Bespoke systems for ambitious tradespeople

I ring tradespeople for a living, and the same thing comes up most weeks: their quality of work is often exceptional, but the quality is often not displayed to its true potential and volume of eyes to see it. That sentence names two problems and most people only hear one. A welder in Kent can spend a day on a set of gates the customer will still be glad of in twenty years, photograph them on his phone at four in the afternoon because the light is finally on them, and put that photograph into a camera roll in a van where it sits with every other job he has ever done and is never once seen by a stranger who would have paid for the same thing. That is the first failure and it is a display problem. Nothing is wrong with the work. Nothing is wrong with the photograph either. The second failure is the one that gets skipped, because it is not about quality at all but about how many people ever get far enough to look: better photographs are worth nothing if barely anyone sees them, and paying to be seen is worth nothing if what people find when they arrive makes twenty years of good work look ordinary. It has to be both. That is why the thing I build is a system instead of an afternoon’s work, and it is the honest reason I work with trades and not with whoever will pay.

Me.

There is no team page, because there is no team.

The whole thing started with cold calls. I had no list bought from anybody and no script, just a phone and a habit of ringing tradespeople in the middle of the afternoon to tell them their work was better than their website. Most people hear my age and put the phone down, which is fair enough, and I would probably do the same. David at Rabiu Plumbing and Heating nearly did. He stayed on the line for about ninety seconds longer than he meant to, and by the end of that call I had agreed to build him a preview of his site with his own jobs on it before he paid anything, so the first decision he made was about something he could look at rather than something I had described. That is still how it works. His review is on this page and it tells people to stick around if I ever ring them, which I did not ask him to write and would not have dared to. Since then I have built every site on this page myself, by hand, on the client’s own domain and in the client’s own name. I write the pages, I take the photographs when a client has none, I run the ad accounts inside the client’s account rather than mine, and I answer the messages, including the ones at ten at night, mostly because I cannot sleep until whatever it is has been fixed.

That cuts both ways. There is no account manager for me to hide behind, so nothing on this page can be padded. Every review is real, every number came out of a real ad account, and every one of them is one click from here.

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