Local service businesses

Quotes that no one chased

A small service business gives quotes constantly and follows up on almost none of them. Not through laziness: the quote is given on a Tuesday, the week gets busy, and by the time anybody thinks about it the customer has had somebody else in.

The money involved is larger than most owners expect. A business giving eight quotes a week and winning three is leaving five on the table, and a meaningful share of those five did not go elsewhere on price. They went elsewhere because someone else rang them and you did not.

A quote recorded as an opportunity at a stage is the whole fix. A saved view of quotes given more than ten days ago with nothing since is, for a business of this size, the single most valuable list in the product. It takes two minutes to build and it is a call list for a Friday afternoon.

Work that comes round again

The annual service. The six month check. The yearly clean before Christmas. Almost every local service business has recurring work, almost all of it is remembered rather than recorded, and a predictable proportion is missed every year.

Missed recurring work is worse than a lost quote because you had already won the customer. Somebody who would have said yes was simply never asked, and frequently assumes you have stopped doing it, and next year they ring someone else.

Held as a task against the customer with a date, it appears in a daily view before it is due. That is not sophisticated software. It is the difference between remembering and not, and for a business of this size it is usually worth more than everything else on this page combined.

The honest test

If you do fifteen jobs a month, work alone, and can remember every customer and every promise, a diary and a notebook are enough and you should keep them. Software has a cost that never appears on an invoice, which is the time spent keeping it current, and for a business at that size the return may genuinely not be there.

Three things suggest the balance has tipped. A quote was forgotten this year. A recurring job was missed. Someone rang about a job and you could not find it. If two of those have happened, an afternoon is probably worth it.

What this does not do

No route optimisation. No dispatch board. No engineer mobile app with offline mode. No live tracking. No parts and stock. If the core of your problem is scheduling six vans efficiently, a field service product is the right purchase and this is not.

What it costs

For most businesses of this size, nothing. Three people, a thousand customers, 500 MB of files, no card and no time limit. That is a plan instead of a trial, and there is no point at which it expires or asks for payment details. The constraint you meet first is usually the fourth person needing an account.

If you stop paying for a paid plan, you drop to the free one rather than out. Nothing is deleted and export always works. For a seasonal business, both of those are worth knowing before you start rather than after.

Put every outstanding quote in, with a date to chase it

This is the whole of the first afternoon and it is where the return is. Most businesses of this size have several quotes out that will never be chased, and a chased quote converts at a rate that would surprise anybody who has not measured it.

Then put in the recurring work

The annual service, the seasonal visit, whatever comes round in your trade. It usually lives on a wall planner and a predictable proportion is missed every year.

Record where the enquiry came from

Recommendation, a search, a board, a card, an existing customer. It takes four seconds and it is the number that decides whether the money you spend on getting found is doing anything.

Keep the customer history against the address

What you did last time, what you found, what you recommended and they declined. That last one is a quote you have not sent yet, and in most of these businesses it exists only in someone's memory.

Do not configure anything else

No pipelines with eight stages, no sequences, no reporting. A business of this size that spends an afternoon configuring will abandon the result. Quotes chased and recurring work remembered is the entire value and it is a great deal of value.

The enquiries arrive in the fortnight you have least time to answer them

Heating work arrives the week it turns cold. Gardening arrives when the grass starts growing and the customer looks out of a window. Cleaning arrives in the weeks before Christmas and again at the end of a tenancy. Garages fill up around test dates and empty when the schools break. Whatever the trade, the enquiries do not arrive evenly, and the busy fortnight is defined by the customer's calendar rather than yours.

The consequence is uncomfortable and worth saying plainly. You are slowest at quoting in exactly the fortnight when quoting matters most, because the same weather that generates the enquiry has already filled your week. A business that quotes within a day in February and within nine days in October is not badly run. It is a normal business, and October is where its money goes missing.

Which is why the chasing list matters more in one month than another

In the quiet season an unchased quote is usually still there a fortnight later, because the customer is not in a hurry either. In the busy season the same quote has a competitor in it by Thursday. The list of quotes with nothing against them for ten days is worth building once and worth looking at daily for about eight weeks of the year.

Booking recurring work out of season is worth more than it sounds

The same service costs you the same to perform in June as in October, and in June you have the time to do it properly, the customer has a choice of dates, and nobody is working in the dark. The reason it never happens is that no one asks in June, and the reason nobody asks in June is that June is when the reminder was never set.

A dated task moves the asking instead of the work. Set it for the month you want the conversation in rather than the month the work is due, and a proportion of your customers will say yes to a quiet week simply because they were asked during one. This is the least glamorous idea on the page and it is the one that changes a working year.

The quiet weeks are when the lists earn their keep

January, or whatever your January is, is not dead time. It is the only time anybody in this trade has to look at a list of customers who have not been back in two years, at the recommendations recorded and declined, and at the enquiries that never turned into anything. Doing that once a year in the quiet fortnight is a realistic habit. Doing it monthly is a plan written by somebody who has never run a van.

Judging the system by six busy weeks tells you about the season

If you start in your busiest month, everything will look like it is working, because the phone would have rung anyway. If you start in the quietest, everything will look like it is failing for the same reason in reverse. The honest comparison is this season against the same season last year, which means the first useful answer arrives a year after you begin, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

So the sensible time to start is the wrong one for enthusiasm

The quiet fortnight is when you have the evening free to put this in properly. If you are reading this in the middle of your season, the honest advice is to do one thing: put the outstanding quotes in, with a date to chase each. That is an hour, it pays for itself before the season ends, and the rest can wait until things calm down.

