The job you turn down is the best page on your site

Every tradie has a list of jobs he won’t take. Almost nobody has written it down.

So it stays in your head, and the website keeps sending you the exact enquiries the list exists to stop.

The quote you shouldn’t have driven to

It starts fine on the phone. Bloke describes the job in 30 seconds, sounds like normal work, you book it in for Tuesday morning. You drive 40 minutes across town. You stand in the driveway for 10 minutes and work out it’s the thing you stopped doing 2 years ago.

Nobody did anything wrong. He read your site. Your site listed 9 services and every one of them was true. It just never said the other half.

That call cost you most of a morning and it invoiced nothing. Two of those a month is a working day gone, every month, and none of it shows up anywhere you’d notice.

Your no’s are more specific than your yes’s

Write out your service list and read it back. Nine items, all real, all true of most of your trade within 30 km of you. It has to be. You all do broadly the same work.

Now write out the 4 jobs you knocked back last month. Those aren’t generic at all. They come out of what’s in your van, what tickets you hold, how far you’ll drive, how you like to be paid, and what went wrong the last time you said yes to one.

That is a description of your actual business. The service list is a description of your trade.

Go and get your last 10 knock-backs

Open your call log and your messages and go back about a month. Find the enquiries you said no to, or quoted deliberately high on so it would go away. You want 10 of them. Go back as far as it takes to find 10.

They will sort into 4 piles:

• Not my trade. The adjacent work customers assume is yours. You’ll know the version of this call you get.
• Not my patch. Past the point where the drive eats the job.
• Too small to move for. Anything under your minimum once you’ve paid for the travel and the parts run.
• Not the way I work. Supply-only, someone else’s materials, fixed price on a job nobody can see the inside of yet, invoicing a managing agent instead of the person who’s standing there.

The fourth pile is the one worth the page. The first three are boundaries anyone would understand. The fourth is a decision you made after something went badly, and it’s the one no competitor has a copy of.

Three lines each, and no more

Each entry is what you don’t do, why, and what the customer should do instead. In that order, in plain words.

We don’t install a hot water unit you bought online. Two reasons: we can’t warrant a unit we didn’t supply, and the last 3 that turned up this way were missing the valve, so the job stops halfway with your water off. If one is already sitting on your driveway, whoever sold it to you usually keeps a list of installers.

An example, and the shape is the point. It says no, it gives a reason about the work rather than about the customer, and it leaves the person with somewhere to go. Nobody reading it feels knocked back.

Compare it to the 4-word version in a footer: supply-only jobs not accepted. That stops nothing, because the bloke with the box on his driveway doesn’t know he’s a supply-only job.

What the page does once it’s up

Three things, and only one of them is about search.

It sorts your phone before it rings. The wrong enquiries either don’t call or ring already knowing the answer, which turns a 40-minute drive into a 2-minute conversation.

It makes the rest of the site believable. A bloke who tells you what he won’t touch gets believed about what he will. Nothing else on a trade website buys that as cheaply.

It cannot be copied. Not because it’s clever writing. Because the next mob’s no’s are different from yours, and if they lift yours word for word they start getting calls for work they actually want.

Four ways to ruin it

• Making it a whinge. Anything starting “we don’t work for people who” reads as bitter, and the customer reading it assumes he’s about to be one of them.
• Naming anyone. No customer, no street address, no “the place with the boat out the front”. The reason works fine without them.
• Sounding above the work. “We don’t do small jobs” is snobbery. “Our minimum is $280 because of the travel and the parts run, so for anything under that you’re better off with someone closer” is a fact with a number on it.
• Saying never when you mean rarely. If you’d do it for a regular or in a genuine emergency, write that in. A rule with a stated exception gets believed. A rule you quietly break doesn’t.

Sending it somewhere else isn’t lost work

The refer-out line is the part people resist, and it’s the part that pays.

You don’t have to name a business. Naming the trade is enough: a roof plumber, a licensed gasfitter, a level 2 provider. If you do keep 2 or 3 names you’d ring yourself, say that and put it behind a phone call rather than a link, so the list stays current without you maintaining a page.

Work comes back the other way, because everyone you send someone to has their own list of jobs they turn down. And the customer you turned away remembers exactly one thing about your business: you were straight with him when there was nothing in it for you.

Where it goes

It’s a page, not a blog post. Link it from your services page and from your contact page, in the words a customer would use: Jobs we’re not the right people for, or What we don’t do. Don’t bury it in a menu called Information.

Then keep it alive. Every time you knock something back that isn’t on the list, add a line. Once a year, delete anything you’ve quietly started doing again. A stale list is worse than no list, because it turns away work you now want.

If someone else writes your site for you

This is one of the 3 standing questions we come back to on the monthly or fortnightly call, and it is the one we reach for when the last few weeks were ordinary. The monthly or fortnightly piece gets built from a recorded conversation about jobs you’ve already done, so a quiet fortnight still has something honest in it.

None of that is required for this page though. Your call log and 20 minutes is the whole method, and the version you write yourself will sound more like you than anything anyone writes for you.