So, I’m not talking about those.

I’m talking about a standalone estimate request where you go yourself or send an employee to get eyes on the situation and provide pricing.

Old schoolers will tell you NEVER to give pricing over the phone. Boo, hiss to price shoppers, right?

Eh, I’m going to call bullshit.

We live in a time where information flows freely. Gatekeeping is passe and can end up wasting time and resources.

Time is Money, Baby

It’s relatively easy to do the math on how much an in-person estimate costs you. Gas, employee time, blah blah blah. But that’s not really the cost I’m worried about.

Opportunity cost. That’s the painful one.

A drive across town to stare at the spot in the house, measure a few things, and sit in the truck with the air running is all wasted capacity that could have been funneled elsewhere in your business.

Is the information you are gaining from seeing it in person really worth the trade-off? Sometimes.

A whole-house re-pipe? Bet your ass I’m going over there.

An electrical project in a 100 year old house with some homeowner DIY-special thrown in? Uh, yeah.

Commercial property that requires an upside-down solder joint three stories up in an atrium? (That’s a real example, btw.) Definitely.

But then there are the jobs you’ve done a million times. The ones where there are only so many possible what-ifs and you’ve seen them all.

If you can’t get the right information over the phone, it’s not an estimate problem - it’s an intake problem. And we’re going to fix it.

First, The Basics

Start with the same stuff you get for every appointment. The who, what, when, where, and why of it all. But you’re going to focus on two things as far as effecting the estimate:

Where is the job? What are we doing?

Location narrows down service area and any mileage concerns.

The job type is going to send your customer service person into the right question list for the rest of it. Because unless you do exactly one thing, you might need different information for the next part.

And Then There Are the Nope Jobs

What is an automatic "No, thank you!”?

It would be really nice if the phone only ever rang with perfect jobs. But some jobs, some locations, and some customers just aren’t for you.

That’s okay. Make like a Millennial fresh out of therapy and set some firm boundaries.

Outside the service area.

Equipment you don’t work on.

A customer who says, “I’ve already had four companies out here and none of them know what they’re doing.”

Oh no.

NO. No thank you.

Maybe every contractor in town really is incompetent but still sounds like an exciting adventure for somebody else.

The Stuff That Eats Your Margin

The next list you’ll make is the stuff that isn’t a hard no, but does make you squint real hard or makes your eye twitch.

It’s the stuff that slows down or complicates a job.

“Of course it’s on the third floor.”

“Of course she didn’t move the stuff.”

“Of course there’s nowhere to park.”

“Of course the crawl space is twelve inches tall.”

“Of course the gate isn’t wide enough.”

Whatever your list is, this stuff makes it complicated. Not impossible. Just longer, or more people, or more equipment.

Ask about these qualifiers. Photos help so ask for those if you need them. A picture is worth a thousand words.

Build Your Menu

To recap: you’ve got your service list, your hard no’s, and your squint list. Now price them.

Not every last thing. Focus on the 80% — your bread and butter work. Water heater swap, panel change, disposal, whatever your top ten is. You already know what those cost and what you charge. It’s just never been written down anywhere your CSR can reach it.

Flat price where you can. Build a range where you can’t. Each of the qualifiers is a line item — third floor adds this, crawl space under two feet adds that, no parking adds an hour.

It’s a nice little flow-chart that anyone can read.

Will the estimate still be wrong sometimes? Sure, and that’s where disclaimers come in. Every sight-unseen price goes out with one:

This price is based on information and photos provided by the customer. Your technician will confirm pricing before work begins. If conditions are materially different than as described or provided, invoice adjustments will be made as necessary.

I Don’t Want You to Stop Doing In-Person Estimates

Truly, I don’t. Sometimes sending someone out is the right answer.

I want you to stop doing things automatically because it feels easier to just get it done in the moment than to sit down and do the homework.

The Homework

Pull your last twenty estimates. For each one, ask: did someone really need to be in person to price this job? If not, what would we need to ask to get this information from the customer on the phone or online?

That’s the list! You’ll see the patterns quickly.

You can do this, I’m rooting for you.

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But your bank account is still so sad.

How? Why? What the F*?

Because too much is going out.

So You Want More Money

When the bank account is sad, our instinct is to look at marketing. More work = more money. Adding more money to the money place should solve the money problem. Right?

Not always. Not usually, even.

Because your money place is a damn sieve. It has holes in it.

Is that a tired metaphor? Yep. Is it accurate? Also yep.

So why does your money place have holes? Most likely it’s because you and your team are reacting to every moment of your day and it’s super inefficient. Here are a few common culprits:

• Wasted technician time (ahem, supply house runs!)

