there are lots of companies jumping into the stone polishing business, adding it to carpet cleaning. They simply add a few lines to their coupon ad and voila! they are stone pros.
This is like your $100 cc'er. Knows nothing but makes a mess of the market.
After almost 24 years in stone restoration, I can give a written guarantee that you can't identify most of the stone out there, no less figure out what to do with it. I would be the same BTW, with carpet.
As far as companies going OUT of biz, we don't see that. The reason? Where are they going to go??? Become auto execs? Bank presidents? Mortgage brokers? You get the gist. No, what they do is hunker down in front of the TV and watch SportCenter all day, hoping that the phone will ring in their single wide.
When it does, they immediately slice their price in half, figuring 1/2 a days pay is better than nothing. Soooo, the whole market starts tumbling down.
Guys like me, with large warehouses, multiple trucks, office help, sales reps, i.e. fixed overhead, can't compete with that. And don't.
All we can do is what we have done in the past. Direct mail market, send out reminder post cards to previous customers 3 times a year (that really, really works) and hope that our previously proven avenues of advertising continue to draw more than flies.
Again, maybe cc is different from stone restoration. Obviously there is a much larger amount of carpet than stone. But our market is limited to people who don't know the meaning of recession, but are influenced by the media who are screaming "BARGAINS, BARGAINS" when we are preaching "QUALITY and VALUE".
It makes it tough. We have had good and not so good months this year, and we still can't figure out how the rest of the year will shake out. But our back log is much shorter than it used to be, and that means we have to react to so many things we could ignore in the past. We have added a new service that has proven very profitable and will be promoting that heavily in 2010. Our ads and ad budget are fixed for the year and it is not worth disturbing for that.
Sorry I didn't get swept up in that silly
Vortex discussion, but I thought the question had nothing to do with equipment.