Pro Contractor Results

My husband Dennis has remodeled bathrooms for 22 years and he can tile a shower with his eyes half shut, but ask him to return three phone calls before supper and you would think I asked him to do taxes. I run our office, which for years was our kitchen table, and I was the one apologizing at night to people whose only bathroom was torn down to the studs. One family last spring was showering at the wife's sister's house across town. I knew their kids' bedtime because I was texting them updates past it. After we hired Launchbarr, the review asks started going out on their own when a job wrapped up, and the reviews that came back were not the usual great job stuff. People wrote about the toilet staying hooked up the whole job, about the plastic Dennis zips over the hallway, about the glass showing up on the day he said. One lady wrote that she picked us because strangers kept describing how we left the house, not just how the shower looked. That is the stuff I could never say about us without sounding like a salesman. Dennis still tiles. He still hates the phone. But he read that review out loud at our table, twice. Then he said, "Twenty two years and it took a robot asking to get people to notice the plastic."

My husband Earl has swept chimneys for twenty two years and he still picks up the phone like the person on the other end already owes him an apology. He is not mean. He is just usually thirty feet up, covered in soot, with a brush in one hand and somebody's creosote in his face, and the phone is the last thing he wants to think about. I used to be the one calling folks back from our kitchen at night, saying sorry we missed you, sorry he has not rung you yet, while his supper went cold in the microwave. After we hired Launchbarr, the reviews started talking about the girl who answers. One lady wrote she was the nicest part of the whole job. That girl is not a girl. She is the voice that answers when Earl cannot, and she books the sweep, takes the address, and asks about the fireplace like she has done it before. Earl did not believe me till I read him three reviews out loud on the porch. Now people get called back without me doing the apologizing, and reminders go out before burning season without me writing a list on the fridge. Earl told our son last week, "I do the dirty part. She can have the talking part." That is the closest thing to praise that phone has ever got from him.

I run the phones and the schedule for my husband Hank, which mostly means I am the one who apologizes when the plant tells him a truck is loaded and it is not. Hank believes them every single time. Twenty years of this and he still stands a whole crew around a set of forms saying any minute now, any minute now. The homeowners do not call the plant. They call me, at home, at night, wanting to know if anybody is coming tomorrow at all. After we hired Launchbarr, the confirmations started going out on their own. The day before a pour, the customer gets reminded, the cars get moved, the gates get left open, and I stopped being the warning system. One lady wrote in her review that she knew more about her own driveway job than her sister knew about hers, and her sister used another company. Hank read that one twice. He still argues with the dispatcher every morning. That will never change. But he told our oldest last month, I do not live on that phone anymore, Carla does not either. He is right. Supper is just supper now.

I am Tim's partner. Tim came up building decks, I came up framing houses, and we joined forces eight years ago before working alone wore us both out. My end is estimates and customers. Tim's end is the deck. Tim can build one that will outlive the house and he cannot explain one to save his life. A customer asks why composite costs what it costs and Tim starts in on hidden fasteners like that settles it. For years we lost those folks. They smiled, took the number, and went and found a man cheaper and better at talking. A woman from the next town over told me at her kitchen counter, with Tim standing there, that she had already decided before she called. She had spent an evening on the website Launchbarr built us, looking at finished decks on houses like hers, not a catalog, and she said the price still made her gulp but at least she could see where it went. Railing. Footings. The stairs her dad needs to get down to his yard. We built it in July, and she sent us a picture of her dad out there in a chair like a king. Tim still cannot explain a deck. He does not have to open with it anymore. Last week I heard him tell a new customer, go look at the pictures first, then I will talk. From Tim, that is a personality change.

Most of my patches start with a plumber cutting a hole and a homeowner thinking it is a twenty minute fix. It is three trips. Always three trips. I used to drive across town and argue about a minimum charge in a man's kitchen. Now people book the patch through the site, they send a picture of the hole, and the minimum is right there before I ever start the truck. A guy last month said he booked because the site told him three visits upfront. Fine by me. Argue with the website, not with me.

