financial and business goals.

Here’s what might be important for you:

• Rapid growth as quickly as possible

• Gradual growth over a set period

• Staying local, going regional – or bigger

• Grow by taking on staff or using contractors

• Grow by going alone

• Long-term plans to build up your business and sell it

• Plans to pass on the business to family or colleagues

• How much time you want to spend working – your family and work/life balance might be important considerations

Start by penning a business growth strategy. It should help you to outline your goals and stick to them.

Our handy free guide to creating a business development strategy can help you do this.

How to create a business development strategy - Free template included

What is a business development strategy? The business development process helps to identify, nurture, and acquire new customers and business opportunities to help grow your organisation and ensure its profitability. This may seem quite broad, but this is where your business development strategy

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Decide on your business growth goals

Here’s a common trade business dilemma: Grow too fast and you might not be able to handle the extra workload. But grow too slowly and you could lose money and get frustrated.

The key is achieving managed growth. That means growing at a pace that suits you.

Once you’ve decided on why and how you want to grow your fencing business you need to find ways to do it. Our list below ways to expand covers key areas.

Key steps for business growth

Successful trade businesses keep an eye on areas like these all the time. The knack for achieving sustainable growth is striking a balance that feels right for you.

Stay local or go regional?

Many trade businesses stay local when they start. However, demand for fencing contractors is national, so you might want to think beyond your local area.

Whichever option you choose, remember that building business leads in new regions can take time. In the long term, you need to be flexible and take opportunities you believe will benefit your business the most.

Decide how to finance growth

Your expansion plans will need firm financial foundations. Options for funding growth can include:

• Using money saved by the business

• Using your personal savings

• Borrowing from family and friends

• Borrowing from banks and other lenders

Lots of small business funding options are available. It’s a case of choosing what you think will work for your business.

Use technology to grow

As part of your expansion plans, it’s probably worth thinking about how technology can support your business. There are plenty of ways technology can improve how you run your business.

Areas to concentrate on could include:

• Your website

Make a solid start on growing your fencing business with a memorable website. An eye-catching website is a great way to attract attention and generate income by increasing your sales.

• Getting noticed on internet search engines

It’s called search engine optimisation (SEO). Boosting SEO can place your trade business higher in searches, like on Google.

• Social media

Getting your name out there on social media, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram can bring in business.

Expand your customer base

Attracting new customers and winning more work from existing customers relies on sales and marketing activities.

• Sales activity

There are lots of ways to increase sales. A lot of it comes down to ways of making your business stand out from competitors. Of course, pricing and customer service are also important aspects of the sales process.

• Marketing activity

Set a marketing budget to hit your targets cost-effectively. Our free marketing planning guide can help.

• Generating business leads

There are plenty of ways to find new business leads. Building up a steady ‘pipeline’ of opportunities is a great way to generate income throughout the year.

Lead generation for fencing installers helps you fill quieter periods of the year with new work. It also means you’re not relying just on work repairing fences damaged in bad weather.

How to increase the number of fencing leads you get

Fences are a key part of most gardens in the UK. As a result there's always interest out there for getting work done. Especially when terrible weather means fences being blown over! Need more leads for your fencing business when its quieter? See how you could benefit from that existing interest by

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Be more efficient

Working more efficiently is another factor to consider. Planning your time better enables you to dedicate more effort to expanding your fencing business.

Take on more staff

By the nature of the work, fencing businesses often need lots of pairs of hands. Fences and fencing materials can be large, heavy and cumbersome.

Some of the options for growth that involve expanding your workforce include:

• Hiring more people – make sure they have the right skills for the job

• Bringing in subcontractors – they can support your business growth

• Applying for business training grants – upskilling yourself and your team

Improve customer satisfaction

This can seem a tricky challenge for a busy trade business. However, maintaining strong customer relationships is a key to achieving solid business growth.

After all, it’s probably easier and more cost-effective for you to win more work from existing customers. The alternative usually involves spending money on finding new customers.

If you have higher customer satisfaction levels then you a likely to receive more referral business. This is when customers recommend you to people they know.

Referrals are usually down to several factors. These often include the quality of your work, as well as your attitude and professionalism.

A fencing business with a strong reputation can win a lot of new and referral business.

Grow your fencing business with Checkatrade

In this article, we’ve given you some ideas on how to build up your fencing business. That's not all – there's more we can do to help you.

Checkatrade members receive our help with new enquiries. There are lots of other benefits of Checkatrade membership too.

They include:

• Dedicated membership advice team

• Exclusive offers and discounts

• Up to 20% off Public Liability Insurance

• Savings on other business essentials such as fuel and materials

• Guarantee for jobs booked through us (T&Cs apply)

• Dedicated trades apps for job management and quoting/invoicing

What do you need to become Checkatrade approved?

Being a Checkatrade member comes with a whole host of benefits, but the biggest has to be gaining our seal of approval. You can then demonstrate your great reputation and win more business. That’s because homeowners trust tradespeople with the Checkatrade tick next to their name. It's a sign that

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Key takeaways

• Decide how, when and why you want to grow your fencing business

• Make sure to focus on your long-term goals for success

• Choose methods for business growth that suit you and that are most likely to deliver results

• Think about using different sales and marketing activities

• Consider adopting technology and building your customer base

• Joining Checkatrade could be a great way to find new business leads