What's the ONE software headache you'd pay to make disappear?
Hey all 👋 Marisa here — founder of Cloud6. I'm not a tradesperson; I'm the person who builds custom mobile apps and websites for small businesses. New to this community and learning. Real question: what's the ONE software or workflow issue that steals time from you every single week? Things I hear a lot from other service businesses I've worked with: - Booking system that sends too many no-show appointments - Quotes and invoices living in two different tools, so you're double-entering everything - Customers can't reach you after hours, so leads go cold - Photos from job sites aren't syncing into your CRM What's yours? Drop it below. Curious what the real pain is before I try to build anything here, and happy to share what I've seen work for other small businesses if it's useful. — Marisa, Cloud6 LLC
Jobber Best Practices: How do HVAC companies manage scheduling and job assignments?
Good afternoon all. We are an HVAC company that focuses on installing residential new construction HVAC. We work for various national and regional builders. Would love any kind of advice on managing schedules and assignments via jobber. We are just now getting started with JobberElectricians - Are you charging time & material or flat rate right now—and why?
Curious what’s actually working for everyone in today’s market with rising material costs and labor rates. Currently - I do time + material and then add in my overhead/profit % and I still get tons of kick back. Other big electricians in my area charge 3-4x the amount for something that I do and it works for them. I can't wrap my head around it.
How to grow a landscaping business stuck at “owner + one crew” stage
TLDR: My spouse and I run a small landscaping business that’s stable but stuck at the owner + one crew stage. We still have to work in the field daily because we haven’t been able to develop reliable crew leaders, and hiring more staff feels unmanageable. Our maintenance model works well in a dense service area but doesn’t scale easily to nearby towns, and clients mainly see us as a maintenance company rather than landscapers. We’d like to move toward higher-value work and build a business that doesn’t rely on our physical labor long-term. For those who’ve grown service businesses: how do you break past this stage and start working on the business instead of just in it? My spouse and I run a small landscaping business that we somewhat fell into unexpectedly, and we’re looking for advice from people who have grown service businesses past this stage. The business started informally in a neighbourhood about 20 minutes outside a nearby town. Over time, several gated communities were developed nearby, adding a few hundred homes. Many are vacation properties and many residents are snowbirds, so there’s strong demand for property maintenance. Right now we operate with one truck / crew (2–4 people including us), and season that runs roughly March–December. We do have another truck and a few other trailers so have had short stints of running two crews. The business is financially stable. We pay ourselves modestly, have an accountant/bookkeeper, and use QuickBooks and Jobber. However, we feel stuck at this size. Main challenges We’re still on the tools every day. Most hires are entry-level and turnover is high, so we don’t have anyone who can reliably run a crew, quote jobs, train others, or solve problems independently. Crew leads aren’t long-term. Even when someone steps up, they still require constant support. Growth feels unmanageable. Hiring more staff means more work to manage, which already feels like full capacity. Our model relies on a dense service area. Maintenance works well in the clustered neighbourhoods we serve, but expanding into nearby towns becomes inefficient (plus there is a lot of more established competition outside our main service area). We’re stuck between models. Clients mostly see us as a maintenance company, but we’re not big enough to run separate maintenance and landscaping crews. Goals/Ideas We've Thought Of Move toward higher-end design and installation work Reduce dependence on daily physical labor Build a business that is sustainable and potentially sellable For context, I handle marketing (website, social media, Google reviews) and have a graphic design background. One of us also has an irrigation technician certificate, but we haven’t added irrigation services yet due to limited experience. Each winter we plan to work on business development, but the time usually goes toward preparing for the next season. Questions How do service businesses break past the “owner + one crew” stage? How do you develop reliable long-term crew leaders or managers? Is it better to scale maintenance crews or pivot toward higher-value landscaping work? How do you make time to work on the business when operations already take everything? Where do you start to work on the business? We’re approaching middle age and don’t want to rely on physical labor forever. I’d love to build something more sustainable than just owning a job. Neither of us have "dream" careers, but owning a landscaping business wouldn't have been on the list of contenders. We want to know how to make this work and how to figure out what to do in the future whether that is with the current business or doing something completely unrelated. If anyone has gone through this stage in a landscaping or service business, or just as a middle-aged person who still doesn't know what they want to be when they grow up, I’d really appreciate hearing what helped you gain clarity / move forward!
