January, 2009

Maximize Your Sales

Deck accessories offer terrific margins, and can be even more profitable if you customize your product.

By Bob Heidenreich

When you sell decking accessories, you have the opportunity to make very good margins. And in the current slow sales climate, it’s important use every opportunity to capture that incremental income.

Accessories come in all sorts of categories such as paints and stains, lighting, light posts, riser lights, decorative posts, decorative balusters and railings, furniture, grills, and there’s even increasing interest in items such as outdoor, deck-compatible sound systems.

So what’s driving deck accessory sales? We’ve found that people want to know about every option available that let’s them turn their decks into a true outdoor living area.

One of the more common requests we get from customers is to help them design a deck that will support a hot tub, and we do that a lot. More and more often, people want to be able to step into their hot tub, rather than climb up into it, so we suggest that. (And when the cover is on the hot tub, it can double as a serving table, which is a bonus.)

We’ve found that lighting is always the easiest add-on sale to a new decking project, but changing and updating lighting on an existing deck is also a great sales opportunity.

But to go a step further in selling deck accessories, we always look for ways in which we can add value to the end product, which increases our profit potential.

For instance, we “remanufacture” different companys’ products to suit different needs. We’re able to machine railings from one manufacturer to accept posts from another manufacturer, which we call “hybriding.” With light posts and stair riser lights, we’re actually making those ourselves out of material we recycle. Our greatest profits come from items like those. We use a form of a CNC machine (a computer-controlled machining tool) to do that. If you get the right person to run a
machine like that, one who’s not only good at their job and is creative, they can really add value to your products.

For instance, adding stone columns to a deck is an elegant look, but it’s very difficult to find a good way to attach rails to them. We found—and now sell—a very attractive faux stone column, and we found a way to machine a pocket into them that will accept our rail designs. We’ve added value to that product, and our margins can reflect that.

With lighting, we’ve got a number of manufacturers that we buy from, but then we may add on transformers and wiring so that we’re actually selling customers more than just lights. We add components such as light bulbs of different wattages, and that lets us make some pretty decent margins.

And don’t forget that teaching your decking customers new techniques can also help you sell more. We teach our decking customers creative ways to disguise the wiring in their projects. We teach them to router a channel in their 2-by material, and then to run the wiring through hollow components of the premanufactured railings. We talk to them about different aspects of lighting, such as the “shadow effects” and patterns that lights can create. Suddenly our customer is interested in products that let them create special effects such as uplighting or downlighting.

There’s a quote that says, “if you can see the filament of a light in a lighting system, that’s poor design.” You want to create deck projects where you’re lighting indirectly. So we teach our customers to install these lighting products in such a way so that people never have to look directly at a bulb.

When you sell deck accessories, be creative. Think about how you might modify or adapt the products you now sell to add value to the product—and to put more money in your pocket.

BOB HEIDENREICH is the owner of the 30-employee Deck and Door Co., in Apple Valley, Minn. He has been selling decking and home improvement projects for 26 years.