Squeegee Alliance

[SolitaryT]

A few years ago, a buddy of mine came up with a joke logo for a non-existant "Squeegee Alliance". I was thinking about it the other day. You know how credit unions have their network of other credit unions that you can use so they can compete nationally with the big chain banks? What if all of the independent sign shop owners did something similar. Say I'm in Bozeman, Montana, and there are a bunch of franchise shops in town. My shop is any small shop. A printer, a vinyl cutter, a wood shop, etc. Say we specialize in sand-blasted, hand-painted signs. A customer comes in and asks if we can do channel letters. Now say there's a guy in the alliance who does that. I hook it up, we all win. Thoughts?

 

[player]

 

[Salmoneye]

How does this really differ from subbing out work to a wholesaler, marking it up and giving it to your customer? I think that most of us do this already with at least some products.

 

[The Big Squeegee]

Squeegee Alliance = Signs101.com. Enough said.

I can understand where you may think it will bring you more work. Bozeman is pretty remote and small. I know because I lived there for 2 years about 20 years ago. Loved the hunting and fishing. Do they still stock those ponds by the mall with 14" trout?

 

[GB2]

Without giving this any deep thought, it has occurred to me previously that something like this might be advantageous. It seems like it might work best in a local area, such as one small state or county. Not only could you pool your resources amongst your member businesses but you might be able to get better pricing on materials if you could buy in greater quantities and could negotiate better prices on equipment purchases and supplies. It possibly could work on a larger level too but then you'd be talking about having a central warehouse where you could buy train loads of materials and distribute to your members and I'm not sure all that would be economical to accomplish. The way it differs from simply subbing out to a supplier now is that with an alliance, your "supplier" would hopefully be subbing back to you too and the price structure could be better.

 

[Christian @ 2CT Media]

We do this on a smaller scale in our neighborhood. There are about 5 of use that readily trade work to give our clients a total solution, we all have verbal no poaching agreements and it has been working great, a lot of them have increased their market presence just by being able to offer our services on top of theirs.

I would love to get a nationwide installer network going with mutually agreed upon pricing so that when we have installs out of town (Which we frequently do with our clientele) we have installers we can contact and have a known pricing schedule.