Ben In Denver

Ben In Denver Ben is a Marketing Director into AI development
(3)

08/25/2026

You get three estimates. All three companies show up, all three are polite, all three send a number within a couple of days.

You pick one. If somebody asked you to write down why, you would have trouble.

The price was in the middle. The reviews were about the same. What you remember is that one of them stood in the yard a minute longer than he had to, and when you asked about the part you were worried about, he said he did not know yet and would have to get up there and look.

That is usually the whole thing.

I have spent a long time thinking about how small businesses win work, and I keep landing in the same place. Almost none of it happens in the part anybody is managing. Nobody is evaluating a fence company on a Tuesday afternoon. Somebody is standing in their own yard deciding who they feel like having around for three days.

The other two did nothing wrong. One of them is probably better at fences.

That is what I am thinking about when someone asks me what to fix about their marketing. Usually they want to talk about the website, and sometimes the website is the problem. More often the thing that decided it already happened, in a driveway, and it was finished before the estimate ever went out.

08/24/2026

A job has an end. You finish it, you clean up, you drive away.

Marketing does not have one.

That is the part nobody warns an operator about. Every other piece of this business gives you a stopping point. The last call gets returned. The truck gets unloaded. The day reconciles or it does not, and either way it is over and you go home.

Marketing just sits there. There is always another photo you did not take, another review you did not ask for, a line on the website that has been wrong for a year. None of it is urgent. All of it is your fault. So it follows you to dinner, and it sits on the couch with you, and on Saturday it is still there.

I think that is the actual reason operators avoid it, and I do not think it is a discipline problem. Discipline works on tasks that end.

What works is giving the thing an artificial floor. Two hours on Tuesday. One post a week. Whatever the number is, the point is that finishing it counts as finished, and the rest of the week is not marketing time you are failing to use.

Saturday should be for the family. It does not get to be for the website.

08/23/2026

I want to say something about marketing advice, including the kind I give.

Most of it cannot be checked.

Someone tells you to post more, or to rewrite your headline, or to pick up the phone faster. Maybe they are right. The trouble is you only get to run one version of your business, and whatever happens next has forty other things inside it. The weather. A competitor who raised prices. A referral that was coming anyway.

So you try the thing, the month lands fine, and everyone decides the advice worked.

I have been on both sides of that. I have taken credit that belonged to a warm September, and I have watched good work get blamed for a slow stretch it had nothing to do with.

I think the advice worth taking is the kind that changes something you can watch directly. Not this will grow your business. Closer to: you will know inside a week whether people are getting through to you, because you will be sitting there listening to the calls.

That second kind is rarer than it sounds, and it is usually smaller and less exciting than what you were hoping to hear.

If a recommendation cannot fail in a way you would notice, it is not a recommendation. It is a mood.

I am not sure that leaves as much standing as I would like it to.

08/22/2026

The phone does not slow down in September. It changes what it is asking for.

Right now most of the calls coming into a Denver shop are emergencies. The AC quit on a ninety degree Tuesday. Something is leaking. The caller is not shopping. They want to know how fast you can be there, and if the answer is good enough the conversation is basically over.

In about three weeks that flips. Same call volume, different call. Now it is a homeowner who has been thinking about the furnace since last winter and finally picked up the phone. Nothing is broken. Nobody is panicking. They have time, which means they have time to call two other shops.

The mistake I watch operators make is answering the second call with the first script.

Speed wins an emergency. It does almost nothing for a planned job. The person calling in October is not comparing response times. They are trying to figure out what they are actually buying, and whether you are the kind of shop that will tell them the truth about it. That call needs a different opening, more questions, and a willingness to say the work can wait until spring if it can.

Your August close rate and your October close rate are measuring two different things. If you are tracking them as one number, September is going to look like a slump that came out of nowhere.

08/18/2026

Most of the estimates I see are written for the person who was standing there during the walkthrough.

That is usually not the person who decides.

Think about what happens after you drive away. The estimate ends up on a kitchen counter. That evening it gets handed to a spouse, or a business partner, or a brother in law who did something like this once. That second person never met you. They did not see the crawl space. They have no idea why the number says what it says.

They are reading a piece of paper cold, and the easiest thing for them to say is not yet.

Here is the test. Take the last estimate you sent. Hand it to somebody who was not there, and do not explain it. Ask them to tell you what the work is and why it costs that.

If they cannot, you did not lose that job on price. You lost it because the only person who could defend the number was you, and you were not in the room when it got read.

The fix is not a fancier template. It is two or three lines of plain language up top: what is wrong, what you are going to do about it, what happens if it waits. Written for somebody who was never on site.

Most operators I know explain their work better out loud than anything they put on paper. On the night that actually matters, the paper is on its own.

08/17/2026

Most shops I know can tell you what a new customer costs them. Almost none can tell you what a second job from an old customer costs.

The first number is easy to find. You spend money getting found, some of those people call, some of those calls turn into work. Divide one by the other and you have your cost per job.

