Contractors and trades
You were up a ladder. They called the next name on the list. I build the thing that answers while your hands are full.
You’re under a sink, on a roof, in a crawlspace, or driving with the radio on. The phone rings in your other pocket and by the time you get to it, it’s a missed call with no voicemail. You call back at 6:30. They’ve already got somebody coming Thursday.
That’s the whole loss, and it happens quietly. Nothing on your books ever showed a job you didn’t get. Most contractors I talk to genuinely do not know their number, and when we go through the phone log together for one week, it’s higher than they guessed.
The voicemails aren’t much better. “Yeah, hi, it’s about the, uh, the thing out back, give me a call.” No address, no name you can spell, and a number said too fast at the end. So you’re playing phone tag with somebody who is currently getting quotes from two other guys, and when you finally connect you still have to drive out before you can put a number on it. The job is three days old before you’ve quoted anything.
A missed call gets a text back within seconds, from your number, asking what they need. Most people answer a text while they’re still standing where the problem is, and they’ll send a photo of it without being asked twice.
Their reply comes to you as a filled-in job request. Name, address, what’s wrong, photos attached. Not a voicemail to decode. And the list sorts itself by how urgent the job actually is, so no heat in February sits at the top and an overgrown lawn waits its turn.
Your number doesn’t change. The number on the truck, the yard sign, and every listing you’ve paid for stays the same. This sits behind it.
If you’d rather still call everyone back yourself, you can. The text just buys you the four hours you were going to lose. If you have an office person, the requests land in front of her already organized.
And the wording is yours. I’m not putting some chirpy script on your number. It says what you would say.
Walk through a missed call, answer as the customer, and send an estimate. Sample data, nothing to sign up for.
Anybody can put a text box on a screen. Getting a business text to actually arrive on a customer’s phone is a different job.
The phone carriers require any business sending automated texts to register the number and the campaign behind it. It’s called A2P 10DLC. Unregistered business texting gets filtered, throttled, or silently dropped, and the sender usually never finds out, which is the worst outcome possible for a system whose whole job is catching leads.
My messaging systems are A2P 10DLC registered and carrier approved, so the texts actually get delivered. I’ve been through that filing and I handle it for you. It’s running today on the Golden Rose Advisors system, which texts home sellers directly and has been approved and sending for months.
Worth knowing when you’re comparing quotes: most freelancers can’t ship a texting product at all, and the ones who try often don’t find out about registration until the messages stop arriving.
Callback Pro is a finished system, not a project scoped from scratch. It gets installed and configured for your business, and that includes filing the A2P carrier registration so the texts actually arrive.
What it costs depends on the business it goes into, so the number comes after a short conversation about your call volume and how many of those calls go unanswered. You get one flat price before anything gets built. The website packages are on the pricing page.
The texting itself has a small monthly carrier cost, billed to you directly so the phone number and the account stay in your name. I’ll show you what that runs before you commit to anything.
No. Your number on the truck, the yard sign, and every listing you’ve ever paid for stays exactly what it is. The system sits behind the number you already advertise.
They get delivered. My messaging systems are A2P 10DLC registered and carrier approved, so the texts actually get delivered.
That registration is what separates business texting that arrives from business texting the carriers quietly drop, and it’s the part most people never make it through.
That’s what the urgency sorting is for. An answer about no heat in February, or water coming through a ceiling, gets pushed to the top and can ring your phone or send an alert instead of sitting in a list. The slow drain waits.
The first reply sends itself, so the customer is handled whether or not you look at your phone.
When you do look, you get a filled-in job request with an address and photos instead of a voicemail you have to call back to decode. Most contractors find it’s less phone work, not more.
If the calls get answered fine and the problem is what happens after, when the job goes into a spreadsheet nobody keeps current, start there.
If the office is retyping every job into the scheduler and then again into the invoice, that’s double entry.
When the phone is only one of five places work goes missing, the whole back office is the real project.
And if people can’t find you in the first place, you need a site that shows up before you need any of this.
You don’t need to know how any of it works. Tell me what you do and when the phone goes unanswered, and we’ll go from there.