How to solve this:
Here’s the good part: it’s not very complicated to solve.
Here’s the thing…
Your business is either growing or failing. There is no such thing as maintenance in this world. What this could mean is that you are either performing exceptionally well; so much so that you have to hire new positions. Poor performance on the other hand can be a different, less-dramatic type of occurrence: you don’t realize it’s happening until it’s too late. Things seem fine, you are “maintaining” by doing things the way you always have to succeed. It’s almost like the Titanic’s captain spotting the iceberg up ahead and thinking everything was fine. (Spoiler warning: the Titanic sunk) It’s the same here, everything will be fine until it’s not.
In the present year, you simply cannot afford to be ignorantly stagnant. You must find new ways to survive.
“Okay, sure, but how do I do this?”
By using the simple tools you likely aren’t incorporating, or at least aren’t incorporating correctly.
The old way (and why it’s hurting you):
Many companies in your industry have always used what we call the “good ol’ boy” method for securing contracts. Within your city, there are the contractors, just as yourself, who’ve been around forever. So, whenever there is a need on a job for a certain service that those typical “good ol’ boys” can fulfill, the project manager calls them up to get a bid. Long story short, they always get the jobs, so why would they need to do anything that helps them pull from a new pool? Because pretty soon, that new pool is going to outsize the old. Almost every business outside of the blue-collar space uses the internet as a tool for more than half of their business operations. However, just as the new generations are becoming your client base and project mangers, they are also becoming your competition.
No online presence is, potentially without you knowing, losing you money and any current and future customers that would search for you. And that lost relevance as the internet continues to grow is only going to let your competition have what could have been your money. So, any other company that is engaging with the internet for their business is passively funneling people to their business when you are not.