Most advice on this topic is written by people who have never had a truck payment. Here is the practical version, ordered by how quickly it produces work for a shop that needs jobs this month, not next year.
1. Your Google Business Profile — free, and most shops leave it half-built
Claimed, categorised correctly, service areas set, hours accurate, and photographs of actual completed work rather than stock images. Then reviews, consistently asked for, every job, without exception. This is the single highest-return unpaid hour in home services and the one most often skipped because it is not urgent.
2. Reviews, asked for the same way every time
The ask that works is immediate, specific and easy: at the end of the job, on the customer's phone, with the link already open. A written system beats good intentions — most shops that do this badly are not lazy, they are just relying on remembering.
3. Repeat and referral, treated as a channel rather than luck
A customer who already trusts you costs nothing to reach. A text six months after a repair, a note when a part they have is due for attention, a card left with the invoice. Shops that keep a customer list outperform shops that keep a lead subscription, and the gap widens every year.
4. Trade partnerships
The plumber who keeps meeting garage door problems, the roofer who keeps meeting electrical ones. Reciprocal referral between non-competing trades is the oldest lead channel there is and it still works, because the recommendation carries trust the internet cannot manufacture.
5. Property managers and small commercial
Less glamorous, far steadier, and largely invisible to consumer platforms. One property manager with forty doors is worth more than a hundred one-off leads, and they are not shopping you against four other quotes every time.
6. Booked-job marketplaces that charge on completion
Where a platform earns only when the job completes, its incentive is to send you work you can actually do. Roger works this way: a percentage of a closed job (10% to 30% by trade and job size, shown on the offer before you accept), nothing charged for accepting a job or replying to a homeowner, no annual contract, and a flat monthly option instead if you prefer a fixed number.
Roger is early and will not quote you a job count. What is true is the structure — jobs route to one pro, so being early in a market means taking its matches rather than splitting them, and on the per-job option waiting costs you nothing.