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Resources

A short shelf, honestly labelled.

Most vendor resource pages are a hundred posts nobody read, written to catch a search. This is seven things worth a contractor’s time. Three of them exist today and are below. One is on hold until a lawyer has been through it, three are still being written, and they’re marked that way rather than dressed up as links that go nowhere.

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Worksheet · available now

What is a missed call actually costing you?

Three numbers, none of them ours. We haven’t filled anything in for you and there are no industry averages hiding in here. If we don’t know your numbers, we certainly don’t know the average of everyone else’s.

The missed-call worksheet

It runs in your browser. Nothing you type is sent to us, saved, or attached to your email address. There isn’t an email box on this tool for exactly that reason.

Rings out, goes to voicemail, or you see it two hours later. Your phone bill or call log will tell you if you’re guessing.
Your own hit rate on a caller who reaches you, not a benchmark. Round down if you’re unsure.
The whole ticket, not the profit. Or use the profit if you’d rather the answer be conservative. Amount in US dollars

What that comes to

Fill in the three boxes and the arithmetic appears here, along with the sum itself, so you can check we haven’t put a thumb on it.

This is your arithmetic, not our research. There is no missed-call statistic in this tool, because we don’t have one we’d be willing to cite. Every figure in the answer traces back to something you typed.

It is not a claim about what we’d recover. Answering a call is not winning a job. Some of those people call back on their own, some were selling you something, and some would never have hired you. Treat the number as the size of the pile you’re not looking at, not as a promise, and not as a projection we’re making.

A month is a week × 4.33 and a year is a week × 52. No seasonality, because your season is yours: if your season is ten weeks a year, work it out on those ten weeks instead.

The shelf

Everything else, with its real status on it.

Three you can use this minute. One is waiting on legal review. Three are being written, and none of them will go up until they’re worth the click.

  • The missed-call worksheet

    Available now
    Open it

    The tool at the top of this page. Your missed calls, your close rate, your job value, worked through to a weekly, monthly and yearly figure, with the sum shown so you can argue with it.

  • Talk to the receptionist

    Available now
    Start the demo

    A live conversation in your browser, about ninety seconds. Not a recording and not a scripted walkthrough. Ask her a price she hasn’t been given, or a ZIP code outside the service area, and listen to what she does with it. It uses your microphone and the conversation is recorded and transcribed exactly as a real call would be; the privacy policy covers what happens to it.

  • A sample postcard, and the conversation it starts

    Available now
    See the sample

    The other half of the product, from the homeowner’s side: the card, the QR code, the page it opens, and the voice that answers. It shows the one thing that only works with mail: she greets a scanner by name, because the scan tells her which card it was. Someone who dials the printed number instead is anonymous, and the sample says so too.

  • Call recording consent for contractors, state by state

    Needs legal review

    On hold, deliberately. A guide like this is legal guidance; we’re a vendor rather than anybody’s attorney, and it is worth nothing to you if one line of it is wrong in your state. It goes up when a lawyer has been through it and their name can sit at the bottom, not before. What we’ll say in the meantime is below.

  • EDDM or targeted mail: which one for your trade

    Being written

    Saturating a carrier route versus picking households by home value, home age, lot size or new movers: what each one costs you in waste, and which jobs justify the premium. In the meantime the short version is on the two product pages themselves: targeted mail and EDDM, each of which carries the chooser table.

  • Why your business texts get blocked: 10DLC for the trades

    Being written

    Why a text from your business number quietly never arrives, what the carriers now require before they’ll deliver it, and what a small contractor actually has to register. Dry, and the reason a lot of “we texted you” conversations never happened.

  • How to write a postcard a homeowner keeps

    Being written

    What earns fridge space: one offer, a legible number, a reason to act this month, and the design decisions that stop a card reading like a flyer. Written from the cards we’ve actually printed rather than from a stock-photo swipe file.

No dates on the unfinished ones. We’d rather leave the shelf visibly short than promise you a publication calendar we’d then quietly miss.

Why one of them is held back

We’re not going to publish legal advice we wrote ourselves.

A state-by-state guide to call-recording consent is the single most useful thing a company in our position could publish. It is also the fastest way to get a contractor into trouble if one line of it is out of date, and we would be the ones who wrote that line.

So it doesn’t go up until a lawyer has been through it and their name can sit at the bottom. Here is the whole of what we’ll say without one:

  • Every call our receptionist takes opens by telling the caller she’s an automated assistant and that the call is recorded, before they’ve said a word. It isn’t a setting a business can switch off.
  • Some states require everyone on a call to agree before it’s recorded, and the notice has to be inside the recording itself. That’s why the disclosure is her first sentence rather than a line in a contract.
  • What we keep, for how long, and how a caller asks for a copy or a deletion is in the privacy policy. That document binds us; this page doesn’t.
  • None of the above is legal advice about your obligations in your state.

What to ask your own attorney

  1. In the states I actually work in, does everyone on the call have to consent to recording, and does a spoken notice at the start satisfy that?
  2. If a caller keeps talking after the notice, is that consent where I operate, or do I need something more explicit?
  3. Am I responsible for the disclosure, is my vendor, or are both of us, and does my contract with them say so?
  4. Do any of my states have rules about a caller being told they’re speaking to an AI, separate from the recording question?
  5. How long should I be keeping recordings, and does keeping them longer help me or expose me?
One more thing

The best resource on this site isn’t a document.

It’s ninety seconds on the phone with the receptionist, asking her the questions your customers ask you. If you want to know when the rest of the shelf fills up, the sign-up box at the bottom of this page is the only list we have, and it’s the only thing on this page that asks for your email at all.

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