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?
Need Help With Mass jobber import
Looking for a Jobber consultant / implementation specialist Hi everyone, We're a window cleaning business based in South Wales, UK, with approximately 7,000 active recurring customers and around 11,000 historical customer records retained for marketing and reactivation purposes. We're currently undertaking a large data standardisation project and are looking for someone with genuine experience in Jobber implementations, large data imports, recurring jobs and API-based solutions. The customer data itself is being cleaned and standardised separately, so we're not looking for data entry. The challenge is helping us structure and import the data into Jobber correctly, particularly around: Recurring jobs Recurrence schedules Individually priced services Service structures Large-scale imports Jobber API capabilitie Best-practice setup for a recurring service business Ideally we're looking for someone who has worked with recurring service businesses before (window cleaning, lawn care, pressure washing, pest control, etc.) and has successfully handled larger Jobber implementations. If that's you, or if you can recommend someone you've worked with, I'd love to hear from you. Thanks, JayHow to start an in house training center for painting?
I am looking for feedback on starting a training center for residential painting. We have a shop but it is kind of small for what I am looking at doing. Is there any creative ways I could go about purchasing, or leasing a building that is specifically for training and education? My goal would be to hire on young men and women who are interested in the painting trade and have a facility to train them in before they every step foot on a job. For example, there would be a class room to learn about products and applications. Then there would be actually rooms built out and small exterior walls build out with different substrates to actually train applications. I would hire some of my current employees to be paid extra to run classes and training. What do you think? Am I dreaming too big or is this something I could accomplish? How could I go about making this happen?
Starting a New Hardscape Division While Busy with Landscape Maintenance Team
How do you actually start a new division of your business while still managing day-to-day operations? Between quoting, scheduling, and running jobs, it’s hard to carve out time to build something new. Curious how others have handled this without things falling through the cracks. What worked for you? Context: our "bread and butter" as a landscaping company has been in residential maintenance (lawn cutting, care, property clean-ups, trimming, garden care, softscape / small hardscape installs, etc.). My business partner and I are near max capacity with taking on more residential maintenance clients and would like to get into higher earning, longer term, larger projects on the install / design side of landscaping.
Can AI create accurate inventories from photos or walkthroughs for estimates?
Anyone here using AI to build inventories from photos or on‑site for moving quotes? We’re a moving company looking to automate as much of the quote process as possible. Right now, we’re still doing a lot of manual inventory collection and data entry, and it’s slowing us down and leaving room for mistakes. I’m specifically interested in: AI tools that can take phone photos or short videos (or an on‑site walkthrough) and automatically create an itemized inventory we can use for estimates. Anything that can recognize furniture/boxes from images and turn that into quantities, cube/weight, or at least a structured checklist. Workflows where the customer does a virtual survey themselves and we just review and price it. Bonus points if it can be integrated within jobber If you’re doing this today, which software are you using, how accurate is it, and what does your workflow look like from first contact to approved quote? Any “don’t waste your time on this tool” stories are welcome too.How do you manage different level Service Contracts in Jobber?
We are currently offering one service contract; however, we are looking to create three tiers. We would have a Silver, Gold, and Platinum package. Each package/membership would offer something different. How could we effectively manage this in Jobber to keep track of which clients are on which level package? How many visits they have/have used? Payments? Etc.How to implement safety meetings? Certs?
When growing your painting business how can you go about focusing more on safety? With a larger team and more people on jobs/bigger jobs what do safety meeting look like? How do you go about getting your team and your self educated? What certs can you get and how do you offer them?Building an AI online bid?
I have been messing around with the idea of creating a way for my customers to submit some information on their own through our website and AI provide them their bid for painting. Has anyone done this? Have any ideas on how to do it? And what could be the potential pros and cons of this? I'm thinking that it would need to have a customer login & portal. There would need to be a way to upload additional files. Pictures and videos of project. There would need to be a fee that is charged to use this service to try and gatekeep competitors from using it. The fee would be removed if the job is landed. There might need to be an agreement signed that unforeseen work that wasn't included in the submission could result in a change order. What would you add?Why I Stopped Chasing Jobs and Started Building Systems
Early in my career I equated motion with progress. AKA: Rocking chair syndrome. If the phone rang, I was winning. If my schedule was full, I was successful. But all that movement was just noise. I was busy, not effective. The shift came when I started documenting everything! How calls were answered, how quotes were written and how materials were ordered. Once I built systems, my business stopped depending on how many hours I worked and started depending on how well I led. Systems create predictability. Predictability builds trust. Trust builds freedom. Stop being the technician who holds it all together with duct tape. Be the leader who builds a machine that runs smoothly, even when you step away. Have questions? Message me!
