With the rise of the on-demand economy, there’s an increase in the demand for handyman businesses. Providing skilled workers for a variety of tasks, the handyman industry brings convenience to the door steps of customers. Moreover, with a compound growth rate of 17.2% in the next 10 years, it is attracting many new players. To help them out in starting a robust online platform, we have outlined all the basics that need your attention.
Understanding the Handyman Industry
We can begin with the basic research and knowledge that you need to know about establishing your startup. This will help you understand how a handyman business works and whether you need to launch an MVP first to test the market or can directly build the platform.
1. Market Research
As the majority of handyman bookings are online, they most require a portal or marketplace platform. This also gives you the freedom to launch your startup in multiple regions at once. However, for a well calculated approach, it is wiser to refine your target audience and select one particular market. After market selection, the following areas are where you need to focus your research.
- Competitive Analysis: Find out who will be your top competitors and what value proposition they provide. In small towns, you may be competing with local handyman professionals and you can grow holistically by onboarding them on your platform while also reducing the competition.
- Services Provided: Do research on the types of handyman services that are required in your target region. The most common ones are carpentering, plumbing, electrician, mechanic, gardening and cleaning.
- Commission Strategy: You also need to come up with a commission rate that will be agreeable to the handymen who register on your marketplace.
- Scope of Business: Instead of relying on market size, you can do your own research to find the scope of business in your target region. This can be done by doing surveys on the amount customers are willing to pay for the various services you offer on your platform.
Lastly, if you are planning your launch at a macro level, then SWOT and PESTLE analysis are highly recommended for every target region.
2. Business Model
The majority of handyman businesses work on two models: direct hiring and job posting.
- Direct Hiring Model: In this business model, handyman professionals register themselves on the marketplace and create detailed profiles, including the services they provide and work portfolios. Customers browse those profiles and hire a professional based on their work requirements.
- Job Posting Model: In the job posting model, instead of browsing handyman profiles, customers upload their work requirements as jobs or gigs on the marketplace. Handymen bid on those jobs and the one with the best bid or proposal gets hired by the customer.
Some businesses can also follow a hybrid business model where they allow both during hiring and job posting on their platform.
3. Challenges
For a successful business launch, you will need to overcome certain challenges. While the challenges can be region-specific as well, but to generalize, nearly all handyman marketplace come across the following challenges:
- The chicken and egg problem: It refers to the correlation between number of handymen and customers. Basically, you need customers to attract handymen on your platform and handymen to attract customers.
- Finding skilled handymen: To ensure quality services and build a reputation in the industry, finding skilled handymen is very important.
- Task management: You need to keep track of all pending tasks and completed tasks for complete management.
- Creating repeat customers: The majority of handyman services are required very rarely, for example when a customer needs fixing or repair work. This makes it difficult to make repeat customers.
- Seasonal Fluctuations: Certain services are only required during a specific time of year, such as AC cleaning, roof repair, snow removal, etc. This leads to uncertainty and profit fluctuations.
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Starting an Online Handyman Business
After understanding the market thoroughly, we can begin with the path to start your own handyman business.
1. Select a Business Structure
There are two common business structures that can be used for your business. These are:
- Limited Liability Company (LLC): In an LLC structure, your personal assets are separated from the company’s assets and you are not personally liable to incur any losses, such as loan repayments and legal liabilities. Additionally, you get several federal and state benefits as well. In the future, more partners can join your business with no change in business structure.
- Sole Proprietorship: In this type of structure, you remain the sole owner of your business and your personal assets are linked to the company. Meaning, while you get to take all the profits, you are also responsible to bear and recover any losses. Adding a partner later will also require restructuring of the business.
2. Choose Software Technology
To launch your handyman marketplace, you will require software technology that can power the frontend and backend of your business. It should also support your desired business model and be fully customizable. Today, there are two popular software categories to choose your software from.
- Self-Hosted: Self-hosted handyman marketplace software can be launched on any server. Due to this, you get complete control over your platform. As the software is hosted on your own servers, there cannot be any monthly recurring costs nor any limitations on the number of listings and transactions. Meaning, you get to own the software entirely at a one-time cost.
- SaaS (Software as a Solution): In SaaS solutions, the software is hosted on the software provider’s server and provided to you as a monthly service. Thus, you are bound to agree to the provider’s terms and conditions, which can include recurring payments, limited number of listings, transactions, and more.
3. Create your Feature List
For proper functioning of your handyman marketplace, try to get the software with the following features:
- Task management
- Task grouping
- Bidding management
- Job posing
- Background checklist
- Verification badges
- Commission management
- Order management
- eWallet
- User management
- Portal management
- Email automation
- Homepage slider
- Multi-currency and multilingual support
4. Go-to-Market Strategy
For the final deployment of your handyman marketplace, you will need to draft a GTM strategy. It should be inclusive of pre-launch campaigns to increase awareness about your business and some marketing essentials like SEO and Google My Business listing. Once the marketplace is launched, you can leverage digital marketing to promote and grow your business, and even upload early adopter reviews for trust building.
Conclusion
After understanding the handyman market, including demand dynamics and key challenges, it will become easier to draft a reliable launch plan that can help you build your marketplace in time. At the same time, having a proper Go-to-Market strategy is important to ensure a strong start and gain a competitive edge. For end-to-end handyman business management, you can rely on Yo!Gigs. Contact us now to book a personalized one-on-one demo.
