Industries
Technology for trades and contractors.
You win work by being reachable and responsive. Most of what gets in the way of that is admin that happens after hours, in a truck, on a phone.
At a glance
- Enquiries answered while you are still on site
- Quotes and invoices that assemble themselves
- Found in local and map search
- Office and field seeing the same job
Typically: Plumbing, HVAC, Electrical, Roofing, Landscaping, Construction, Cleaning.
The job you lose is usually the one you did not answer first.
Homeowners and property managers contacting a trade rarely contact only one. The work tends to go to whoever responds first with something credible, which means the enquiry that arrives at 10am while you are under a sink is frequently gone by the time you see it at 6pm.
The second cost is quieter. Job details get written on a phone, re-typed into a quote, re-typed again into an invoice and once more into accounting. Every transcription is a chance to get a number wrong, and all of it happens in the evening after a full day on the tools.
Common problems
What tends to be going wrong.
- Enquiries arrive mid-job
- Calls go to voicemail and form submissions sit unread until the end of the day, by which point the customer has booked someone else.
- Quoting eats the evening
- Measurements and notes taken on site get rebuilt from scratch into a quote hours later, usually after dinner.
- The same details, four times
- Job information is entered into the phone, the quote, the invoice and the accounting system, by hand, every time.
- Invisible in local search
- Competitors appear in the map pack for the towns you actually serve while your profile sits unoptimised and unreviewed.
- No follow-up on old quotes
- A quote sent and never chased is the cheapest work you will ever lose, and chasing depends entirely on someone remembering.
- Scheduling by text message
- Crew assignments live in a group chat, so the office cannot tell a customer where the truck is without making a phone call.
The approach
What usually gets built for a trades business
- Instant enquiry acknowledgement
- An automatic reply within a minute confirming you have it and when you will call back — enough to stop the customer working down their list.
- One record per job
- Details captured once at intake and reused for the quote, the schedule and the invoice, so nothing is re-typed.
- Local search presence
- A Google Business Profile configured as a service-area business, with a review request that fires automatically after each completed job.
- Quote follow-up
- Scheduled reminders on outstanding quotes, which is usually the single highest-return automation for a trade.
- A site that proves competence
- Service pages for the work you actually want, your real coverage area, and photographs of finished jobs rather than stock imagery.
- Field to office connection
- Photos, sign-offs and hours submitted from the van landing directly in the office systems.
We are a small crew. Is this overkill?
Usually the opposite. A two-person operation has nobody spare to handle admin, so automating enquiry acknowledgement and quote follow-up returns time directly to the people doing billable work.
We already use job management software. Can you work with it?
Yes. Most of the value is in connecting what you have to your website, your accounting and your follow-up, rather than replacing a system your crew has already learned.
What makes the biggest difference first?
Response time, almost every time. Automatic acknowledgement on enquiries and scheduled follow-up on outstanding quotes typically recover more work than anything else, and both are quick to put in place.
Related
Where this usually starts
The solutions most often applied in this sector, in roughly the order they tend to be tackled.
Losing work to whoever answers first?
The free tech audit looks at how enquiries reach you, how fast they get answered and where quotes are going cold.