Resources

Things you can use today

No downloads, no email address required, nothing gated. Three checklists you can work through this afternoon, the tools we recommend to clients, and plain definitions for the terms you will hear from us.

Checklists

Open one and work down it. Nothing here needs us.

Before your discovery meeting

30 minutes goes fast. Have these five things in front of you and the call goes to your business instead of to background questions.

How customers find you today. Word of mouth, Google, a truck wrap, a referral partner. Rough percentages are fine.
The tools you pay for. Scheduling, invoicing, email, storage, a CRM, anything with a monthly charge.
Who owns your website login. If nobody knows, that is the answer and it matters.
What you are paying monthly, roughly, across software and marketing.
The three things that eat your week. Not the big strategy problems, the small repeating ones.
Your service area, in the towns you would actually drive to.
One competitor you think is doing it better, and why.

Google Business Profile in an hour

For most trade businesses on the Western Slope this is the single highest-return hour of work available. Do it in this order.

Claim the profile, or recover it if a former marketing company holds it.
Set the primary category to what you actually do most, then add secondary categories for the rest.
Set the service area by town, not by radius. Grand Junction, Fruita, Palisade, Delta, Montrose.
Fix the hours, including holidays, and turn on the "open by appointment" option if that is how you work.
Add ten real photos of real jobs. Phone photos beat stock photos every time.
List your services individually with a sentence each, instead of one paragraph covering everything.
Answer the questions in the Q and A section yourself, including the ones nobody has asked yet.
Reply to every review, including the good ones. A one-line reply is enough.

Is your website costing you leads?

Open your site on your phone, on cell data, and walk this list. Any two failures is a website that is losing work you already paid to attract.

It finishes loading on a phone in under three seconds.
The phone number is tappable, not a picture of a number.
There is one clear next step on the first screen. Call, book, or request a quote. One, not four.
The address bar shows a lock. If it warns "not secure", fix that first.
Your service area is named in words on the page, not implied by a map.
The photos are your jobs and your crew, not stock images of somebody else's truck.
Something on the site shows it has been touched recently. A date, a recent job, a current price.
Filling out the contact form actually sends you an email. Test it. It fails more often than anyone expects.

Tools we actually recommend

We take no referral fees, no affiliate commission and no kickback from any company on this page. If we recommend something it is because it works for businesses like yours, and if a cheaper option would do the job we say so.

Google Business Profile

Free, and for local trades it usually outperforms everything else combined. Fix this before you spend a dollar on anything else.

Cal.com

Scheduling. Customers pick a time from your real calendar instead of trading four texts with you. There is a free tier that covers most one-person shops.

Stripe or Square

Payments. Stripe is better if invoices go out by email, Square is better if you take cards in person. Both charge per transaction and neither charges a monthly fee to start.

Jobber or Housecall Pro

Job management: quotes, scheduling, invoicing and customer history in one place. Pick one, not both. Running two is how records go out of sync.

A password manager

1Password or Bitwarden. The most common emergency we get called into is a business locked out of its own domain, website or Google profile. This is the fix, and it costs a few dollars a month.

Google Workspace

Email on your own domain, plus calendar and file storage. An address at your own domain reads as a real business in a way a free consumer address does not.

Words you will hear from us

If we use a term you have not heard, stop us and ask. Here are the ones that come up most.

AEO: Answer engine optimization. Being the business that ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews name when someone asks who to call. Related to search engine optimization, but the answer is a sentence rather than a list of links.
NAP: Name, address, phone. When these three do not match across your website, your Google profile and the directories, search engines lose confidence that they are all the same business.
Schema: Structured data in the page code that states plainly what a business is, where it works and what it offers. People never see it. Search engines and AI models read it.
CRM: Customer relationship management. The system that holds who your customers are, what you did for them and when to follow up. For a lot of businesses it is currently a phone, a notebook and a memory.
SOW: Statement of work. The document that lists exactly what we are building, what it costs and when it is delivered. Produced at the end of the strategy briefing, from the scope you built with us.
MSA: Master services agreement. The terms that sit under the work: ownership, confidentiality, payment, how either side ends the relationship. Signed once, then every statement of work runs under it.
Catalog path: The part of your audit drawn from a defined set of services, each with a fixed scope, a fixed price and a delivery estimate, sorted into Phase 1, Phase 2 and Deferred.
Custom path: The part of your audit that does not fit a catalog. Operational and infrastructure work scoped to your business, your tools and how your team actually operates.
Care plan: Ongoing maintenance after a build. Updates, monitoring and small changes, so the systems keep working as the business changes instead of aging out.

Found something on a list that worries you?

If a checklist turned up more red flags than you expected, that is exactly what the free discovery meeting is for. 30 minutes, no obligation, and a written audit within a day or two.

Book your free discovery meeting