The Tiny House Million Dollar Pivot

Let’s call him Dave.

Eight years ago, Dave started a business manufacturing tiny houses. Not your normal tiny houses, but tiny houses made from converted shipping containers. Dave’s business did around $6 million every year, profitable but not life changing.

When Dave brought me onboard the business was hovering around $400k to $800k a month, 4 to 6 tiny houses, depending on the season. He was out of ideas, patience and interest. My job, he said, was to kick it up a gear or two.

It wasn’t a lack of leads. Dave’s website fire hosed around 5-10 solid leads every day, and his salesperson could barely get to them all before the next day’s leads landed.

I looked at Dave’s CRM and found over 1,500 contact details from just the prior 12 months.

This, I told Dave, was the mother lode. If Dave could close just 0.5% of that list, it would give him around $1 million additional top line revenue.

All the business Dave wanted was right there in his CRM. The question was, how could he mine that list to extract every serious sales opportunity – without overloading his salesperson?

Because Dave had a sales process problem. His salesperson was doing his job well enough, but the core issue, I told Dave, was that he was only processing leads once. He was hitting the 3% ready to buy today, yet abandoning the 37% who were close but not quite there.

Just because a prospect said ‘not today’ doesn’t mean ‘no’ forever. Whatever the reason, a simple re-engagement system would find one or two extra sales a week from leads that were weeks or months old.

I built Dave a simple, automated follow up system to keep his business top of mind. A series of short, courteous emails, ‘Hey, it’s Dave here. Are you still looking for a swimming pool?’ Nothing salesy, just a simple reach out to keep the dialogue going. Fully compliant, too, with anti-spam laws.

Did it work? You bet it did. Last I heard, he had booked multiple million dollar months and traded the Pajero for a Porsche.