The business

Two people, one van, gutters and roofline, some seasonal help in autumn. Work comes from a sign written van, recommendations, and a board that goes up outside a house they are working on. They give perhaps eight quotes in a busy week and win a bit under half.

Monday: the call taken on a ladder

A homeowner rings because water is coming over the front gutter. No one can answer, so it goes to voicemail and is returned at six. What gets recorded is the name, the address, the telephone number, and one thing most businesses skip: that they rang because of the board outside a house three streets away. Skip that and the board stays an act of faith forever.

Wednesday: the visit, and the sentence said at the gate

The gutter is clearing. It is also sagging at the corner where the bracket has gone, and the fascia at the back is soft. All three get looked at. The customer wants the clearing and the bracket, and says the back can wait.

Two things go on the record before the van pulls away. The opportunity moves to quoted with a price and a date. And a note says the rear fascia was raised, inspected, and declined for now. That second item is not admin. It is a quote you have not sent yet, with a customer who has already been told about it by somebody they let up a ladder.

The following week: ten days of nothing, and the list that notices

No reply. In most businesses this is where the job ends, silently, and is later remembered as a customer who went cheaper. Here it appears on a Friday in the saved view of quotes given more than ten days ago with nothing since, and gets a two minute telephone call.

The answer is not price. The answer is that they would rather have it done in spring when the money is easier. Without that call the business would have concluded it was undercut, and would possibly have dropped its prices on the strength of a guess.

Which turns a lost job into a dated task in March

The opportunity does not sit open pretending to be alive, and it does not vanish. A task against the customer, dated for March, appears in the daily view when March arrives. Somebody rings. The job is booked. The whole mechanism is a date and a name and it replaces a memory that was never going to survive the winter.

The visit, and the two facts that stop a telephone call

The appointment sits in the calendar attached to the customer. On the record are the two things whoever turns up actually needs: that the side gate is locked and the key is with the neighbour, and that the van will not fit on the drive. Those two facts are the difference between an eight o'clock start and an eight twenty five start, and in a business with one van that is a real number of jobs a year.

The work is done. Photographs of the corner before and after go on the timeline. Not for a portfolio: for the conversation in two years when someone says it was like that when you came.

Autumn: the leaves come back and so does the task

A task dated for the following September asks whether they want it cleared before the leaves drop. The customer says yes, because they always say yes when asked, and the thing that failed every other year was the asking rather than the answer.

Three years later: a different name at the same address

The house sells. The new owner rings about the same gutter. If the address was only ever a line inside a customer record, a new record gets created and everything the business knows about that roof is gone. If the address is its own record with people connected to it, the connection to the old owner ends, a new one begins, and the visit starts with someone who already knows about the corner bracket and the soft fascia at the back.

What the same job costs when none of it is written

The board never gets credited with the enquiry, so next year the business argues about whether boards work. The unanswered quote is remembered as a price objection that never existed. March never happens. The gate key is discovered at eight in the morning. The September clean is remembered in November. And the fascia, which was inspected by a professional and mentioned to the owner, is quoted by someone else in year four.

A job is two things, and the product keeps them apart

In the trade a job is both the thing sold and the visit made. In the product those are different records on purpose: the sold thing moves through stages and has a value, and the visit is an appointment in the calendar attached to the customer. One job can be three visits, and three separate small jobs can be one visit on a Tuesday.

This feels like bureaucracy for about a day, and then it stops feeling like anything, because it is what lets you ask how much work is sold and not yet done, which is a question no diary has ever been able to answer.

Price, quote, estimate: the product only cares about the date

Trades use these words interchangeably and argue about them. A written quotation, a price given verbally at a gate and a rough estimate over the telephone are all the same thing here: a customer has a number from you and a date when they got it. That is what the quoted stage means and what makes the chasing list possible.

If it matters to you which kind it was, that is one custom field recording which sort it was, and it is a reasonable use of one of the two or three fields you should allow yourself.

The round, which the product does not have a word for

Window cleaners, gardeners and domestic cleaners work a round: a fixed set of addresses at a fixed interval, in an order that makes sense on a map. There is no round record. What there is instead is a recurring dated task against each customer, so the round exists as a set of dates rather than as one object you can pick up and hand to somebody.

That is a simplification and we would rather name it than talk around it. It handles remembering perfectly well and it does not handle sequencing at all. If the hard part of your week is the order of forty addresses rather than remembering them, this is the wrong tool for that half of the job.

Call out, and what the calendar will and will not do

A call out is an appointment like any other here, attached to the customer it concerns, with clashes reported rather than prevented, because whoever is booking usually knows something the calendar does not. What the product does not have is any notion of who is nearest, what the traffic is doing, or which engineer should go. Nothing on this page should be read as suggesting otherwise.

The customer is frequently not the person who rings

A letting agent books, a landlord pays, a tenant lets you in. An adult child arranges work at a parent's house and never sees it. A neighbour holds the key. In your language all of these are the customer. In the product they are separate people connected to the same address with different roles, which is the only arrangement that survives the day the tenant changes.

Use your words rather than ours

Stages carry the names you type into them, and if your trade says booked in rather than booked, or priced rather than quoted, type that. The only rule worth insisting on is that a stage name should describe where the customer has got to rather than what you intend to do next, because a stage named chase it is a task wearing a stage's coat and it will be wrong by Thursday.

Two trades next door to this one use the same records with more of them: maintenance and facilities contractors, where the site rather than the person is the record that lasts, and letting and estate agents, who are frequently the ones ringing you. Bringing a messy customer list in is described on import, export and search, and the stages themselves on pipelines and forecasting.