Two years in with three techs and I'm still running the whole thing off my phone

Jamal Carter· Plumbing company owner, three techs, two years in· Open, Trades & Contractors·Jul 24

Plumbing company, three techs, two years open, and the business works in the sense that money comes in and everyone gets paid. Underneath that it's held together with text messages.

Quotes go out as a photo of a handwritten page. Scheduling is me sitting in the truck at six in the morning deciding who goes where. Two of my guys invoice from their own phones and one of them writes it on a carbon pad. Last month I found out we'd never billed a job from July. Four hundred and ten dollars, which isn't the point. The point is I've no idea how many more of those there are.

My insurance renewal also snuck up on me and I had a week where I genuinely wasn't certain we were covered, which at six in the morning in somebody's basement is a horrible feeling.

I know the answer is software and process, and I've been putting it off for two years because every hour I spend on it is an hour I'm not billing.

For anyone who's been here with a small crew: what did you fix first? And did you set it up yourself or pay somebody to do it?

4 replies

Rob Mackenzie· Open·Jul 24

Fix the billing first. Everything else is annoying, but that one is money you've already earned walking out of the door, and you only found the July job by accident.

What I did in my last business was the dullest possible version: one shared job list that nothing gets deleted from, and a rule that a job isn't closed until it's invoiced. No software needed to start, a whiteboard did it for a year. Then when you do buy something, you already know the shape of your own process, instead of buying a system and trying to become the sort of company it expects you to be.

Carla Vasquez· Open·Jul 25

On do it yourself or pay somebody: pay for the setup, run it yourself. I say that as the person people pay to set things up, so discount accordingly, but the pattern I see is owners who buy a good tool, configure twenty percent of it badly, and conclude the tool doesn't work.

Two days of somebody who's done it before, with your actual price list and your actual job types loaded in, is worth more than the subscription. And pick something your carbon pad guy will tolerate on a phone in a crawlspace, because adoption is the whole game and the prettiest tool loses to the one he'll actually open.

Brianna Sato· Open·Jul 26

The insurance renewal thing is fixable in ten minutes and I'd do it tonight, because it's the only item on your list that can end the business rather than just annoy it. Every policy renewal, every licence, every filing date in one calendar with a reminder a month out. Mine is shared, so it isn't only in my head.

I lost a week to exactly this in year one, chasing a certificate for a commercial customer while not being certain my own policy was current. Never again. The tax calendar was where I started before I built my own.

Jamal Carter· Open·Jul 28

Calendar's done, all four renewal dates in with a month's warning, and it took about the ten minutes you said. The job list rule goes up on the whiteboard in the shed tomorrow. I'm going to sit on the software decision for a month and just see how many uninvoiced jobs the whiteboard finds first.

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