Marketing Your Business? | The Business of Blacksmith | Forum

A subject dear to my heart! My first advice would be this: Don't go looking for work or asking for work. Might be a few people who actually want to give you work, but mostly they don't care whether you have work or not. Course there are a few customers who will throw you some work when you're desperate, but that's charity not business.

They give you work because it solves a problem for them. Most of them come to work and have a pile of problems on their desk. Put yourself in their shoes. How do you feel when a salesman takes up your time? Don't go looking for work, go looking for how you can solve problems for people. That should become your goal. They will pay handsomely anyone who lifts some of the load off their shoulders, and the more you lift off the better they will be willing to pay.

When you get work, try to make it as seamless as possible for the customer. Don't ask the customer to buy the material. Find out everything that needs to happen to the part you're making. If it's going to be tested, painted, sandblasted, boxed or anything, offer to take care of it. You don't have to do it for free. You're taking away a lot of headaches for the customer. Now he doesn't have to birddog the part everywhere or even think about where it is or where it needs to go next. And you can mark up all of it! Business isn't really about the money, that's just how we measure it.

Customers love “one stop shopping”. They often have to get something made and maybe had to get the material and then they have to get it heat treated and tested and this and that. They love having someone who will do everything AND take responsibility. That's a big deal. If anything goes wrong there's only one guy to turn to – you! That's OK, responsibility pays well.

You think you're a forger or blacksmith or whatever. But you really need your customer to think of you as a problem solver and someone who can relieve some of his load. Quit thinking about finding work and spend your time thinking about how you can be of real service to your customers. I had customer who would consult with me because I could (and would) tell them whether their item should be a weldment, a casting or a forging. I became an expert who they could turn to who had their interest at heart.

Build alliences with all of your suppliers. Steel suppliers, heat treaters, painters, industrial suppliers and many others can be great for sending referrals. Make some kind of useful widget for the sales counter. Make sure everyone knows what you can do. When asked most people actually want to be able to refer people to someone. Don't get cheap on this, they can be a full time sales staff for you.

Don't forget people who do similar types of work, but have different capacities or capabilities. For instance, many people with fancy mandrel benders or rolls, can't do large bar or tight bends that are easily done hot. Lots of iron shops can't do what you can do. Ask for some of their cards and explain what you do and that you are looking for someone to refer your customers to for things they are better able to do. And “Oh yeah, would you like to have some of my cards for any customers that we can help”?

Remember this: It's always easier to get more business from the customers you already have than to find new customers. Always try to get plant tours, many items in their operation they have no idea that you can make. Keep a sharp eye out for problems you can offer a solution to. Usually they have no idea how a bit of hot working can save them. Look at the “hillbilly upsetter” thread.

Just remember; quit trying to make money and focus on how you can save your customer time, money and headaches. Become a problem solver for your customers and they will never take a second glance at your bills. At that point, they don't just need you, they want you.

Saw this somewhere: "You will be enriched as you enrich others".

Ur a pretty fart smeller there Grant... Oh I mean smart feller

I mentioned suppliers and how they can promote you, but remember to look at work they have in the shop to see if there are things you can be doing. I've gotten names from job sheets at the heat treater when I saw something I might be able to do. Discovered customers I had no idea existed before. Sometime all you have to do is ask who that work is from.

One big iron shop in Seattle was the "go to" place for heavy bending, but if they couldn't do it they loved being able to send folks to me. They really like to be knowledgeable and know the places to get things done. These were always very profitable jobs because by then the customer was running out of options and I knew they could/would pay my price. They had usually been warned that I was rather "proud" of my work.

I'm coming at things from another angle than Grant, given that it's totally all bespoke and ornamental work I do. The vast bulk or my work comes from my website, it's my absolute lifeline, and a small but significant amount comes from architects I've dealt with in the past.

I'm bad at English at the best of times and my site reads a bit strange. Thats cause I'm more bothered about getting the key words to attract the search engines in than what the content is. By the time people have looked at page, it's the pictures that might or might not interest them. I've got a few information pages that they can then read which I spend a bit of time expalin how the work is made, this hopefully should make the work look "expensive".

