Most trades businesses do not have a lead problem. They have five separate holes in the work they already won, and four of them can be priced with numbers already sitting in your phone.
A plumbing business sends 20 quotes a week. Average job is $800. It closes about a third of them, which is seven jobs and $5,600 a week, and on paper nothing is wrong.
The owner still cannot work out where the money goes.
It is not going anywhere dramatic. It is leaking out of five separate holes, and four of them can be measured tonight with numbers already sitting in your phone. This is what each one costs, and what to do about it.
Every figure below is illustrative. It is one worked business used consistently so the arithmetic holds together. Substitute your own numbers as you go.
Why buying one tool never closed them
The five leaks are structurally different, which is the part most owners miss.
They sit in different parts of the week. One is on the phone, one is in the follow-up, one is in a list you have not opened in two years, one is in the ledger, one is in what happens after the job is done. No single piece of software has line of sight over more than about two of them.
Your job management system sees the quote and the invoice. It has never seen the call that went to voicemail while you were under a house. Your phone sees the call and knows nothing about whether the quote landed. That is not a fault in the software. It is a scope problem, and it is why “we already have ServiceM8” is a reasonable answer to two of these five and no answer at all to the other three.
If you are on ServiceM8 already, five automations most tradies never turn on is worth reading before you spend anything, because some of what follows you may already be paying for.
Leak one: the call you did not pick up
You are on the tools. The phone rings. It goes to voicemail, they do not leave one, and they ring the next bloke.
Say one call in ten goes unanswered and never gets rung back. On a business generating 20 quotes a week, that is roughly two enquiries a week that never became a quote at all.
Two enquiries, at a 35 percent close rate, at $800 a job, is $560 a week. Over a year, about $29,120.
Run it on your own numbers: missed calls per week, times your close rate, times your average job value, times 52.
That figure is deliberately conservative. It applies your normal close rate to missed calls, when in practice an after-hours emergency caller is often readier to book than a Tuesday-morning price shopper. It also assumes you only miss one in ten.
Free fix this week: turn on call diversion to a mobile that is actually answered, and put a rule in place that every missed call gets a text back the same day. A text is enough. Most people who ring a tradie just want to know they have been heard.
What we sell for it: the speed-to-lead build texts back within seconds, qualifies the job, books it, and alerts you on the ones worth ringing. $990 to build, $197 a month to run.
Leak two: the quote that went cold
You sent the quote. You never followed it up. It is not that they went elsewhere on price, it is that nobody asked.
This is the one leak with an established number in front of it, so the arithmetic is already published: moving from a 35 percent close rate to 45 percent, on the same 20 quotes a week, produces two extra jobs a week. At $800 that is $1,600 a week, or roughly $83,000 over 52 weeks.
The shape holds at other sizes. At 15 quotes a week and a $600 average job, the same ten-point lift is around $46,800 a year. At 25 quotes and $1,200 it approaches six figures.
The full working is in the quote follow-up revenue leak, including why a ten-point lift is a conservative target for a business with no follow-up process at all.
Free fix this week: a calendar reminder at day two, day five and day seven on every quote over a threshold you set. It is manual and it works.
What we sell for it: honestly, no done-for-you build yet. PlumberText is $27 and gives you the SMS sequence to send yourself. A hosted quoting system is in development and I am not going to put a date on it.
Leak three: the list you already own
Every customer you have ever invoiced is a lead you have already paid for. Most trades businesses have several thousand of them in an accounting system and contact none of them.
This is the one that competes directly with ad spend, which matters if you have burnt money on Google Ads and got nothing back.
The maths on a reactivation campaign is deliberately conservative. Take one campaign of 300 past customers. Anchor on 5 to 8 percent of contacted people actually booking, which is a booking rate and not a reply rate. That is 15 to 24 jobs. At $800, somewhere around $12,000 to $19,200 for that campaign.
Note that is per campaign, not per year. Run it quarterly on different segments and the annual figure changes, but so does the risk of annoying your own customer base, which is a real cost that does not appear in any spreadsheet.
Be careful who you contact. Under the Spam Act, a marketing text needs three things: a consent basis (for a past customer that is usually the existing business relationship, which weakens the longer it has been), your business clearly identified as the sender, and a working opt-out in every message. Someone you have not invoiced in three years is a much weaker basis than someone you saw last spring, so start with the recent end of the list.