• Slow-to-send and poorly written estimates

• Sloppy communication causing dropped balls

And so, so much more. Here’s my line:

Marketing gets you revenue. Operations decides how much of it you actually keep.

BOOM. Mic drop.

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WTF is Revenue Retention?

For every dollar that comes in the door, how much survives the trip to your bank account?

Think of your revenue as a pinball. Every time the pinball tries to go into the money place, a flapper hits it and pings it up into the mechanics. But instead of adding to your score it’s taking a few pennies off that dollar.

Instead of launching that ball up into the mechanics of your business and letting it fall neatly into the revenue hole, it hits a bumper called “Oops, Don’t Have all the Parts.”

Then it hit’s a bumper called, “Oops, didn’t charge for shop supplies.”

Then it lights up the thing called, “The next job was across town instead of across the street.”

And by the time the ball goes into the hole, it’s worth a fraction of what it used to be.

Anyway, revenue retention means getting the ball to the money place without hitting the bumpers. So, the opposite of how you play pinball. But hopefully my metaphor makes sense anyway.

Where the Money Actually Goes

You have departments. I don’t care if you are doing all the jobs in all the departments - you have departments. Field operations, sales, accounting, marketing, hiring, blah blah blah.

Every one of those departments is a potential bumper in your pinball machine and each one loses money a little differently.

It’s usually most obvious in field operations because technician time is most directly tied to revenue. You do two jobs in a day and each is worth $500 vs. five jobs in a day each worth $500.

Yeah, you don’t have to be an operations or accounting genius to figure out which is the better option.

The two job guy was probably doing supply runs, waiting for approvals, looking for tools on his nasty truck, etc. etc.

Here’s some deeply un-fun math:

One 40-minute supply-house run each day loses roughly 167 hours over a year. At $150 an hour, that’s a $25,000 hole in your retained revenue. Ew.

And before you tell me that a supply house run doesn’t take 40 minutes - I’m going to need you to stop lying to yourself. It’s not just the time in the truck and at the counter. And yapping. And the bathroom break. It’s also stopping and starting and getting into the flow of work again.

It’s obvious in the field, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t happening in every part of your business. Here’s some of how it shows up in other places:

Sales

• Estimates don’t get followed up on.

• You aren’t doing any marketing to previous clients.

• You aren’t showing your customers upgrade options.

The size of the hole: You paid the acquisition cost, but aren’t getting the full revenue.

Accounting

• Slow invoicing.

• No late invoice follow-up.

• Books not regularly reconciled.

The size of the hole: Money is slower to go into the money place and billing errors don’t get caught in time.

Lead Handling

• Don’t always answer the phone or slow to respond.

• Not qualifying leads before going out.

The size of the hole: You’re literally just leaving money on table, bruh. Did you pay for those leads? Yeesh. Even worse. Also over time this will trash your reputation.

Hiring

• Employee onboarding is just, like, a ride along.

• You hire anyone who will pass a background check.

The size of the hole: You won’t find out their work is trash until it’s too late. You are paying full wages for someone to run their own business in your truck.

Software

• Duplicate or rarely used tools.

• Under-utilizing

The size of the hole: Subscription fees for days.

While not an exhaustive list, hopefully you are starting to get the idea. It’s like death by a thousand cuts. Or, bumpers? I think I’m done with the pinball metaphor.

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An Example of My Own

The best example I can pull from my own memory is our estimate process. Not follow up or anything like that, but the conversation and options the plumber had with the customer during the diagnostic.

So, before the process was defined it was just up to the plumber what they recommended. So the old-school guys would repair - with duct tape and rubber bands if they had to.

The young bucks would just replace, replace, replace. (Often because no one taught them to repair, honestly.)

And then there were the guys who loved the new shiny, the tech, and everyone else hated that they sold the sh*t that came with apps.

But which one is those is right? Well … it depends.

We really needed to decide what we - the owners of the company and people who defined the brand and values - wanted our customer experience to be.

So we built a standard. It was basically a decision tree for how many options to offer. All the standard advice is "give three options.” Which, cool. Yep. I get it.

But here’s the real life of it:

• Some people can’t afford an upgrade.

• Some people love bougie stuff and always want to upgrade.

• Some sh*t shouldn’t be fixed because it’s a damn liability.

• Some things are worth repairing and replacing it is wasteful.

When possible, we didn’t make the decision for the customer. We let them decide what they want for their home and what they can afford. But also we didn’t want to do the strict “you must give three quotes” because sometimes that’s just a dumb path.

Anyway, I’m off topic.

