What the hour actually is.
Every piece we publish ends the same way. Find the friction, then remove it. One hour, one number, no obligation. Nobody has ever explained what happens in that hour, which is a strange thing to ask a person to agree to. So here it is, in order, including the part where you never speak to us again.
Nothing gets shown to you.
It is not a demonstration. There is no deck, no screen share of somebody else's dashboard, and no product to look at. Nothing is being unveiled, because we do not yet know what your business needs and neither does anybody who has not read your records.
It is also not an audit. The word was retired here on purpose. An audit makes a person picture somebody arriving with a clipboard to find out what he has been doing wrong, and that is exactly backwards. We are not measuring you. We are measuring the seam between systems that were never built to talk to each other, which nobody in your business installed and nobody in your business can be blamed for.
One hour of your time, and you keep the number either way.
Three things, and no preparation.
Do not tidy anything. A cleaned up record is a record that has stopped telling the truth, and the mess is the part with the information in it.
- The phoneWhatever record exists of calls coming in. A phone system export, the call history in your scheduling software, or the screen on your desk.
- A month of workOne recent month of jobs finished, as your software has them.
- A month of moneyThe same month of bank activity, so the two can be laid against each other.
Read access is enough. Nothing is changed, nothing is installed, and nothing is connected to anything.
Six steps, in front of you.
- We count what came in
Every call, form and message that reached the business in the month, from the record rather than from memory.
- We count what got answered
And, more usefully, when. A call answered in forty seconds and a call answered in nine minutes are not the same call.
- We time the gaps
The stretches where the phone was ringing and the office was already on the phone. This is where most of it lives, and it is nobody's fault.
- We read after five, and the weekend
What happens to a person who tries to give you money at seven in the evening. Usually the honest answer is that nothing happens.
- We put one number on it
Derived on screen, from your figures, with every step visible so you can check it or argue with it. Not an industry average dressed up as your business.
- We name the first duty
One. The one that moves that number most, and how it would be measured afterwards against the same baseline.
The picture the hour draws.
Nobody in your business decided to stop answering the phone at two in the afternoon. Two people were already on it, and a third call arrived. Drawn out across a day, that stops being a failure of effort and starts being a shape, and a shape can be engineered against.
Three things you keep.
Written down, with the date and the month it came from, so it can be checked again in ninety days.
Every step of how it was reached. If we got it wrong you will be able to see exactly where, which is the point.
Named, and specific enough that you could hand it to somebody else entirely and they would know what to build.
If you never speak to us again, all three are still yours. There is no list to come off, no sequence that starts, and nothing to unsubscribe from. We are not being generous. A business that reads its own records and fixes it alone was never going to buy anything, and an hour spent finding that out is cheap for both of us.
Run a crude version of it here.
The hour reads your records. This does not: it takes three numbers you already carry in your head and applies two published rates to them. It is worse than the hour in every way except one, which is that you can run it right now without speaking to anybody.
Off your phone system, or a rough count. Guess high rather than low.
Blended across small jobs and the big ones.
Of the calls you do answer. Most shops sit between 35 and 50.
Not neglect. The arithmetic of running crews while the phone keeps going. missed
The problem needs solving today, so they call the next name on the list. gone
This is the crudest possible version of the hour. It takes three numbers you can estimate and applies two rates measured across home services contractors. If you are not in a trade, treat those two rates as a starting point rather than as your number. The hour itself does not need them: it reads your own records and derives the rate you actually run at. Run this anyway. If the figure at the bottom is large enough to annoy you, that is the finding.
of inbound calls to home services contractors go unanswered on a normal day. Primary research across the category.
of callers who reach voicemail never try again. Direct measurement of voicemail callback behaviour.
of homeowners hire the first contractor who responds. Not used in the arithmetic above. It explains why the missed ones do not come back.
average value of a missed home services call. Brackets the job value most shops should be entering.
When the hour ends in no.
Sometimes the number comes back small, and then we say so and that is the end of it. Building a seat to recover an amount that does not justify building it is how people end up paying for software they resent. There are three situations where we already know the answer before we start.
- Nothing is written down anywhere. If calls, jobs and money live on paper or in one person's head, there is nothing to measure and nothing to read against anything else. Get a system running first. Any of them. Then this becomes worth doing.
- Nobody has been in the office seat for long. The rules an assistant runs on come out of how your office actually works. If that changed last month, we would be writing down a description of something that is still moving.
- Nothing is generating the leads in the first place. A leak needs something flowing through it. If the phone is quiet, the problem is upstream of anything we do, and we would be fixing the wrong end.
Find the friction. Then remove it.
Bring the month that will not tie, or the calls you cannot account for. One hour, on your records, and you leave with a number you did not have.
Book the hourOne hour. One number. No obligation. livadea.systems