Dan Kennedy is famous for saying “You don’t own a service business. You own a business that markets services.”

That quote gave me a bright idea today that I want to share with you, and feel free to steal it make a bunch of money with it…. Just send me an email about it when you have success.

Ok, so here’s the whole conversation as it played out in my head…

If a person, say an electrician, decided to step back and think they have a “business that electricians services” they could easily double or triple their income, and do a whole lot less work in the process…

That person could start a business with a general name like “Midwest Electricians Group” (MEG for the rest of this example) and then contact all the other electricians in the area and present them with a brokering style opportunity, much the same way Real Estate works.

What do I mean? Ok let me get a little deeper….

So say you start MEG. You then contact all the other electricians around and say “join my organization and you can save thousands of dollars a year on advertising. You’re probably paying way to much and getting very little results as it is, so instead of wasting your money, get under the umbrella of MEG and we’ll do the promotion work for you.”

So then you start charging everyone who joins $300 a month to be part of your organization.

You than start producing advertising for all media under the MEG name.

All business starts coming through you and you simple dowel out the work evenly to all the members of the organization.

Everyone gets to keep their own business but doesn’t have to find work themselves. Hell, they could even have little “MEG approved service” on the side of their truck.

The Electricians can do what they want to do (which is electrical work) and they don’t have worry about advertising … and at the same time you are creating a large recurring income that won’t fluctuate much because these guys are counting on your service to get them jobs.

The beauty of this is in it’s simplicity.

If you have 20, or 50, or 100 Electricians paying you $300 a month… You still only need to run one ad. Because you are simply promoting the MEG brand that everyone else is paying to be part of.

The whole thing could easily be run from a 2 person office and be “full-time” in about 20 hours a week.

(Small disclaimer: this is just an idea. I’m sure there are some kind of issues with being considered a General Contractor in the electricians field. However you could apply this model to just about any business from freelance artists to sex toy party reps.)

A lot of great businesses with exceptional products and services go broke. Not because someone else has a better widget, or “the economy is bad”, but because they don’t reach the right people in the right way.

You can cry yourself to sleep at night thinking about the housing slump, the bear market, or the cost of gas; but at the end of the day – people are still buying things. Just maybe not from you.

And to top it off, they aren’t even buying things they need. As business people we all know consumers buy emotionally then rationalize it logically. Why did Susie buy that new black dress right after losing her job? If you asked her she would probably say to wear it to her next job interview; and although that may be true, deep down she knows she bought it because it made her look and feel good.

So the question shouldn’t be “How do I get people to buy from me?” it should be “How do I get people to associate something they want with me and my product/service?”.

If you are a Realtor (for example) – stop putting your face on billboards and frisbees. That’s what everyone else is doing, and if you haven’t noticed “everyone else” isn’t doing so great…

Instead it would be much more beneficial for you to determine the needs of your target audience (home buyers in a specific income range) and create something to help them, maybe a “25 Things You Better Know Before You Buy A Pre-Owned Home” to start.

With helpful information in hand you could contact a local radio station who caters to your target demographic and do a 20-30 minute interview about the topic. It’s win-win. The radio station gets great material for its listeners and you are now perceived as the expert everyone is going to want to go to when they buy a pre-owned home.

Assuming you did your due diligence and really did give your audience something they wanted – after a few tactics like this and a little time, you should be able to lighten up on the advertising while your customers come hunting you down in hordes.