Well, I can remember back in 1979 when I basically invented mobile car washing out in California. Although there were some folks in Florida doing custom detailing, no one was really out washing fleets of vehicles, or going to office buildings to just wash cars with a mobile system. Back then we didn't have fax machines, that might sound like a remarkable comment but it was true. In fact we didn't even really have true long-distance service on our telephones, and our telephones were all land lines. There were no such thing as cell phones back then, because no one had put up the cellular network yet.
There were push to talk radios by Motorola but they were so expensive that surely anyone running a mobile detailing or mobile car washing business could not afford them. In fact, I had one of the first cell phones I believe it was back in 1984 or 1985, and it was a dollar a minute, it was quite expensive, but if you needed to make an important phone call it would surely be worth it. I can remember running up bills that were a thousand dollars a month, and that's a lot of time to talk on the phone, especially back then. There were satellite telephones, but those were only for the military, oil executives, and the CIA.
We didn't have computers either, if you were lucky you could afford a Selectric typewriter, and you could type out your mistakes, and that was a revolutionary technology by IBM back in the day. Still, it was amazing how fast you could go if you could fix your mistakes on the typewriter without changing out the ribbon, or putting in a cartridge to erase a mistake. Indeed, you could put together flyers, sales letters, and all sorts of things quite quickly to take to the copy store, runoff, and put them in the mail.
Speaking of mail, we used the old snail mail because there was no e-mail, because no one had a personal computer. This is about the time that IBM said the total market worldwide for personal computers would be about five. They were wrong, Bill Gates was right, and the rest was history. Of course without computers and the Internet no one had a website, and folks who wanted to do business with you had to have your advertising, meet a salesperson, or get something in the mail.
Today, everything has changed of course, and you can send out e-mails, and use social networks to get new business referrals, and things are so much easier today. If you aren't using all the tools possible, you should, because that's how I got going in the beginning using all the new technologies including the pager technologies as they came available, and then I stayed up with it the whole time. Indeed I hope you will please consider this, as a little history lesson to help you in your business.