The whole point is that we wanted a consistent experience that relied on good customer service rather than sales or plumber preference. We trained our staff on how to decide what options and conversations to have with the customers.

All while holding our values at the center of the conversation.

Spot It. Size It. Stop It.

Truth is, I didn’t think “Spot it. Size it. Stop it.” but it’s damn good phrase so we’re going to use it.

You probably already have something in your mind that you are thinking is a hole.

So let’s start there. You are already a third of the way done.

1. Spot it

Where are we depending on memory, vibes, or personal preference?

Look for the things that just happen a certain way because that’s how Judy-from-accounting likes to do it. Look, it’s fine if you like the way Judy does it. But what happens if Judy gets hit by a bus? (RIP, Judy but what steps did you take to follow up on overdue invoices again?)

Don’t let something in your company break because someone is out sick. Or dead. Jeez this got dark.

2. Size it

How big’s the hole? Some juice isn’t worth the squeeze. Don’t spend $500 or a week of training fixing a $10 problem.

This isn’t rocket science, just use reasoning and judgement to figure out where you can make the biggest differences with the smallest lift. And try to do the simplest version that won’t break.

3. Stop it

Here’s the hard part. It’s the worst when you have to ask people to change behavior because we are TERRRRRRIBLE at that. As in, humans. Humans are terrible at changing our behavior.

So keep it simple. Checklists, templates, flow charts.

Write that sh*t down. I beg you.

Keep the Money, Honey

I really want you to keep more money in your money place. I want you to have lots of resources so you can do things that feel good and live at ease. I don’t want things to be hard for you.

So, let’s do like … a little bit of a hard thing. But on purpose so that the hard doesn’t happen to us on accident while we are broke.

You got this. But if you don’t, book a 20 minute free session. I’ll hold your hand, look you in the eye, and help you get it.

“We tried hiring someone, but they got me my first one-star review.” “I hired a friend from my old job, but they were ruining our reputation.” “I just can’t find anyone that’ll do it right.”

You know exactly what a great job looks and feels like. But until you hire someone, you haven’t had to put it into words. They don’t know what you want from them. Not yet. Handing them a truck key because you trust their skill isn’t enough. A few days of ride-alongs isn’t enough.

On top of that, it’s not their business. It’s not their insurance. It’s not their reputation on the line when a customer picks up their phone and writes a review. They will never be you. Accepting that truth isn’t giving up. It’s the starting point.

None of those owners made a bad first hire. This is not a personality or skills problem. It’s a communication problem.

Since we aren’t living in the kind of future where you can clone yourself, you have to get over the frustration and do something.

Show Them the Way.

Your hire wants to do a good job. They show up ready to work. But “good job” in their head might look meaningfully different from what it looks like in yours. The way you greet a customer, what you do when something goes sideways, the way you leave the job site: you have done all of it so many times it feels automatic. Chances are you never consciously decided how to handle any of it. It’s what felt right for you.

But it may not come naturally to them.

My mantra for training and customer service is the same: if you aren’t over-communicating, you’re under-communicating. Don’t assume anything. Lay out expectations plainly.

Start by asking yourself: what does doing a great job look like at my company?

• What does a perfect arrival look like from the moment your employee pulls up?

• What do they need to tell the customer before they start working?

• What do they do if they find something unexpected?

• When do they talk about price with the customer, if ever?

• What are the steps to complete each service type thoroughly?

• How does a job site get wrapped up? What gets checked, cleaned, and communicated before they leave?

• How do they handle a customer who seems unhappy?

• What do they say when a customer asks them to do something outside the original scope of work?

If your answer to any of those is “they have experience, they should know that,” I’ve got to push back. Remember that you started your business (probably) because you think the other guys kind of suck. But the people you hired have only experienced the culture and expectations of these kind-of-sucky companies. Not yours. That is the gap. And that gap is where five-star reviews become three-star reviews.

This is where you need what I call a Field Guide.

What I’m describing is what the business world calls a Standard Operating Procedure, or SOP. That term probably conjures a thick corporate binder gathering dust on a shelf. That’s fair. Most of them do. A Field Guide is the same idea, built differently. Short, specific, written in the plain language of the actual job, and meant to be a training guide and a resource a real person can actually pick up and use.

A Field Guide is not a list of everything that can go wrong. It is a picture of what right looks like, detailed enough that your employee can hold it up against their own work and know whether they’re hitting it. When something does go sideways, a person who has a clear picture of success can make a judgment call about how to get back there. A person who doesn’t is just guessing.

A Field Guide covers the touchpoints your employee will face every single day. How to greet a customer. How to wrap a job. What to say in the five most common conversations with customers. The stuff no job listing or first-day orientation ever gets to.

