When should you stop saying yes to every customer?
In the beginning of my business, I said yes to almost everyone. If someone was 1+ hour away and wanted service, I would try to make it work. At that stage, every customer felt important. I wanted the revenue. I wanted the reviews. I wanted the experience. I wanted proof that people would actually pay for the service. That helped us get started, but it also created problems later. After a while, the drive time started catching up with us. Too much windshield time. Too many miles on the vehicles. Too much energy spent servicing areas where we were not gaining any real density. The crazy part is that some of those customers looked profitable on paper. But once you added the drive time, route disruption, fuel, vehicle wear, and the fact that we couldn’t build enough customers around them, those stops did not make as much sense as I wanted them to. Eventually I noticed most of our best customers were coming from specific cities in our service area. That changed how I looked at growth. Instead of trying to serve everywhere, we started focusing more of our advertising and energy into our top 7 most profitable cities. That helped us build tighter routes, reduce drive time, and make the day more efficient for our technicians. Another thing I had to learn was that not every customer who is willing to pay is a good fit for the way the business needs to operate. For us, a good example was service frequency. We used to allow more flexibility with every other week and monthly service. The issue was usually customers with 3 or 4+ dogs choosing the lowest frequency possible. Even when those jobs were priced correctly, they could still take 30–45+ minutes per visit. That created a capacity problem. Our technicians could spend almost an hour in one yard, or they could service multiple weekly customers in that same amount of time. So we changed the offer. We removed monthly service as an option. We also stopped offering every other week service to customers with 3+ dogs. If someone has 3 or more dogs, they need weekly service. That change made the routes cleaner, reduced heavy yards, and helped technicians get in and out more consistently. It also forced us to stop building the business around customers who only wanted the bare minimum version of the service. That was a hard shift mentally. Because early on, saying yes feels like growth. Later, too many bad-fit yeses create operational drag. When did you realize it was time to stop saying yes to every customer? Was it based on service area, pricing, job type, customer behavior, or something else?
Best Way to Manage Recurring Jobs Across Multiple Crews?
Hey everyone, We're one season into trying a new workflow for scheduling jobs and I'm curious how others handle this. Last year, we assigned every employee to every job. The downside was that nobody could easily tell which jobs they were actually responsible for each day. This season, we created dedicated teams so the same crew visits the same properties each week. For the most part, it's worked really well. However, when rain delays force us to move routes around, crews sometimes need to cover properties that normally belong to another team. The problem is that when a job gets moved, the crew covering it can't see it because they aren't assigned to the recurring job. We then have to manually remove and reassign employees for each affected visit, which becomes pretty time-consuming. Has anyone found a good workaround for this? Ideally, we'd like to assign jobs to a "fleet" or "truck" rather than individual employees. For example: Truck A covers these properties Truck B covers these properties Then whichever employees are assigned to Truck A can see Truck A's route, regardless of who is working that day. I'm curious how other companies are managing this and whether there's a better way than manually reassigning employees every time a schedule changes. Thanks in advance!Are you using AI in your business yet or still “just curious”?
Where are you at with AI right now? A) Not using it at all B) Using it for basic stuff (e.g., emails, replies) C) Using it for ops (e.g., estimating, training, reporting) D) “We run everything through AI” level—share below how you’re using it! In this episode of Masters of Home Service, PhilRisher and ryaantuttle share real-world ways home service pros are using AI to: Speed up estimating and hiring processes Create ready-to-use marketing content Prep for the shift from traditional SEO to AEO and GEO Want to put these tips into action? Download our free AI starter toolkit (includes scripts and pro tips). Never miss an episode of Masters of Home Service. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Have you ever had to let go of customers because they no longer fit your service area?
This has been one of the harder operational decisions I’ve had to make as our business has grown. When we first started, we said yes to almost everything. A new customer 35–45 minutes away? Sure. One random stop completely outside our main routes? We took it. At the beginning, it felt worth it because every customer mattered and we were trying to grow. But over time, I started realizing some of those decisions were quietly costing us a lot: extra drive time fuel route inefficiency employee hours schedule pressure less availability for denser areas A few isolated customers may not seem like a big deal individually, but collectively they can eat hours out of your week. And the hardest part is some of those customers have been with you for years. I recently had to let go of one of our original clients after 4+ years because her area simply no longer made operational sense for us. Honestly, I procrastinated that conversation for over a year. Part of it was guilt. Part of it was loyalty. Part of it was knowing she had supported us early on. She was really sad about it, which made the conversation harder, but she also understood why we had to make the decision. That conversation reminded me that scaling sometimes requires protecting the overall health of the operation, even when individual decisions feel emotionally uncomfortable. We’re trying to build tighter route density now instead of constantly expanding outward. Less windshield time has improved a lot: scheduling profitability technician morale flexibility capacity for growth inside our strongest areas. Still not an easy part of business though. Do you keep long-term customers outside your core area out of loyalty, or eventually redraw the boundaries as the business grows?
Airbnb Cleaning Automated Scheduling
Hi Everyone, We own a cleaning business in Australia and use Jobber as our software. We have a lot of clients that have Airbnb properties that we clean for them. We have been researching and trying to come up with the best solution to automate the booking process, as you can imagine cleaning 100 Airbnb properties with multi bookings per week can become a admin logistical nightmare. Does anyone have any experience in this area. How have you automated the process, can you connect Airbnb with Jobber, what is the best practice of booking and scheduling these appointments?Tutorial: How to Set Up Re-Occurring Jobs in Jobber
Hey Guys It took me a while to set up a reoccurring job correctly - so I made a video on how you do it! From the quote to how you set the job up so they get billed automatically. Here is the loom video going over the process. How to Set Up Recurring Jobs in Jobber
How to track job categories/special requirements?
Just wondering if anyone has some ideas around this, or has found a solution for themselves... We have some jobs with special requirements, for example: Require visit reminders (our Admin follows up manually if a visit is rescheduled after the automated reminder has been sent) Special scheduling requirements (eg. visits can only be completed on Fridays) Fixed price invoicing regardless of job time/time based invoicing (often different work categories are one way or the other, but we have some jobs that don't fit that strict "category rule") We currently use an emoji shorthand in job titles so we can quickly see at a glance things like what standard the property should be maintained, whether we only do lawn services or gardens are also included at the property, if they have a dog, that the job is correctly scheduled for summer/winter, etc. But these are tailored for the field crew and I'd prefer to avoid overloading the job info/titles and keep it simple for the crews. It's really admin/office staff who need to see the different info mentioned in the bullet points. I was thinking we can use Calendar Colours, but does anyone have other tricks up their sleeve?
