Hiring Someone to Fix the Front of Your Business: A Buyer's Checklist

The front of a trade business is everything between a customer finding you and you turning up to do the job: the phone call, the quote, the follow-up, the review afterwards and the Google listing the next customer reads. A website is one piece of it.

Plenty of agencies will sell you the website and stop there. If the calls still go to voicemail and the quotes still go quiet, a better-looking site just sends more people into the same gaps. So the questions below start with what happens after someone gets in touch.

Ask it in those words. A good answer is specific. The caller gets a text within a minute, from your business number, saying who you are and asking what the job is, and their reply lands somewhere you'll see it.

Then ask when it starts. US carriers make every business register before it sends texts from an ordinary phone number, and the registration is in your name. It can take a few weeks. Anyone promising texts on day one either hasn't done it before or is sending from a number that isn't yours, and that's the number your customers will save. A straight answer sounds like: it starts once the registration clears, and until then this is how a missed call reaches you.

The question matters because the gap is bigger than owners think. In Service Direct's look at home-service businesses, owners guessed they answered 97% of calls; measured, it was 66%. Source: Service Direct, Home Service Call Performance Report (blog.servicedirect.com/home-service-call-performance-report).

Most quotes that lose never get a no. They get silence. Level CFO found accepted quotes are usually accepted in about two days, while lost ones sit for about a month. Source: Level CFO (levelcfo.com/blog/quote-follow-up-7-day-rule/). The first couple of weeks after a quote goes out are when a follow-up can still change the answer.

So ask whether anyone checks in, on which days, in whose name, and whether it stops when the customer replies. 'We send reminders' is too vague to hold anyone to. 'Day three, day seven and day fourteen, from you, stopping the moment they answer' is a real answer.

A seller who knows what they charge can put it on the page. One who makes you request a quote for a number they already know wants a sales call before you see the price. Look for the build cost, the monthly cost and what the monthly cost includes, all in writing.

Ask the same of your own site while you're at it. A homeowner who can see a range before calling is easier to quote.

Get it in writing, item by item: the domain, the site, the words and photos, the Google Business Profile, the analytics, the phone number customers call and every inquiry the site has taken. Each should be registered to you or handed over when you leave.

The expensive version of getting this wrong is the free website that comes with a monthly contract. The site lives on their platform, the domain is in their name, and leaving means starting again with nothing.

Month to month with a stated notice period is easy to find now. A twelve-month lock-in on a service that's supposed to earn its place every month tells you how sure the seller is that it will.

Ask what happens in the first week after launch if the work isn't what you agreed. If there's no written answer, assume there isn't one.

Ask which numbers you'll get and how often: calls, missed calls, quotes sent, quotes won, reviews. If results can only be described on a call, you won't be able to check them later either.

Then ask for one real result, with a named client and a timeframe. A seller without one should say so plainly and show you the work instead, and the research behind it. One who has been trading for years and still can't name a result is the one to worry about.

A list of thirteen services with no particular strength in any of them tells you they want to be available to everyone. Look for a trade focus, a way of working they can explain in a sentence, or an owner who writes down how they do things. It doesn't have to be your exact trade.

Some homeowners now ask an assistant who to call, so it's fair to ask a seller what they do about it. A useful answer is modest: real prices and timeframes on your pages so there's something to quote, a complete Google listing, steady reviews, and the same business details everywhere. Those help a human reader just as much.

Be wary of anyone selling it as the main event, with a separate monthly fee for 'AI optimization' and no number you can check. The calls and quotes you already have are worth fixing first.

Ask the missed-call question first. How someone answers it tells you whether they've thought about how your business wins work. Then check the price, the ownership and the exit on their own site before you book a call. It takes five minutes, and it's worth doing to this site too.