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: ten percent of a closed job, taken from the payout, 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.
Call and tell us your trade and where you work. Ask anything — how the routing works, what you would be charged, what a job looks like before you accept it.
Common questions
- What is the fastest of these to produce work?
- A properly built Google Business Profile with recent reviews, in most markets. It is also free, which makes it the obvious first move regardless of what else you do.
- How many reviews do I need before it matters?
- Recency matters more than total. A steady trickle of recent reviews generally outperforms a larger pile that stopped two years ago.
- Is it worth doing all six?
- Not at once. Pick the top two, build the habit until it runs without you thinking about it, then add another. Six half-built channels beat nothing but lose to two that actually work.