When I work with a service business getting ready to hire, the Field Guide is always where we start. Not systems, not scheduling software. This.

This document is what protects your reputation when you’re not in the truck with them.

Start small. Write down the five situations that make your stomach turn when you imagine them going wrong. What does handling each of those situations well actually look like? That’s your first draft.

Now here is the part most business owners skip. A Field Guide on its own is just a document. It does not train anyone. It does not hold anyone accountable. Left on its own, it becomes exactly what it was supposed to replace. The binder no one reads.

The Field Guide works when it’s taught, practiced, and returned to. That’s not a one-time conversation. It’s a system. We’ll get into what that looks like next.

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Train Again. And Again.

Showing someone once is not training. It’s an introduction.

A century of research backs this up. German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus called it the “forgetting curve” way back in the 1880s. Basically, people forget a lot of information really fast, unless you reinforce the training. And when I say a lot, I mean 80% of it is gone within 30 days.

That training session you ran on day one is mostly gone by week three.

That’s not laziness or stupidity. That’s just how human memory works.

What actually sticks is something called spaced repetition. Instead of cramming it into their brain at one time, space it out and repeat it. Employees who receive training spread out over time significantly outperform those who received the same content all at once, specifically when it comes to on-the-job training.

A little bit, often, is better than a lot all at once.

The sequence matters too. It is actually the oldest training model in the trades. The master-apprentice system has worked this way for centuries. The sequence has stuck around because it works.

Here is what that looks like in practice:

The first week. Ride with them. Do the work the way it should be done and let them watch. Then let them do it while you watch. Watch me, do it with me, do it while I watch, do it on your own.

The first month. This is where the reinforcement starts. With the businesses I work with, this looks like a 15-minute debrief at the end of the day for the first week of solo jobs. After that, an end of week recap. These aren’t formal reviews. Just: what came up that we didn’t cover? What did you feel unsure about? Those conversations are where the real learning happens. And they’re where you find out which parts of your own system need work.

Ongoing. Bring the Field Guide back out at your regular training meetings and review each section. More reinforcement. Update it when something comes up that isn’t in there yet. Training is not a one-time event. It’s a habit.

The moment you stop revisiting it, it fades. That’s not the employee’s fault. That’s the system failing to hold itself up.

Do as You Say AND as You Do.

In a recent training seminar, the speaker asked everyone to stand up and put their arms straight up in the air. Simple enough. But while he was saying that, what he was doing was holding his arms out to his sides.

I’m not embarrassed to admit it took him saying it four times before I finally got it right. (Honestly, I only got there because I watched the people around me correct themselves.)

I was learning by watching what someone did. Not by hearing what they said.

Psychologist Albert Bandura called it observational learning, the idea that we absorb and replicate behavior we witness, often before we’ve consciously registered we’re doing it. We model what we see. We copy what we watch, even when it contradicts what we hear.

Which means if you are going to set a standard, you have to hold that standard yourself. Every single time. In front of your team.

The minute you take a shortcut, you have given everyone watching permission to take that shortcut too. They will. Because they were watching you, not listening to you.

Your standard is not what you say. Your standard is what you do when you’re tired, running behind, and you assume no one’s paying attention.

As your company grows, the reality is that your reputation is what your team does in the field when you aren’t watching. Not your intention. Not your idealized version.

None of this is glamorous work. But neither is reading a one-star review you could have prevented.

Want a head start? I built a Field Guide template for exactly this. Download it below.

Anjaworks Field Guide Template

75.1KB ∙ PDF file

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A beginner-friendly SOP format for getting standards of service out of your head so you can train employees to do things the right way.

Download

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It started eight years earlier, when my dad became so frustrated trying to find an employer who aligned with his values that he decided to go out on his own. For the first year or so it was just him doing the labor. My Mom pulled double-duty with her day-job, invoicing and bookkeeping on nights and weekends. And I used my graphic design and business degrees to help with branding and marketing in my free time.

So many service businesses start this way - someone gets fed up, bets on themselves, and suddenly the people who love them are along for the ride. We happened to be lucky in our lineup: a master plumber, a banking executive, and a business major with a marketing background - we made a great team.

From Code to Clogs

Before any of that, I was working at a tech startup where I quadrupled the revenue in a matter of months, eventually running day-to-day operations while the owner stepped back. I learned more in those three years than I could have in a decade elsewhere.

I’d just been laid off from that startup (a story for another day) when my parents approached me about joining the company full time.

They wanted to grow the plumbing business into something bigger than my dad.

