Phase 3 Preparation Tips for Jobber Grant Applicants
To everyone who may be advancing to Phase 3 of the Jobber Grants competition, congratulations on making it this far. The work you put in now can help your business long after this competition. Here are a few things I’d recommend focusing on: Review your full application and be ready to speak confidently about everything you submitted. Practice explaining your business in 30–60 seconds. Keep it simple, clear, and memorable. Know exactly how you would use the grant and the impact it would have on your business. Update your website, LinkedIn, and social media so your online presence reflects your business professionally. Refresh your business plan and make sure it reflects your latest progress and goals. Know your numbers—customers, revenue (if applicable), milestones, growth, and future goals. Practice answering questions out loud. Confidence comes from preparation and repetition. Be ready to explain what makes your business unique and why now is the right time for it. Organize your financial information and important business documents in case they’re needed. Create a simple one-page overview of your business that clearly explains your mission and vision. Gather testimonials, reviews, or customer feedback if you have them. Social proof adds credibility. Stay informed about your industry so you can confidently discuss current trends and opportunities. Build relationships with other founders. Networking often creates opportunities beyond this competition. Don’t memorize answers. Know your story well enough that your passion comes through naturally. Take care of yourself. Get enough rest, stay focused, and walk into every opportunity with confidence. Most importantly, act like you’ve already made it to Phase 3. Use this time to strengthen your business, improve your brand, and prepare for every opportunity ahead. Wishing everyone the best of luck. No matter who moves forward, keep building, keep learning, and keep believing in what you’re creating. Your next breakthrough could be closer than you think.Are you using your customer reviews to improve your marketing?
I recently had Claude scrape and organize all of our Google and Facebook reviews, then I put the findings into ACQ AI to see what needed to change in our business context, avatar, offer, and marketing. It was honestly one of the more useful marketing exercises I’ve done. Because the reviews showed what customers actually care about. For us, the strongest themes were: communication reliability thoroughness gate safety haul-away professionalism being kind to customers and their dogs Some of that I already knew. But seeing it repeated across hundreds of reviews made it a lot harder to ignore. For example, customers mention our text communication constantly. They like knowing when we’re coming. They like the 30-minute heads up. They like the “all done” message. They like getting a picture of the closed gate. That tells me communication is a major part of the service experience. Customers also bring up gate safety a lot. That matters because many of them have either had a dog get out before or they’re afraid it could happen. So if I’m writing ads, emails, or website copy, I probably need to talk about safety and gate photos more often. Another big one was haul-away. We take the waste with us instead of leaving it in the customer’s trash can. I’ve always seen that as part of our service, but the reviews showed customers notice it and care about it. That becomes a marketing point. The review analysis also confirmed something important about price. We are on the higher end in our market. Customers still say things like: worth every penny more than fair I’d pay twice as much That tells me our marketing should not be built around being cheap. It should explain why the service is worth more: better communication safer access cleaner yards less smell less stress more trust I think more home service businesses should do this. Your reviews can show you: Why people hired you in the first place Were they overwhelmed? Burned by another company? Too busy? Embarrassed? Dealing with a life event? Why they stayed Was it communication? Quality? Reliability? The technician? The process? What they say when price is no longer the main issue Those exact phrases should influence your ads, website, emails, and sales scripts. What your unique selling proposition actually is Sometimes the thing customers love most is different than the thing you keep promoting. Where your systems are creating trust or friction One bad review about repeated follow-up texts told us something important too. Automation has to respect opt-outs and avoid making people feel chased. The biggest takeaway for me: Your best marketing language is probably already sitting inside your reviews. You just have to organize it, look for patterns, and let the customer tell you why they chose you. Have you ever gone through your reviews and changed your marketing based on what customers were already saying?Are You Selling Your Service… or Selling the Experience?
Customers have more choices than ever. Sometimes the difference isn’t just the service you provide, but how you make people feel from the first interaction to the final follow-up. What are some ways your business creates an experience that keeps customers coming back?What customer expectation caused you the most problems?
One expectation I wish I had defined earlier was arrival times. When I first started, it was easy to tell a customer: “I’ll be there around 10.” Or: “We should be there between 12 and 1.” At the beginning, that felt like good customer service. The schedule was smaller. The routes were lighter. I had more control over the day. As the business grew, specific arrival times became harder to keep. All it took was: one chatty customer talking for 10 minutes a locked gate a dog outside extra waste in a yard traffic road construction an accident a customer note that needed attention Suddenly the whole route was pushed back. And once you miss the arrival time you gave the customer, even if the work itself is done well, you’ve created frustration because the expectation was set wrong from the beginning. That forced us to change how we communicate scheduling. Now we set the expectation that we scoop from sunrise to sunset. Customers know their service will happen on their scheduled day, and they’ll receive an “on the way” message 30–60 minutes before arrival. That one change reduced a lot of unnecessary pressure. It also made the route easier to manage because we weren’t trying to force the day into exact arrival windows that didn’t hold up once real life happened. I think a lot of service businesses run into this. You create an expectation early because it feels manageable, then growth exposes how hard it is to keep that promise consistently. For us, the lesson was pretty simple: If the business cannot deliver it consistently at scale, be careful promising it casually in the beginning. What expectation did you set early on that later became hard to manage as the business grew?Should you fire customers who only want the bare minimum service?