Inventory Management
Hi Everyone, I run a small appliance repair company in Nova Scotia. Our current strain with using jobber is lack of inventory management. We keep essentially inventory in 2 different places, the technicians truck and in the shop. The shop is split into 2 sections. Customer parts that we receive in for specific jobs and just warehouse stock of parts we keep around. We have seriously been considering switching to a different program for lack of features that fit with jobber on this. If anyone has any recommendations that you have personally used I would love to hear about it. In my ideal world a technician would be able to add a line item and enter a part number and it would say "you have this in your truck" so he can select it and it will alert us that he is using it from his truck to reorder. This is a strain on our growing business and I am hoping there is a solution so we do not have to leave jobber. Thanks, Jacob.
AI & Lead Gen for Service Based Contractors
Any service based or fence contractor businesses interested in helping each other in AI and Lead generation I have created some really helpful Automation and AI tools that I use every day that have helped my business out tremendously. Like: AI Answering phone calls, determining call intent, and then sending me an email right when call ends. No missed calls. Scrape google businesses in any zipcodes based on search terms (great for marketing B2B) Find emails from list of websites Automated Wordpress Blog Posts based on keywords Mass Email sender (so it looks like it comes from you personally). The only non free ai tool is the AI Answering assistant, but it is super cheap. What I am currently struggling with is getting consistent lead flow. I'm only doing Google ads, but wanted to see what other ways are working for you to generate leads. Would be happy to discuss the above with anyone that currently owns/ operates a service based business.The Handyman Business Machine: Non-Negotiables for Scaling
Non-negotiables that turn a handyman business into a repeatable machine—systems that make the business operate whether you “feel like it” or not. Think standardized scope, flat-rate pricing, SOPs, quality control, scheduling discipline, job costing, and a comp plan that rewards speed + quality. If you had to boil scaling down to 5–10 tenets, what are yours—and which ones moved the needle the most? Make sure they are measurable actions and results. “What doesn’t get measured doesn’t get done.” - Peter Drucker
Software
We own a general contracting company which uses Jobber but we will be starting a separate electrical contractor company this year, the previous electrician we're bringing on used Joist for his CRM/Invoicing. His "price book" was all in his head since he owned the business and did all of the invoicing himself. We would like to create or set up a price book and use flat rate pricing. We did a demo with Housecall Pro and we liked the ability to integrate Profit Rhino as well as mark up/down as needed. It does not look like Jobber has this ability so we might not set up the new company with Jobber. I saw we can import a CSV file with our products but Housecall Pro seems to be able to update prices/costs automatically all within the system. What other software have you electrician companies used that provides this service? If you have used Housecall Pro, any downsides we should keep in mind? The CEO/owner of the GC company was sitting in on the demo for Housecall Pro and really liked the Pipeline feature, which Jobber also does not have. So we're thinking about switching both companies over to Housecall Pro. All back-end accounting will be handled by QuickBooks Online so mainly need to worry about CRM/invoicing and tracking job progression from lead to completed job.Drywall or multi visit scheduling
Would love to hear what others are doing to mitigate the manual chaos of scheduling multiple visits. Currently right now as quotes are approved we build the jobs in a Google sheets we call our schedule board. We build all the visit blocks and then put them on techs accordingly. We meet once a week to go over the board for the following week and once we agree and finalize it we then build all those appointments into Jobber. That summary doesn't sound too daunting but trust me it is, there has to be a better way to schedule jobs as they come in. Less manual intervention. I would love to hear what other companies are doing in this space. Thanks
