When did you realize your business needed systems, and what did you implement first?

Our first system was more of a personnel add. My wife hopped on and got me organized and started answering phone calls. Since then we have employed forms and such to capture the leads we might miss.

Our system implementation started just like yours,NJones​. We were doing more work than ever but we were letting calls for service slip by and were not operating at the level we had been. 

I totally signed up for jobber after a late night putting together PDF invoices for people after getting worked all day. haha more recently, I've created a sales funnel system because I realized we miss waaaay too many job leads. Just literally burning money at that point. If it affects you bottom line, make the investment (whether it's time or money) to fix the thing.

My suggestion here though is not to do it all at once. Even though there are a ton of fires going on in your life, really hone in on one and fix it completely or most the way before moving on to the next shiny object. And if you are able to dedicate time to it, just pay a premium for someone who is very good at that thing to do it for you. That way you ensure it gets done and you don't need to learn all the intricacies of a given program to make it. A good example is your website - are you really going to take the time to learn how to code or make things look coherent? It'd be way more efficient to focus on the things your good at and pay someone else. 

I think when we started we all had our own system and we just built on it and expanded it as the business expanded.  As for Jobber I signed up once I missed the second appointment with my customer as I was tracking it in Excel.