Tom is my brother, and he is my business partner, which means I have had a front row seat for 22 years of him being a first rate electrician and a last rate receptionist. I pull wire right beside him most days. I just got the phone manner in the family, and there is only one of me. Last winter Tom spent three hours in an attic full of Christmas boxes hunting a buried splice some handyman left behind, and I know for a fact four calls came in while he was up there sweating through his shirt. He will stop and answer if he hears it. He just answers like the phone interrupted a fight, which it usually did. After Launchbarr set up his Voice AI, a review came in that Tom read out loud in the truck, twice. The lady wrote that the patient girl in the office explained the diagnostic fee so clearly that she stopped calling around. That girl does not exist. It is the AI, answering while Tom is in an attic being short with a junction box instead of with a customer. He gets the details on his phone, calls back when his hands are free, and he is a nicer man for it. He told me last month, and I am quoting my own brother exactly, "She explains my prices better than I ever have, and she does it without sighing first."

Lou is my brother and my partner in this company. He builds the fence. I am the one who has to sell it, mostly because Lou will measure a yard, give you a number once, and start walking back to the truck the minute you want to argue about what your brother in law could do it for. So the phone was my problem, not his. And the worst calls were not angry people. They were polite men who wanted Lou out for a free measure, every post and panel written down nice and neat, so they could build it themselves off his numbers on a Saturday. The estimate thing on our website changed who shows up at that point. People punch in the yard, the style they want, pictures of the slope and where the gate swings, and they put a small deposit down before either of us drives out there. The free material list crowd mostly quit calling, and I do not miss them even a little. The people who book now are serious before we ever leave the shop. Lou came in last month grinning, which is not his normal face, and said a customer told him the website answered half his questions before Lou opened his mouth. I said good, it talks nicer than you do anyway. He did not argue with that.

Half my mornings used to start with a couch, two recliners, and a dog the size of a deer standing on the floor I was to tear out. The appointment messages handle it now. Folks get reminded to clear the room and gate the dog before we come. A lady told me she almost hired the other bid, then got our reminder the night before the measure and said, well, at least these people have done this before. Room was empty when I got there too. First time in months I started sanding before nine.

I spent a whole morning last spring on the phone with a man who was ready to tear my head off over a spring job I never did. Some outfit used a name close enough to mine, charged him double, left the door crooked, and disappeared. He found my real number in the mess and decided I was the thief. I had to talk him down, look up his address, and prove we had never been to his house. By the time I hung up, I was an hour behind and mad at a man whose name I do not even know. That is the tax every honest door company in this town pays now. Our Google profile is boring now, and I mean that as a compliment. Real address, real trucks, real pictures of my techs, reviews with street names in them. A lady across town told me she almost called one of the fake listings, then checked ours twice because the scammer had no address and we did, and she could see my truck in front of a house on her own side of town. She said, "You were the one I could prove was real." I have had that sentence in my head for months. I cannot stop the fakes. But people can check now, and more of them are checking before the car is trapped and they are desperate.

In leaf season I am on a ladder from sunup till my knees start talking to me, and that is exactly when everybody in three counties decides their gutters cannot wait one more rain. I used to come down at dark to a phone full of missed calls and no messages, because people do not leave messages anymore, they just call the next man. I lost more fall work standing ten feet in the air than I ever lost doing bad work, and I do not do bad work. Launchbarr put a voice on my phone that answers while I am still up there. She sounds like a person, she asks how many stories the house is and whether the downspouts are clogged, and she books the cleaning before the homeowner has time to dial my competitor. A man two towns over told me, "Your office girl got me on the schedule Tuesday before you ever came down off that roof." I did not correct him. I just cleaned his gutters. My helper says I am a different person in October now. I am not yelling at a phone in the truck anymore. I am just tired, like a normal man with a ladder.