The second number is close to zero. That customer already knows your name, already let you into their house, already paid you once. There is no ad spend in front of it and usually no estimate battle behind it.

Here is the quick test. Open whatever you use to track jobs. Pull every job from the last twelve months. Count how many of those names show up more than once.

Then try the harder version. Can you produce a list of everyone who paid you in the last two years, with a phone number or an email next to each name, in ten minutes?

Most operators I know cannot. The names sit in invoices, in a phone, in a notebook, in three places that do not talk to each other. If you cannot pull that list, that is information. It means the cheapest work available to you is work you have no way to ask for.

I am not saying stop advertising. I am saying you are probably paying full price for jobs you could have had at a discount, because the discount depends on a list nobody ever built.

08/16/2026

Most shops cut marketing in the slow month. It is the most understandable decision in small business and it is usually backwards.

Here is the shape of it. Demand drops in the weeks between seasons. Revenue gets tight. Marketing is the one line item you can cut this afternoon without anyone calling to complain, so it goes first. Six weeks later the season turns, the phone is slower than it should be, and nobody connects the two because they happened two months apart.

The part that costs you is that your competitors are making the same call in the same three weeks. When four shops in a market go quiet at once, the cost of being the one who stayed goes down.

I am not telling you to spend money you do not have. Cash outranks strategy every time. I am saying the slow month is usually the cheapest month, and most shops treat it as the most expensive one.

The exercise is cheap. Pull your monthly revenue for the last two years and mark your two lowest months. Then look at what you spent on getting found in the six weeks before each of them. If the spending dropped first, you have a lead time problem, not a demand problem.

Lead time is the piece people miss. Most of what you do to get found takes about six weeks to show up on the schedule. The spend that fills September is the one you make in July, during the month that felt like the worst possible time to spend anything.

08/15/2026

A shop owner told me last month that he has never once had a customer complain about not being able to reach him.

He meant it as a good sign. I think it is the least informative sentence in his whole business.

People who cannot reach you do not complain. Complaining requires reaching you. The ones who called at 4:40 on a Friday, got voicemail, and called the next place on the list are not in your inbox, not in your CRM, and not in any report you have ever opened. They are not unhappy customers. They are not customers at all, and the record of them exists in exactly one place.

It is your phone bill.

Pull last month's call log. Most carriers will hand you every inbound call with a timestamp and a duration. Count two things: calls under twenty seconds, and calls that came in outside the hours somebody was sitting at the desk. That is your missed-call number. It has been sitting there the whole time and nobody sends it to you, because nobody is asking for it.

I have watched that number come back at thirty a month for a shop doing sixty jobs. Even if most of those were wrong numbers and vendors, the ones that were not are worth more than anything else you could do with a Tuesday afternoon.

Silence is not the same as satisfaction. Most of the time it means you are not the one being told.

08/14/2026

There is a moment every operator knows. You look at next month's schedule, it is full, and you feel good about it.

I want to make the case that a full schedule is not entirely good news.

Being booked three weeks out means the last person who called you heard "the earliest we can get out there is the 29th." Some of them said that was fine. Some of them thanked you politely and called the next shop on the list. You will never know which, because there is no report anywhere that lists the people who decided not to wait.

Most shops answer a long backlog by adding capacity. Another truck, another tech, eight weeks of training, the better part of a year before that hire pays for itself. That is a real option and sometimes it is the right one.

There is a cheaper one that most operators skip, and it is the price.

If you are consistently booked more than two weeks out, the market is telling you it will pay more than you are charging. Five percent on a $1,400 ticket is seventy dollars. Sixty jobs a month is $4,200, and you did not hire anybody to get it.

You do not have to guess about this. Put the new number on your next twenty quotes and watch what happens to the close rate. If it holds, you were underpriced and now you know. If it falls off, you found your ceiling and you can go back.

Twenty quotes is a cheap way to test something you have assumed since the day you started.

08/13/2026

Every operator I know has a story about a slow week that came out of nowhere.

Here is something you can do in about twenty minutes. Open your scheduling software. Go back to this same week last year. Then the year before that if you have it.

Count the jobs. Not revenue, not average ticket. Just how many jobs landed that week.

Most shops find the same shape. The middle of August is soft. The week after Labor Day is not. There is usually one week in the spring that is double everything around it and nobody on the team can tell you why.

That is not luck. That is your market's calendar, and you have been recording it for years without ever reading it back.

Here is why it matters. A slow week you saw coming is a completely different problem than a slow week that surprised you. If you know the second week of August is soft, you put the maintenance calls there. You run the reminder to the customers who bought two years ago. You take the training day. You take the vacation.

If it surprises you, you spend the week worrying, and then you spend money trying to fill a week that was never going to fill.

Most operators I know will pay a few hundred dollars a month for data about their market before they will spend twenty minutes reading the data they already own.

Yours is sitting in the software you are already paying for.

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