No man (or business) is an island. Your business is a part of your local community, it is where your customers live, work and shop so it pays for you to be connected to it.

The first step is to identify your community, for a general repairer this is usually fairly obvious, it is the area within an easy drive of your workshop, for a more specialised repairer it is a wider area as there will be few or no direct competitors, if you are a franchise dealer it may be the whole city or a geographic part of it.

For general repairers there are likely to be several other similar repairers fairly close to you. In the area I live in there are at least four repairers within a five-minute drive (two within about a two-minute walk.) Where our office used to be in Auckland, there were three repairers in the same short cul-de-sac and several others close by.

Given this, you need to look to differentiate yourself – can you add services (one of the workshops near me has an associated tyre shop for instance). Making customers your advocates helps – nearly all our team used one of the three repairers in our street based on good reports from others. In my local area people often ask in the local Facebook community groups for recommendations for workshops.

Supporting community groups is another way to engage the community, this could be a school, a sports or recreational organisation or a service organisation. Depending on your size this could range from supplying a sign written vehicle to providing free servicing to cash sponsorship, with the return being advertising at their venue or in their internal communications. Most community groups rely on fundraising of various kinds and some of the traditional sources such as grants from the gambling trusts are tighter at the moment due to the economic downturn, making groups more reliant on local support.

So what could you do to engage with and support your community more?