Claude Bot - Work on The Business and In the Business at the Same Time
I've been trying to get a lot of the people I coach on this but if you are feeling stretched for time, and have a lot on your plate to try and do - the answer is Claude Bot. This is an extension for your Chrome browser. Everyone know what Claude is but I've always been annoyed because AI can tell you how to do everything but you have to do it. You still have to find where to click, find the setting, learn the interface. Claude Bot DOES THE CLICKING FOR YOU. It's unreal. These are projects I've been sitting on that I've knocked out THIS MONTH!! An estimator for my website. Dude I've been having a crappy half finished estimator on my website for a couple years. I asked Claude bot to revamp my estimator on my website to what is going to make the most sense, give me revisions, help me with prices, then test it. laude Bot says - well if I test this you'll have a bunch of emails in your inbox from the testing. I said that's cool you delete them. Then tell me the results. The only thing is it wasn't' able to put pictures in there. No worries Claude bot, I can manage that. This is The Result Next up - I fired my SEO company. I asked Claude bot to go through my website make a punch list of everything that could be improved SEO wise and help with our rankings. Then I asked it to do the things it's able to and make a list with SOPs for the things it can't. Put them in tasks in my company click up for my VA so she can easily go through everything. Set up tasks that need to be reoccurring and set up tasks we can use Claude bot for. Boom done. Fix and optimize my Go High Level - I paid someone to do my automations but there were some things I didn't like. I didn't want to pay her to make adjustments and also wait for them but I don't want to learn to navigate go high level. Ok Claude bot - do that. All the time I'm doing this, I just have that running on one screen then the other computer screen I'm knocking out quotes or putting together content. Oh ya I also made a dashboard for our click up so I can see where everyone is at with projects in one place, have it help me do quotes if I'm watching football or generally don't have the energy to do the things I need to do, and have it put my calendar together for the next week in a few minutes. YOU GUYS NEED TO GET ON THIS! Yes - you'll end up needing to spend money. But TIME is money. It can save you so much time.What are the extra things you do to sell a job that you don't charge for?
I had a client recently share with me that between me and another remodeler, I was the one willing to do the most without asking for anything in return before he booked the job, so that's why he went with me. I went and took measurements, got him a rendering of his new kitchen and a layout from the cabinet shop, met with him 2 other times, met them at the cabinet store. Really spent a lot of time developing report before I got the sale. I don't know how sustainable that is however my motto is just be as helpful as possible and the rest will come. What are the "extra's" you guys do to get that sale or create value with your customers?When Should You Fire Your SEO Agency?
We all want our websites to rank better, and to show up on maps. Once you have the budget, it CAN be a good idea to get a marketing agency to handle SEO for you. I made this move 7 months ago and just fired mine and I'll tell you why. First and foremost, I don't claim to be an SEO wizard. The Jobber podcast has had some amazing episodes on this over the last year, people giving hints on how to improve your rankings etc. I followed all their advice and was experiencing a steady level of traffic but I was ready to super charge my efforts. I hired a company that had a great reputation in another coaching group, and they seemed pretty legit. The promise - $1500/ month for 3 service pages, 5 back links, and meetings every month to go over progress. I thought it'd especially be important because we had just rebranded and I wanted to make sure our traffic stayed up. This was the result: From what I can tell, you have to give companies as least a few months to do their magic. Also, google took away the Call button which attributed to less phone calls. But although it made me feel secure to have someone "handling" our SEO, the results spoke for themselves. Much less traffic. From what I can tell, our high review traffic was doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Claude would analyze their work and the impact of the back links didn't seem to be there and we can make our own service pages with actual pictures vs the stock ones they were using. So we made the decision to move on and do the work ourselves with Claude. What have your experiences been with SEO companies? Have you had success with any? What were they doing?How Would You Handle a Customer Trying To Blame You For Another Person's Work?
So here's the situation - we had a customer we did a handyman punch list for. She previously had some really bad work done at her house and we were fixing their mistakes. Almost 10 month later - She claims that we installed a cooktop using silicone however my guys take very diligent notes and pictures and I have no record of that installation happening. I double checked with the guys and they didn't do it. Something like that would have taken some time and they would have remembered. Honestly I don't mind losing her as a client because she's wasted a lot of my time having my quote jobs she didn't end up doing but how do you tell someone she's mistaken when she is very sure we did it. I thought about sending her screen shots of our time stamped notes but I can't tell if she lying or not. What would you do?Effective Tagging - Who Is Doing It And What is Your Strategy?
I feel like tagging within customers might be the most forgotten about thing on our team but probably the lowest hanging fruit to keeping our information organized. Right now we are just tagging people we don't want to work with anymore and people that need to leave us a review. I''m struggling to do it in a way that's super effective. So for you tagging buffs out there, what are you doing to tag clients ad what strategy do you have? jobber - If you guys ever integrated JOB tags that would be amazing. I'm thinking we could tag jobs by category then reference them quicker. Instead of thinking of which clients we did which types of jobs for. Just putting "trim carpentry" or "doors" then seeing all the jobs we tagged with that would be clutch!
Handyman - how are you guys figuring out what a job actually needs to pay?
Hey guys, I'm a Handyman myself and got tired of pricing jobs by gut feeling, so I built something that calculates pricing using my actual income goal, overhead, billable time, travel, materials and markup. After the job, I entered what actually happened and it starts building my own personal price history and price booklet. I'm curious about what else eveybody else uses. If somebody has something that works better i'd love hear about it or switch to that system. I ran into some guys and they were still using spreadsheet, jobber/joist, a set price book, or mostly experience/gut feeling?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?
Hiring Subcontractors: How Do You Screen and Vet to Avoid Costly Mistakes and Rework?
At our company located in Mansfield, Ohio, we provide the majority of interior and exterior services. We use all subcontractors, most who typically strictly work for our company. We have had many issues hiring subcontractors who have done bad work, which has caused us to spend more money/time sending other subcontractors back out to fix the mistakes. It is also pushing our schedule back completely. This issue has set back our company in the last year because of multiple different crews. We have a few good, reliable crews, but the workload is too much for them. What can we do/use to help us with the process of elimination when it comes to hiring? Are there any types of quizzes/tests that we should provide? Any specific questions that we should be asking? Are there any places we may not be thinking of to find reliable subcontractors?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?