One Truck Becomes Ten

That one-truck operation grew into the largest service plumbing company in our area. Ten crews doing nothing but service plumbing in a mid-size market.

My dad deserves so much credit. He is the kind of man who bends steel with his bare hands - I’ve watched him do it. He is big and strong and not overly patient, because when you have that kind of physical ability, brute force is usually the fastest path forward.

For most of his career, that strength served him well. Until one winter, while he was still working for someone else, he got called out on an emergency during an ice storm. He was hauling an old water heater out of a house when he hit a patch of ice. The compound fracture to his ankle was about as bad as they get. Recovery was long and things were never quite the same after that. That injury seemed to pull out every ache his body had been quietly holding.

He kept working in the field, but it cost him something. To this day he still works with his hands, his back, and his body - helping anyone who needs it. But watching him live in constant pain is hard.

I’ve spent a lot of time wishing I could have shown him earlier that his physical strength was just the surface. His mind is the strongest part of him - my dad finds the root cause of a problem when everyone else is still guessing at symptoms, and always faster than anyone around him thinks is possible.

It’s why we specialized in service plumbing rather than new construction. New construction follows blueprints. There’s a right answer and it’s on the plans. But service plumbing means crawling under houses, opening up walls, and solving problems that were installed wrong years ago in places you can barely reach. That requires real creative thinking - and a mind like a steel trap.

The Really Long Vacation

My Mom and Dad had been self-employed off and on my entire life. They were really good at it, but the business was always dependent on them.

I break business ownership into three stages. Self-Employed: the business can’t run without the owner doing the labor. Owner-Operated: there are systems or employees helping with the labor. The owner can step away for stretches and the business still makes money. Owner-Optional: the owner doesn’t have to be in the day-to-day at all - just the highest-level decisions and strategy.

These stages are often a progression. My dad started self-employed, grew into an owner-operator, and was getting close to owned & managed when we sold. He wasn’t in the field as often because his body needed rest. We all held management roles in the business, but the work didn’t stop when we did.

The uninitiated might think the movement between stages has to do with revenue. It doesn’t. There are businesses doing millions a year whose owners can’t take a day off without their phone ringing every twenty minutes. Money can’t buy peace of mind if your operations are a mess. If your team can’t make decisions or find answers without interrupting you, no amount of revenue changes that.

While our reputation was largely due to my dad’s standards of quality, the scaling of the company was thanks to my mom’s organization and my eye for operations. Together, we built systems into every corner of the business.

We were all really proud when we reached the point where we could each take extended vacations. Have you ever taken a 21-day vacation? Because I highly recommend it.

There’s a lot I’m proud of from my time at the plumbing company, but my biggest flex is the vacations I took while the business kept going. It’s those three-week vacations roaming the western United States. The ten days spent bike-packing from Pittsburgh to D.C. The two weeks in Ireland on honeymoon. The freedom to travel is our real testament to success.

The Check

The months after we sold are some of the darkest in our family history. You’d think it would be a time for celebration. It wasn’t.

First, we were exhausted. Running an essential business during a pandemic, navigating regulations while trying to keep our team safe and employed, watching supply chains destabilize in real time - it had taken everything we had. We were thrilled to have an out.

Then came the team announcement. Reactions ranged from genuine congratulations to being accused of “selling them like cattle.” I still think about that. These were people who had worked alongside us for five or more years. People we knew well. In the end, we made a decision about our own lives that changed theirs in ways we couldn’t control. There’s no clean version of that story.

What happened next was something we hadn’t prepared for. When someone buys your business, they can do whatever they want with it - including shut it down. What we were told would happen after the sale is not what happened. What we built over eight years of our lives was gone in a matter of hours. We had a check. We no longer had a legacy.

And then came the part nobody talks about: figuring out who you are when the thing that defined you is gone. My parents were theoretically retiring. (We should have known better. In what world were these people built for retirement?)

I was mid-career, burned out, and without a plan. The depression was real and took a long time to recover from.

If I could do it again, I’m not sure how much I would change. What I do know is that I wanted to sell because I knew what I didn’t want - but I had almost no idea what I did want. Those aren’t the same thing, and it took a while to learn the difference.

What I eventually figured out is that the part I was most proud of had nothing to do with the exit. It was the years before it. The quality standards that led to hundreds of five-star reviews. The systems that created solid employment for a talented team. The graduates of our apprenticeship program who carry those skills for the rest of their careers. The decisions that got made without us so that we could explore the world. The proof that it was possible to build something that didn’t need you every minute of every day.

I spent a long time trying to understand what made that possible - and why so few owner-operators ever get there. What I found is worth talking about. That’s what this blog is for.