I never get into haggling with price and I avoid customer who want you to come along as one of "three competive quotes". Commercial tenders are a different thing but I'm not overly concerned about cutting my rate to try and beat the next guy. My attitude is; "that's my work, that's how much I cost/value it, if you don't like it find someone else who can do the work for you". Obviously I don't say it in words to them but I know how easy it is for them to find dozens of cut and weld wrought iron merchant but much less easy to find people doing what I do and those that are good are usually busy.

Normal commercial rules go out the window a bit when talking about work that may/may not be considered "artistic". I certainly don't consider myself artistic and strongly dislike the term "artist blacksmith"; I'm just a guy in a shed who messes with tools but I'm quite happy for customers to fiond my work artistic.

It does often boil down to getting a bit of chemistry going. Once I've filtered out who I want to deal with via the initial phone conversation I'll spend a lot of time showing them samples and explain how things are made. Metals rule my life and I'm nothing if not passionate about them, hopefully this rubs off

I'm fotunate in that I've a mate who's a graphic designer and he constantly banged on about how presentation is everything in photos and the website. You've got to make your work look expensive and something to aspire to. I'm not saying my website does this particularly but it's a damned site better than before he advised me. It's a home brewed site and I desperately need to find time to revamp it but it still draws in plenty of work.

Grant and Lewis point bout one stop shop are true even at the bespoke end. Gates and automation, balustrades and wooden handrails etc etc. I haven't quite cracked this yet.

I need to figure out what to put on my cards.... They currently say my name and under simply Architectural and Ornamental Ironwork...

Which is kind of crappy since thats about 20% of what I do these days....

I either need to come up with something clever or just have nothing but my name and info

Maybe Anvil Basher? Metal Mangler?

I used to want to put "No job is too scary for a Monster!" under my name on my truck.... I outgrew it though

JNewman;1987 wrote: You don't consider yourself artistic!!!!:confused::confused::confused: I have been to your website David, you are artistic. That is important so you can be inovative and do work that is unique. The premade components are becoming more and more common and higher quality. Unfortunately there is not enough difference to the average untrained eye between traditional styled ironwork and the modern components that fabricators can buy, so I think it is going to get harder and harder for blacksmiths who do not have an artisitic flair.

Thanks for the compliment but in honesty I'm someone who likes messing/ experimenting with tools more than anything else. Any creativity often follows from there. I used to be a school techer (hated it) and clients more often than not assume I was an "Art Teacher" and are usually suprised when they find it was Maths/Physics I taught.

To me the best part of a job is the liasing with client/architect, bouncing ideas around, then experimenting prototyping tooling up and jigging up etc .... and then photographing the work. The stuff in the middle is often tedious. I absolute hate jobs that are just basically cutting and welding, there something much more satisfying about moving metal, even very repititively.

I basically try to push the boundaries with what I do just to keep me interested. If it was just about earning an ok safe secure wage I have stayed a teacher. Actually I wouldn't, I absolutely f**king hated it!!!!!!!

Larry L;1994 wrote:

I either need to come up with something clever or just have nothing but my name and info

How about just one really good, maybe professionally photographed picture of a "good" bit of work that wets peoples appitite. Think about some of the "good" magazine adverts, they're often nothing more than the "right" picture and an address.

One good tip a design friend of mine said was don't trying to photograph in full a big "fussy" thing like a gate and then just show a thumbnail picture of it (talking website here but same applies to business cards). He said find an interesting detail, angle etc. Use this to draw people in.

Sorry to keep banging on about my website. It's only a home brewed half completed thing but putting it up really changed the amount and type of work I started getting. Look at this page of my website it's a good example of what I mean by using detail shots to draw people in. Architectural ironwork often gets lost against complicated fussy backgrounds such as gardens or buildings.

http://www.verdigrismetals.co......conies.htm