How do home service businesses fill their calendar before busy season?
When work slows down, most service businesses feel it fast: stress, cash flow pressure, and last-minute scrambling. Sound familiar? What’s the one thing you rely on most before busy season to keep your calendar full? New leads Repeat customers Referrals Deposits or upfront payments Booking weeks in advance Something else? (do tell!) Bonus: What used to stress you out about slow periods that doesn’t anymore?
Will AI replace jobs in home service and skilled trades?
I saw an article yesterday about all the tech jobs that are being replaced by AI and I thought about how hard that would be to know your position can be replaced by someTHING that can do it faster and cheaper than you can. Then I thought how happy I am that I decided a long time ago that I am going to work with my hands. Be handy. Solve real problems. I would be safe in saying that AI is never going to cut your lawn, remove your junk, exterminate your bed bugs, plumb in or wire your home. Am I going to regret saying this? Is AI reading thins and just started plotting to take all our jobs???How Are Home Service Businesses Preparing for AI Search Visibility?
Search is changing fast. We’ve already seen Google test online estimates and AI-assisted pricing in local search. Now, AI tools are helping homeowners decide who to call, sometimes before they ever visit a website. Scorpion Marketing published a report with the following stats: 22% of homeowners are already using AI tools to research services or get recommendations 80% of business owners say they don’t know how to prepare for AI-driven search visibility We’d love to hear what you’re seeing👇 Have you noticed changes in how customers find you or ask questions? Are you doing anything intentionally today to prep for AI-driven search? If AI search on your radar but still confusing, what question do you have? This space will continue to evolve. Sharing what’s working (or not) across different trades helps everyone get ahead of it!New Google Search Features: Online Estimates Filter and “Have AI Check Prices” — what does this mean for service pros?
Google has recently started rolling out new pricing-related features in local home service search, and they could impact how service businesses get discovered. Two early changes we’re seeing: “Online estimates” filter Google is beginning to surface an Online estimates filter in some home service searches. Early signs suggest businesses that provide clear, machine-readable pricing or instant estimates may be favored over generic contact forms. “Have AI check prices” or “Ask AI for Pricing” feature Google is also testing an AI feature that gathers pricing on a homeowner’s behalf by using AI to call businesses and collect price quotes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=illIa8LSfY0 These features are still new and evolving, but they raise big questions about pricing transparency, estimates, and local search visibility. We’re curious: Have you noticed either of these features in your area yet? Do you currently show pricing or estimate ranges online? Do changes like this make you rethink how you approach pricing and Google visibility? Would love to hear what service pros are seeing so far 👇
Referral Credit System Is Very Lacking
This post is feedback, and a place to allow other users to leave feedback, for the Client Referral marketing tool in Jobber. The current client referral system is very lacking for a premium paid feature. We would like to see some deep functionality changes and additions immediately, since this has been around for a while now with no improvements....here is my current thoughts on what could be added or should be changed - Credits need to show in the Clients file (maybe under account balance) Staff needs to know if a credit is available or could apply for sales purposes. Currently its restricted to owners/admins in the marketing section and you can't do anything with that info anyway from there, its pretty useless. Credits need to be usable across the whole system & in the field (mobile invoices), we better for techs in the field ('hey, i see you have credit, would you like to use it on this invoice?') Credits need to be adjustable, we want to be able to add referral credits manually if we see fit. (this is especially ideal for when staff forgets to fill out the referrer entry on a job) which happens all the time. Apply credits anyway we would like (if a client has a $100 in credit, we want to be able to apply that whole amount if they have a huge invoice(s) being paid at once) the current automatic application is not good enough. Credit Amount settings ($ / % amount) should be able to be set based on Client type/tag (if the client is a Builder Partner we want to give them 10%, instead of just the $50 we give to a regular customer per lead) Option to set the Amount of credit ($/%) given based on a range of invoice value (5% for $100-500 invoice amount / 8% for $500-1000 invoice amount / etc) Option to exclude certain Clients from the referral program (we have builder partners that are on a completely different program internally, we do not want there account to also be getting other discounts). Option in Jobber websites to add a Refer A Friend button, so we do not have to rely on the email campaigns that most people don't open. Allow the client to see credits in their portal, and apply them to invoices when making payments.When should businesses increase prices to keep up with rising payroll costs?
When's the last time you updated your pricing model to match your payroll reality? For example, our direct payroll (before tax) is 38% while our indirect payroll is 10%. As of January 2, we increased rates for all recurring clients by 4% to offload the indirect percentage. Going forward, we increased all first-time services by 5%. Thoughts?
