Every week somebody asks me the same thing before anything else. What is this going to cost me. That is the right question, and most people in my line of work will not answer it straight. Here is how I think about it.
Why nobody will give you a number on a website
Two contractors call me on the same Tuesday. One has a truck, a helper, and a notebook. The other has nine guys, three crews, a bookkeeper, and a website somebody built in 2013 that nobody can log into. Those are not the same job. Anybody who puts a price list on a website is either padding the small guy or shorting the big one.
What I do instead is come out, look at your week, and give you one flat monthly number before you agree to anything. Month to month. No setup fee. No cancellation fee. If it stops paying for itself, you tell me and we stop.
What actually moves the price
A few things push the number up or down.
How many pieces you need. A website by itself is a smaller job than a website, customer and job tracking, and somebody answering your phone all at once. Most people start with one thing and add the next one when the first one has proven itself.
How much mess there is to clean up. If your customer list is in a notebook, a phone, and your head, moving it takes time. If it is already in a spreadsheet, that part goes fast.
How many people have to learn it. Training one owner is different from training three crews.
Whether tools charge their own fees. Some of the software I set up has its own monthly cost, usually small, and it goes on your card, not mine. I tell you that number up front so nothing shows up as a surprise.
The way to judge it
Forget the monthly number for a second and do this math instead. What is one job worth to you. For a lot of the contractors I work with the answer is somewhere between two thousand and fifteen thousand dollars.
Now think about how many calls went to voicemail last month while you were on a ladder. Most people do not leave a voicemail. They call the next name on the search results. If catching one extra job a month covers the whole thing and puts money left over in your pocket, the monthly number stops being the interesting part of the conversation.
Same math on the paperwork side. If you are doing invoices at nine at night, that is ten or twelve hours a month of your life. Put a number on your own hour and you will see it.
What I will not do
I will not charge you a five figure setup fee and hand you a login. That is the model a lot of the bigger outfits run, and it is why so many tradespeople around here think this stuff is a scam. You pay a big chunk up front, you get a thing you do not understand, and the person who sold it to you stops answering.
I will also not sell you something you do not need yet. If you have forty customers and a notebook that works, you do not need a CRM. I will tell you that. Read my take on whether a small shop needs a CRM if that is where you are.
How to get a number
Text me at 615-499-6474 and tell me what part of your week is eating you alive. I will come to your shop, your office, or the coffee shop down the road, anywhere in Davidson, Williamson, Rutherford, Wilson, Sumner, Robertson, or Cheatham county. We will sit down for half an hour and I will give you a straight number.
If you are outside those seven counties, we can still do it over the phone and a screen share.
