If you are in the residential service industry (i.e. painting business, carpet cleaning, lawn care, etc.) how do you calculate just how much money a single customer is worth? It's simple once you take the following facts into consideration:

1.) For one thing local service customers represent immediate income. Depending on your type of business, whether it's carpet cleaning, painting, window washing, etc. your customers are a way to make instant needed cash. You need to put food on your table and pay bills paid just like everyone else and there is nothing like immediate income to do it.

2.) Add-ons - one thing nice that adds to your immediate income is when customers add on extra work during a job. For example: If you are a house painter and you are painting their kitchen, they may ask you to paint the half-bath down the hall. This adds a nice chunk of cash to your immediate profits.

3.) Customers are a testimony of your good work. Sometimes a potential customer will ask you for references. Having plenty of previous satisfied customers on hand to use as a reference works well. I have had potential customers say things like "I thought they were your mom and dad the way they went on and on. They had so many nice things to say about you!". Wow! Is that a reference or what?!

4.) Your customers can give you lots of great referrals! Without intending to brag, I have made thousands of dollars off of single customers many times over the years. This happens simply from them referring me to their inner circle of family and friends. Not every customers will do this but with the ones that do, I can trace 2nd, third, and even as deep as 6 and 7 generations or levels of new business all pointing back to one single customer referring me to their friends and family for painting.

5.) And the fifth way to calculate a customer's worth is they may call you back many times to service them again. Many times I start out doing a job for a customer and then they call me back for a series of other jobs. I have even had customers give me inside work to do at my discretion to fill in for rain days painting somewhere else! (How did they know?)

This is the proper way to know how much money a single customer is worth to you. Take all that into consideration and I guess each customer can be worth thousands and thousands of dollars to you over the years in your own local service business!

I know this from experience... I'm thinking about just one customer in particular right now that over a 10 year span of painting for them, they have had me back quite a few times. This same customer has also given me some excellent referrals. I can trace new business 5 and 6 levels deep and probably deeper from just this one painting customer alone.

That's the exciting thing about owning your own local business. You get to meet a lot of fine interesting people. These are really nice people that have the money to hire you with. And they have lots of friends who have lots of money to hire you with too! (I call that job security.)

The bottom line is this, if you treat each customer as if they were worth a million dollars to you and consider no job as being too small, they can eventually lead you to some great opportunities to expand your customer base.

Lee Cusano has owned and operated his own successful painting business for over 16 years. He has also helped many others to start their own painting business with his "Paint Like a Pro Estimating and Advertising CD-ROM".

Lee also offers a Free Report titled "How To Gain a High Success Rate For Getting Painting Jobs". To get it go to http://www.Painting-Business.com