My husband Duane has run no heat calls on Christmas Eve nine years out of the last ten. That is not a complaint exactly, it is just the job, but there is a version of it where he also has to be the answering service from the truck, and that version made him short with everybody, including the people standing in a cold house and including me. He would come home with his plate in the microwave and frost still in his beard some nights. This year Launchbarr had his Voice AI answering after hours. On Christmas Eve a furnace quit out in the country and the call got answered, the information got taken down right, and Duane got a clean message instead of a panicked voicemail he found two hours late. The customer left a review after the repair that mentioned the sweet girl who stayed calm on the phone. Carla knows that girl. She has never once needed a parka. Duane was home for supper this Christmas Eve for the first time I can remember as a normal thing, not a lucky break. He kept looking at his phone like it owed him an explanation. Then he said the quiet part: "She can have the 2 a.m. ones too. I mean it. Every one of them."

You cannot answer a phone in a respirator, in a suit, on your belly in an attic that is cooking you slow. I have tried. What actually happens is the homeowner with the bedroom that will not cool down calls three companies, books the first human voice, and I climb down an hour later to a voicemail that starts with the words "never mind." That was my business for years. I was the lead man, the quote man, and the missed call all in one sweaty package. Launchbarr put a Voice AI on our phone and I expected to hate it. Then a lady a few towns over left a review saying the girl who took her call asked smart questions, which rooms ran hot, whether the AC ran all day, and got her inspection booked for Thursday. I read that review sitting in my truck eating gas station peanuts. That girl asked better questions than I ask when I am tired, and I ask them for a living. I still do the attic. I still come down looking like a ghost made of dust. But the calls are answered by somebody patient while I am up there, and Brian is a lot easier to be married to when he is not replaying voicemails at the supper table. My wife's words, not mine. She is right often enough that I have stopped arguing the point.

I have run this shop 17 years with a legal pad. Every measurement, every change, every promise I ever made is on a yellow pad in my truck, and for most of those years it worked fine because the jobs were smaller and my memory was better. Then kitchens got bigger and the changes started coming at night. A client would text me a picture at 9:40, some waterfall island she found, with a note that said can we just swap to this. By morning I had forgotten which job it even belonged to, and once I ordered a cabinet run off a change the client swore she never approved. That one cost me real money and nearly cost me the friendship. The follow ups and reminders run on a schedule now, selections and dates put in front of the client before I have to chase anybody, and the changes land in writing where we can both see them. A client told her sister, who then called us, that she picked us because every Friday she knew exactly what was happening in her kitchen the next week without having to hunt me down. Her words were, nobody ghosts you on your own remodel. I still carry the legal pad. My son laughs at it. But last month I was home for supper 19 nights out of 20, and the pad is mostly grocery lists now.

My husband Dale can fix anything with a small engine and he cannot say no to a yard. Somebody cries about their grass before a wedding and Dale is out there at seven at night cutting it for the regular price, then grumbling about it at me like I sent him. April is our worst month for it. The phone rings while the crew is already out, nobody answers, and by the time Dale calls back the person found somebody else. This April the calls started getting answered by the Launchbarr voice thing. I heard about it from a customer. She left a review saying the young lady who booked her cleanup was so patient with her list of instructions, gate code and all. There is no young lady. It is just Dale, me, and three men in a truck. Dale gets more done now and he is a sight less grumpy about the phone. He told me last week he does not know if it is worth him answering at all anymore, the other one writes everything down better than he ever did. From Dale, that is practically a love letter.

I am Joe's son, Danny, I lay brick beside him and I answer for him in print because he will not sit down long enough. Dad is 63, his knees sound like gravel in a bucket, and he has bid jobs from memory his whole life. Walk the wall, point at things, give a number. Nothing written anywhere a person could find it later. Last spring he bid a repointing job on a big brick house, beautiful old work, and we never heard a word. He shrugged it off the way he shrugs everything off. In October the follow up from Launchbarr went out and the lady answered the same day. Her husband had been in the hospital all summer. She had kept the number because dad had been kind at the door, she said that too. We did that job in November with tarps and heaters and it carried the crew into winter. Dad told her at the end, I almost did not call you back either, ma'am. She laughed. She thought he was joking.

