How much Quote Follow Up is Too Much?
"Can you turn off my automations, your system is blowing me up?" I've gotten that a lot the last few months since I've set my system up. We basically text and email at day 1,2,3, 6,8,12,16,20,25,29 after the quote is sent unless they give us a "no". I feel like it can go two ways. The people that are going to accept but haven't gotten around to it are annoyed by it. The people that aren't going to accept usually don't say anything. I do get a "no" about day 12 though. The others, no response either way. What kind of nurture sequence are you guys setting up and how successful is it?Jobber users how are you handling new requests that don't respond after the first contact?
Do you leave them sitting in New until they respond, archive them, or have some kind of process for keeping the request list clean? I'm curious how other service businesses are handling this, especially when you have a lot of incoming requests. What does your process look like?
How Do Solo Operators Find Reliable On-Call Help When Jobs Get Too Big to Handle Alone?
I would like a better way to keep track of my time. Since I ran in one person operation with occasional aside helper, I sometimes get overloaded with jobs. I think I can do. As a small one person handyman type jobs. I may get out on a job and find its way too much for one person and then I have to stop and try to find someone to help me. So I’ve tried using workers day workers and sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. But whatever I’m looking for as far as parts, I know I can go to Home Depot and find what I need so I always depend on Home Depot and now I just need a way to find a reliable worker that is willing to be on call.Syncing Jobber to Google Calendar
Are any of you time blocking people? Well I'm an aspiring time blocking person and I just learned I can have Chat GPT do it for me instead of me slaving away on google trying to get everything dialed. What I realized was my tasks in jobber would have to get synced to google manually and that's super annoying. Wait - turns out Jobber quietly solved this and I didn't realize. I made a video showing yall how to sync you site visits, jobber tasks etc right on your calendar. https://www.loom.com/share/601da88e9b77434c84f7fa17ead4963c Hopefully that's helpful!How Do You Roll Back a Major Change?
Have you guys ever made a major organizational change then needed to go back? This last year I tried to help buy back some of my time and created a Project/ Operations manager position so I could focus on sales and marketing. It's been a bumpy road to say the least. I first tried to hire two guys from outside the organization, I really thought I did my due diligence but it didn't work out with either of those guys. One guy I learned after a week (lol) the other took me a month and a half. On our third guy, I promoted from within and it seemed like it was working but here we are almost two full quarters in and we have less capacity because I haven't been successful in finding a replacement for him in the field, and we are making less money on jobs because ... well it's a combination of things but he might not be a fit for the position. I'm thinking I need a more decentralized approach since essentially we are at the same revenue number as last year when we didn't have his big overhead position. So the question is - how do you roll that back? Is it possible to make a change like that without alienating the person I'm demoting? Would it be easier to demote if I'm citing financial and structural changes for the company? What's ya'll take on that.How to Know Everything About Everything
Anyone else feel like this needs to be you? You need to know how to market, how to manage people, how to properly incentivize them, be well versed in finance as well as all the technical aspects of whatever trade you are in. We had a situation where we were installing a lighted niche, and the specific tile made it impossible to get the tiles perfectly flat while installing it on the wall, and my guys put the light too far back so it cast a very minor shadow in the niche. In hindsight we could have installed the tiles in the niche ahead of time so we could apply proper pressure to them so there's no lips (and also put the light more forward) ... we won't make that mistake again! As I sit in the office making meta ads, reviewing my financials, it get's super frustrating to have these technical curveballs while sorting through everything else it takes to run a business. This is why we need to build our own checks and balances: Who we call or who we hire (have a good process for vetting people that know what they are doing) What we double check and when Who's the second set of eyes (use your in field managers, make sure everyone is using Jobber for pictures and notes Which leads to what you document Now the niche issue won't ever happen again but we've definitely caught things BEFORE they are a mistake utilizing this system. How to you juggle all the responsibilities?How Often do You Enforce the Fine Print?
In our contracts, it clearly states that if the scope changes and we are not able to do the visit, or if we are sent away for reasons outside of our control we will charge them $300 (for reference our min charge is a half day which is $500). I had a customer who's assistant asked us to install an undermount sink. It was in the contract, they signed it. We had done a visit with them months before and our technician mentioned a top mount sink would be easy but they specifically asked for an undermount. So we order the sink, show up and the owner not the assistant that coordinated the contract) says they want a top mount. Our technician says ok we'll have to come back. We tell them the charge for the new sink plus the cancellation and they think it's unreasonable. I definitely know, no one actually reads the contract. Should the technician have said, if you send me away, it's $300 charge extra. But they also are changing the plan. I'm a softee so I'm not going to charge them the cancellation but what do you think about a situation like that? Maybe the cancellation charge is too much? It's basically enough for me to give the technician something for planning their whole day around the job plus make a very small amount of profit. Thoughts?Are You Building a Business or Just Creating Yourself Another Job?
It’s easy as a small business owner to get caught up doing everything yourself. At what point do you start delegating, hiring, or putting systems in place so the business can operate without you being involved in every job? I’d love to hear how other owners are making that transition while still keeping quality and customer service high.