This is a hard one because those customers are still paying you. And when you’re growing, it feels wrong to turn away money. I’ve had to think about this a lot in my own business because the bare minimum customer can quietly become one of the hardest customers to serve profitably. In pet waste removal, this usually shows up with frequency. Someone has 3 or 4 dogs and wants every-other-week service. Or they want monthly service. From the customer’s point of view, they’re trying to save money. I get that. But from the operations side, that yard can become a completely different job. A weekly yard may take 10-15 minutes. That same customer on every-other-week or monthly service may turn into a 30, 40, or 45-minute cleanup. Now the technician is behind. The route gets pushed and is harder on the body. The customer is still expecting it to look great. Plus your business is making less money per hour. That’s where the bare minimum becomes a problem. They may technically be a paying customer, but the job no longer fits the way the business needs to operate. I used to be more flexible with this. I wanted to help people or to lose the sale. And assumed a lower frequency was better than no customer at all. Then I started paying attention to what those jobs were doing to the route. They were taking too long and wearing out the techs. At least from my experience, these types of accounts created more room for complaints. They were lowering the quality of the day for better-fit customers. Eventually, we made the decision to remove monthly service. We also made every-other-week service available only for customers with fewer than 2 dogs. If someone has 3 or more dogs, weekly service makes more sense for the customer, the yard, the technician, and the business. That boundary protects the operation. It also protects the customer experience. Because if the service frequency is too low for the amount of waste being produced, the customer may still blame the company when the yard doesn’t feel as clean as they expected. That creates a bad situation for everyone. And this can show up in other industries too. A customer wants the cheapest maintenance plan but expects premium response time. Or they want the smallest cleanup package but expects the full deep clean. Maybe they'll ask to skip recommended work and then gets upset when the result doesn’t hold up. A customer wants the lowest level of service but still wants the highest level of outcome. That mismatch creates tension. I don’t think every customer who wants a lower option is a bad customer. Some people truly need a temporary down-sell because of finances, travel, life changes, or seasonality. I’m willing to work with that when it still makes sense. But there’s a difference between a temporary adjustment and a customer who consistently wants the cheapest version of the service while expecting the business to absorb the consequences. Those customers can cost more than they pay. Sometimes the best move is to explain the standard clearly: “Based on the number of dogs and the amount of waste, weekly service is the lowest frequency we can offer and still provide the level of service we’re comfortable putting our name on.” That kind of policy may lose some customers. But it can also protect your route, your team, your quality, and your profit. Do you allow customers to choose the bare minimum service, even when you know it may create problems later? Or have you created minimum standards for who you will and won’t serve?How are you offsetting seasonal churn in your business?
We’re in the part of the year where churn can start creeping up. For us, summer can be weird. People travel more. Kids are home. Budgets get tighter. Some customers pause because they think they’ll “just handle it themselves for a while.” Then a few weeks later the yard gets away from them again. I’ve been thinking a lot about how to reduce that churn before it happens instead of only reacting after someone cancels. A few things we’re working on right now: bulk prepayment offers more customer engagement through our physical newsletter promoting add-on services reactivation campaigns for past clients downselling instead of immediately accepting cancellations The downselling piece has been important. If a customer reaches out to cancel because of finances, I don’t always want the only option to be “stay or leave.” Sometimes there’s a middle option. For example, moving them to a lower frequency for a season may keep the relationship alive and still keep their yard from getting completely out of control. That’s better than losing them entirely and having to reacquire them later. We’re also sending more prepayment offers because it helps with cash flow and gives customers a reason to commit ahead of time. The physical newsletter has helped too. It keeps the relationship warmer. Customers hear from us outside of invoices, appointment reminders, and service texts. That matters because recurring customers are easier to lose when the business only talks to them transactionally. I’m also paying more attention to which customers are most at risk of canceling: price-sensitive customers lower-frequency customers customers who pause seasonally people who have recently had schedule changes customers who haven’t used add-on services past clients who canceled but may still need help This is one of those areas where I think service businesses need more than just new leads. You need a retention plan. What are you doing to offset seasonal churn before customers cancel?