Every painter in the Ozarks has a drawer full of the same story. A man calls, wants his house painted, then tells you his brother in law could do it himself if he had the time, and could you sharpen the number. I have cut my price to win those jobs and then hated every brush stroke for two weeks, because a man who talks you down at the kitchen counter talks you down at the final walk too. The ads Launchbarr runs for us are aimed at the work we want, cabinets and full exteriors, in our towns. A woman in the next town over called about her cabinets after seeing one of our kitchen jobs, and she never asked what my day rate was. She asked how we kept the dust out of the pantry. That is a different conversation and it leads to a different kind of customer, the kind who sends you her sister's number at Christmas.

I dispatch for my brother Walt, which means when the plant says a truck is rolling and it is not rolling, I am the liar. That is how it felt for years. Walt would have a crew standing on a torn up driveway in the sun, I would have a homeowner on the phone asking why nobody told her to move her cars, and the plant would have a recording. The messages Launchbarr set up for us fixed the part that was actually ours to fix. The day before, the customer hears from us. Cars moved, gates open, see you at seven. On the morning, they get the on the way note, and if the plant buries us, they hear that from us before they hear silence. A lady from the next town over wrote that we were the first paving outfit that ever told her anything before she had to ask, and she has had her drive done three times in thirty years. Walt still swears at the plant every single morning. Some things are sacred. He just does not finish the day apologizing to six driveways anymore, and neither do I.

My husband Sean has been a plumber since he was 19 and he can be under a house in a crawl space with water dripping on his neck and still feel guilty about a ringing phone. So he answers it. From the crawl space. With the customer able to hear every bit of what he thinks about the situation, which is not always fit for a kitchen speaker. He is not mean. He is wet, he is upside down, and he is trying to hold a fitting and a conversation at the same time, and the conversation loses. After Launchbarr, the reviews started saying things I had to read twice. A lady whose water heater let go on a Sunday wrote that the girl who answered was calm, told her how to shut the water off, and had Sean there by two. I know that girl's secret. Sean does too, which is the funny part, because he fought getting a Voice AI for a month on the grounds that nobody talks to his customers but him. These days he climbs out, dries off, and reads the notes like a man reading a report from a really good apprentice. Last week he told me, "Grace, if she ever learns to solder, I am retiring early and you can run the whole show with her."

I will tell you exactly how I used to get roofing jobs. I paid for a lead, and the same homeowner got sent to me and four other roofers, and whoever dialed fastest won, and half the time the number was wrong or the lady had already told two men no. I have sat in my truck outside a house eating gas station food, racing to call a person who never asked for me by name, and felt like a telemarketer in a roofing shirt. After one spring of that I told my office manager I would quit buying leads entirely and just starve honest. She talked me off that ledge, barely. The calls that come now come different. A homeowner in the next town over called our number, only ours, because she had read our reviews and seen the roofs we did on her side of town, and she asked for me by name like we had met. Nobody sold her to me. We inspected it Tuesday, she signed Thursday, and her neighbor came out while we were tearing off and asked for a card. My manager says I should not take it personal when a lead is junk. She is right about most things. But a homeowner who picked you on purpose is a different job from the first handshake, and I would rather build a company on those.

Lonnie is my brother and my partner in our septic company, and he has pumped tanks 26 years. He can talk to a customer fine as long as the customer is brief. Lonnie is not brief proof. Put him on the phone with a lady who wants to tell him about her cousin's drain field and her grandson's visit and the smell she noticed at Easter, and you can watch the man's whole day slide downhill. On busy days those calls used to stack up while we were out digging for a lid nobody could find. By evening he was returning calls from the truck like he was apologizing for existing. Since Launchbarr, the calls get answered by his Voice AI, who has the patience of a saint and, near as I can tell, no plans for the evening. She sorts out who has a backup in the house, who has a closing on Friday, and who just needs a pumping, and we get a list we can work. A realtor a couple towns over told me her clients keep mentioning the helpful girl at our shop. I have not had the heart to correct the county. Lonnie says she can have the long talkers, all of them, forever. Then he says, mostly to himself, "Dale, that girl has never once told anybody to just jiggle something and call back Monday." That is my brother's version of a love letter.