Free fix this week: export your customer list, sort by last job date, and personally ring twenty people you have not seen in over a year. Ask how the thing you installed is holding up. Do not pitch.
What we sell for it: the Win-Back Run, $490 one-off. We write the campaign, send it from your number and hand back the replies. No call required.
Leak four: the invoice at sixty days
This one is a different animal and it is worth being precise, because blurring it into the others leads to bad decisions.
Thirty-day terms become sixty in practice. At $5,600 a week, an extra thirty days of revenue outstanding means roughly $24,000 of your own money sitting in other people’s accounts at any given moment.
That money is not lost. You will get it. But it is not available, and that is what has you buying materials on a personal credit card for a job you have already done.
A lost job shrinks your income. A slow invoice shrinks your working capital. Both hurt, they are not the same injury, and this is precisely why the category is revenue leak and cash flow rather than one word covering both.
Free fix this week: send the invoice the day the job finishes, not on Sunday night. Then a reminder at day seven, day fourteen and day twenty-one. Most late payment is not refusal, it is that the invoice arrived four days late and then sat in an inbox.
What we sell for it: PlumberPaid is $27 and is a kit of chase-and-close templates, not a done-for-you build. It is the cheapest thing on this page and probably the fastest to pay for itself.
Leak five: the review nobody asked for
You do good work. Your Google rating is 4.2 because the only people motivated enough to write unprompted were the two who were unhappy.
Pricing this one honestly takes more care than the others, because the tempting move is to claim a relationship between star rating and lead volume that I cannot derive from your business. So here is the unit instead, and you can apply your own judgement to the volume.
On this business, one extra enquiry is worth 35 percent of $800, which is $280 in expected revenue. One extra enquiry per week, sustained, is 52 of those: $14,560 a year.
Now the hurdle. Seven jobs a week is about 364 a year. Ask every one of them and convert one in ten, and you are collecting roughly 36 reviews a year against the handful you have now.
For that to be worth as much as fixing your missed calls, those reviews would need to bring in about two extra enquiries a week. Whether that is plausible in your suburb and your trade is a judgement you are far better placed to make than I am. What the number gives you is the bar it has to clear.
Free fix this week: ask. In person, at the end of the job, while they are happy. Then send the link by text within the hour, because nobody types a business name into Google later.
What we sell for it: nothing yet. A review module is in development and, again, no date.
Fix them in flow order, not in easy order
This is the part that changes the outcome, and it is where most owners get it wrong.
The instinct is to fix the easiest leak first. The leaks are sequential, so that wastes the fix.
- Missed calls first. Everything downstream operates on the leads you caught. Fixing your follow-up while a tenth of your enquiries never reach you means running a better process on a smaller pool.
- Quote follow-up second. Now that more enquiries arrive, make sure the quotes chase themselves.
- The dormant list third. Only worth switching on once the first two hold, because a reactivation campaign floods the front of a system you have just repaired. Do it in the wrong order and you drown.
- Reviews fourth. They compound slowly and feed back into the top of the funnel over months, not weeks.
Unpaid invoices sit outside this order. They are a cash-flow problem, not a lead-flow one, so nothing upstream has to be working first. If invoices are your worst leak, start there today.
Why these numbers do not get added up
You may have noticed there is no total at the bottom of this page.
That is on purpose. Leaks one, two and three are lost revenue. Leak four is working capital, which is a different unit and cannot honestly be added to the others. Leak five is priced as a per-enquiry unit because the volume depends on your market.
Adding them into one alarming headline figure would make a better advertisement and a worse decision. The useful question is never “how much am I leaking in total”. It is “which one of these is biggest for me, and what does fixing it in the right order look like”.
Pick one. Run the arithmetic on your own numbers. Fix that.
Not sure which leak is yours?
Book a free 30-minute Bottleneck Audit. We go through your numbers, work out which of the five is costing you most, and tell you straight whether it is worth fixing or whether you are better off leaving it alone.
30 minutes. Plain English. No sales pitch.
All figures on this page are illustrative, based on one worked example, and are provided to show the method rather than to predict your result. GrokoryAI makes no guarantee of specific results. Outcomes depend on your lead volume, how quickly jobs are followed up, your pricing and your market. These systems improve capture and response time. They do not create demand that is not there.
