Turn accepted quotes into a process your team can follow

The work is fine. Knowing where the work is, that is the problem

Most service businesses do not have a quality problem. The jobs get done properly. What they have is a visibility problem, and it shows up in the same handful of moments every week.

• A customer rings to ask how their job is going and nobody can answer without walking to the back and looking.
• Two people have quoted for the same enquiry because neither knew the other had.
• A job has been sat waiting on a part for nine days and nobody noticed.
• The customer approved extra work verbally, and now there is a disagreement about what was agreed.
• Somebody has finished a job and it has not been invoiced, and nobody can say for how long.
• The whiteboard is out of date by mid-morning, every morning.

None of that is fixed by working harder. It is fixed by the job having a place to live that is not somebody's memory or a wall.

Why whiteboards and spreadsheets stop working at about five people

There is a size at which informal systems quietly stop coping, and most owners pass it without noticing because the failure is gradual.

With two people and a handful of jobs, everybody knows everything. You can shout across the workshop. The whiteboard is accurate because the person who changes it is the person doing the work. This genuinely works, and there is no reason to change it while it does.

The trouble starts when the number of live jobs goes past what one person can hold in their head, or when the people doing the work are no longer in the same room. At that point the informal system has not failed loudly. It has just started leaking: a job here that nobody chased, an approval there that nobody wrote down, a customer who was told something that never made it back to the person doing the work.

The tell is when the owner becomes the database. If work stops moving properly the moment you go on holiday, you are the system, and that is an expensive and fragile thing to be.

What your workflow would look like

Yours will not be a repair workflow, and it should not be. The shape stays similar; the stages, fields and rules come from your operation.

The first thing we do is map what happens now, including the bits that only exist in somebody's head. That conversation is usually the most valuable part of the project, and several clients have made changes off the back of it before we built anything at all.

Then we agree the stages. Most service businesses need somewhere between five and nine, and the temptation is always to add more. We push back on that, because a workflow with fourteen stages is one nobody keeps up to date, and an out-of-date workflow is worse than none.

The four things a job workflow has to get right

We have built a lot of these now, for our own operation and for other people's. The ones that stick all do the same four things, and the ones that get abandoned usually fail at the same four.

Frequently asked questions

What it costs you to carry on as you are

Worth doing the sum before you spend anything, because for some businesses the honest answer is that the current mess is affordable.

There are four costs to a business without job visibility, and only one of them appears anywhere in your accounts. The invisible three are usually larger.

The first is time. Somebody walking to the back to check on a job, twice a day, five days a week, is most of a working week over a year. That person is usually the owner or the most experienced technician, which makes it the most expensive time in the building.

The second is work that stalls. A job waiting on a part that nobody chased for nine days is nine days of a customer getting quietly annoyed and a bay occupied for nothing. Nobody notices because there is no list of things that have stopped moving.

The third is money agreed and never collected: extra work approved verbally and then written off to keep the peace, jobs finished and invoiced late or not at all. Every business we have looked at has some of this, and almost none of them know how much.

The fourth is the one that actually appears in the accounts, and it is the smallest: the customer who leaves because they could not get a straight answer about their job. You will feel that one and misattribute it to price.

If you cannot make those four numbers add up to more than the monthly fee, do not buy this yet. We would rather tell you that now than have you cancel in four months.