Ask any man who hangs fiber cement and he will tell you the same thing, whoever designed it never carried a sheet of it across a windy yard. It is heavy, it snaps if you look at it wrong, and the dust will eat you alive if you cut it stupid. I am picky about it anyway, because I have torn off too many walls where the last crew nailed it wherever their arm landed and called it done. The trouble was selling that. A homeowner would sit there with my fiber cement price in one hand and a vinyl price in the other and ask me why the numbers were not close, like I was charging extra for fun. Our website finally does that explaining before I get to the kitchen table. It has our houses on it, the materials side by side in plain words, and pictures close enough that you can see the trim work. A couple a few towns over told me they spent an evening on it and by the time I measured their house they had already picked their material and just wanted to know if I was the man in the pictures. I was. We hung their house in October and I did not spend one minute arguing about vinyl. That hour I did not spend arguing is worth more to me than the job almost. Almost.

My husband Tony digs a beautiful hole and then disappears into it for four months, and I mean that as his wife and his office. A pool takes forever and most of that forever is waiting. Permit office. Inspector. Rain. The gunite crew that is on somebody else's hole. The customer does not see any of that. They see their yard tore up and nobody there, and they call me, daily, sure we have forgotten them. The updates Launchbarr sends out for us have honestly saved my voice. Dig, steel, gunite, tile, plaster, each step the customer hears it, with a picture Tony takes before he leaves the site. A lady from a couple of towns over put in her review that she never once had to wonder what was happening in her own backyard, and she named the tile day like it was a holiday. Tony came home from a dig last month and said, nobody called me today, Kathy. He said it the way a man reports good weather. Then he went out back and sat by our own pool, which he never does. That is the whole review, really.

My brother Dmitri and I own this company together. He sets tile, I do the tear outs and the estimating, and we have divided the arguing up the same way for eleven years. Here is the truth under our whole business: we tear out other men's showers for a living. Beautiful tile, expensive tile, and behind it black rot, because somebody skipped the waterproofing or poked holes in the pan and called it done. The homeowner always says the same thing standing in the demo dust: it looked perfect. Of course it looked perfect. Tile is a liar that keeps a straight face for about three years. Dmitri flood tests every pan he builds and photographs it, which our crew used to tease him about, called it his modeling career. Then the review asks started sending when we finish, and clients began writing about the test. One woman wrote that she chose us after reading a review where the man explained he filled the shower floor with water and left it overnight before any tile went down. Her remodeler now sends Dmitri his showers, all of them, and told me it is because his customers arrive already knowing what is under the tile. Our youngest setter flood tests now when Dmitri is not even on the job. The pan either holds or we do, one of the two.

I answer phones for my brother Sal, or I used to. Sal climbs like he was born in a harness and he talks on the phone like it is a debt collector. When that oak came down during the storm in March, we had forty some calls before breakfast and Sal was already in a tree two streets over with a saw running. Every one of those calls was somebody scared, with a roof or a car under something, and half of them got Sal's voicemail and called the next name. This time the Launchbarr voice answered them. Booked the estimates, took the addresses, told people honestly where they were in line. Two customers told Sal his new girl in the office was a sweetheart and when was she starting full time. She is not a girl, and she does not get tired, and I might be a little jealous of her phone voice, I will admit that in writing. Sal gets to stay in the tree now, which is where Sal is a gift. On the ground with a phone he is a liability, his words mostly. He said it himself in the truck: Gina, I think she out talks me and out climbs nothing, so we are each doing our job.