You're not losing jobs on price. You're losing them on silence.
Everybody in your trade is roughly the same price. Most of them are roughly as good as you. The thing that separates the one who got the job is almost never the quote. It's that they replied while the customer still cared.
Nobody has one front door any more.
Ask an owner how many ways somebody can get hold of them and the honest answer is usually five or six. Every one of them leaks in its own way, and no two of them leak at the same time of day.
The phone
It goes to voicemail when you're on another job. Most people don't leave one.
Read at a set of traffic lights and answered nowhere. You meant to come back to it.
The website form
Straight into an inbox nobody has opened since Tuesday.
Somebody set it up in 2019. The notifications go to a phone that isn't yours.
The email on the van
Checked on a Sunday night, if it gets checked at all.
Somebody walking in
Or catching you on a job. Written on the back of something and lost by Thursday.
None of that is a discipline problem. It's what happens when six channels arrive at one person who is also doing the work.
I agreed a pharmaceutical pickup. Then a forty-eight hour emergency landed and I forgot it completely. Rang them, messaged them. Never heard from them again.
Leon Smith, twenty-five years of running businesses. That one wasn't a bad decision or a bad price. It was one thing, on one day, that never got written down.
It doesn't feel like losing work. It feels like a busy week.
The person who messaged you does not sit and wait. They go back to the list they were working through, and they message the next name on it.
The enquiry lands. You're on a job with both hands full.
Nothing back. They move to the next name on their list.
Somebody answers within a few minutes, sounding like a person who wants the work. Very often that is the end of it.
You pick your phone up. The job you thought you were about to quote for is already half promised.
This is the whole argument. Not that you need more enquiries. That the ones you already get are being decided while you're up a ladder.
We're not going to borrow somebody else's statistic.
There is plenty of research we could quote at you here, and most of it is somebody's marketing. So rather than repeat a number we can't stand behind, we're going to go and get one.
The enquiry study
The same enquiry, sent from an ordinary personal email address, on a Saturday evening, to every independent venue on a list of forty-nine. Two straightforward questions in it, the sort anybody would ask. Then we log four things: who replied, how long they took, whether they actually answered both questions, and whether anybody followed up when the enquiry went quiet.
No business is named publicly. The results will be published here as counts, not percentages, because forty-nine is too small a sample for a percentage to mean anything, and rounding it into one would be the exact trick this section exists to avoid.
You can have a rough figure for your own business in about two minutes.
The check asks ten questions and does the arithmetic in front of you, using your numbers rather than ours. There's no benchmark in it and nothing to compare yourself against, because the only figure worth anything here is your own.
Or ring 07401 200177 and ask it yourself.