AI for tradies, minus the sales pitch.
The phone rings while you are on a roof, in a ceiling, or under a house. This page is about that, about the quotes you sent and never heard back on, and about the paperwork that eats your Sunday. Nothing on it needs you to know what any of the acronyms mean.
Calls that never get answered
- Flooring 17.9%
- Roofing 17.6%
- Across all nine trades 9.2%
- Pest control 5.1%
- Solar 1.8%
From 207,000 inbound calls across 858 Australian businesses in nine industries.1 Reported rather than verified, and they are one agency’s own clients, so read it as a shape rather than a benchmark. It is still the only Australian number anybody publishes.
A job leaks at six points. None of them feel like losses at the time.
This is one job from the phone call to the review. Read down it and count how many of the six are true of your last fortnight. Most trades we talk to have four, and have never had a reason to think about them together.
The six leaks, in full
1 · The phone rings while your hands are full
You are on a roof, in a ceiling, under a house, or halfway through something you cannot put down. It goes to voicemail. Hardly anybody leaves one any more.
Where it drains They tap the next result in the list. You never learn the job existed, which is what makes this the most expensive one on the page: it does not show up anywhere.
2 · You ring back that evening
Six hours later, from the ute or the couch. Sometimes they answer and it is fine.
Where it drains Sometimes somebody who answered at the time is already booked in for Thursday.
3 · You go out and look at it
An hour of driving and twenty minutes on site, unpaid, to work out what the job is.
Where it drains Then the quote sits in your head for three days because writing it up is a night job and you have had a week of them.
4 · The quote goes out, and then nothing
You send it. You hear nothing back. Chasing feels like begging, so you leave it, and after a fortnight you quietly write it off.
Where it drains Most quotes go quiet rather than getting refused, and those are completely different things. One is a no. The other is a person who got busy.
5 · You win it and you do the work
The part you are actually good at, and the part none of this is trying to change.
Where it drains The invoice goes out a fortnight later because invoicing is also a night job, and then it gets paid a fortnight after that.
6 · The customer is delighted, and says so to you
They mean it. They tell you at the door and they tell their neighbour.
Where it drains Nobody asks them to put it on Google, so the next person searching your trade in your suburb never hears any of it.
Mobile trades get one Google setting wrong. Usually more than one.
If customers come to you at a shopfront, most of this does not apply. If you go to them, all of it does, and two of the five will get a profile suspended rather than merely pushed down. Everything below is quoted from Google’s own guidelines, read on 29 August 2026.2
- One profile, not one per suburb
- Google’s guideline is that a business travelling to customers gets “one service-area Business Profile”, and separately that “there should only be one profile per business”. Creating a listing per town is a common piece of advice and it causes exactly the duplicate problem that makes a profile disappear.
- Hide your address, and this one is Google’s instruction
- Verbatim: “If you’re a service-area business, you should hide your business address from customers.” Most mobile trades are running with a home address showing, which is worse than useless: it publishes where you live and it anchors you to a suburb you may not want to be anchored to.
- Your service area has a limit, and it is about two hours
- Google: the boundaries “shouldn’t extend farther than about 2 hours of driving time from where your business is based”. Drawing a service area across half the state does not win you more work. It makes the listing less relevant to everybody inside it.
- A post office box gets you suspended outright
- Not demoted, suspended. Google also states that a rented mailing address you do not work from is not eligible at all, and that a co-working office only qualifies if it has clear signage and is staffed by your people during your stated hours.
- A workshop plus a mobile service is a different setup again
- Google calls these hybrid, and its own example is an auto shop with a garage that also does roadside work. Those can show a storefront address and a service area, provided the address is staffed and can actually receive customers during the hours you publish.
The one thing Google says that settles most arguments
On the same page where it explains local ranking, Google writes: “There’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google.”2 Worth remembering next time somebody rings offering to get you to the top of the map for a monthly fee. What you can change is how complete and how accurate the listing is, and how many recent answered reviews sit under it. That is genuinely most of it, and it is free.
Sources + notes
- Reported, not verified. AIIMS Group, reported by Dynamic Business, 28 August 2026. More than 207,000 inbound calls across 858 client businesses in nine industries. No date range is given for the calls and the underlying analysis is not published separately. The businesses are one agency’s clients, so they were already doing marketing and already measuring their calls, which is not a random cross-section. The widely quoted “62% of business calls go unanswered” figure is American, rests on 85 businesses across 58 industries, and its source page has been deleted.
- Google, Guidelines for representing your business on Google and Tips to improve your local ranking on Google, support.google.com, both fetched and read 29 August 2026. Neither page publishes a last-updated date, so that is an accessed date rather than a published one.
Cheapest first, and the cheapest are free.
Not an argument against paying for leads. Plenty of trades run a good business on bought work and know exactly what a job is worth to them. It is an argument for doing the free ones properly first, because paying per lead while your own listing is half-built is renting what you could own.
| Where the lead comes from | What it costs | What to know first |
|---|---|---|
| Your own Google listing | Free | The one that decides most of the outcome, and the only one you own outright. Nobody can raise the price on you or switch you off. |
| Reviews on that listing | Free | The routine costs nothing but the asking. Google prohibits incentives and prohibits asking only your happy customers, so the version that works is also the only lawful one. |
| Word of Mouth | Freelisting | A reviews-first site rather than a lead marketplace. Live and active when we checked it on 20 August 2026. |
| ServiceSeeking | From aboutAU$49a month, or aboutAU$9.95a lead | Subscription or pay as you go. Both figures reported rather than read off a live checkout. |
| hipages | AboutAU$30 to AU$80a lead | Reported industry-wide. Worth knowing before you commit: negative feedback is not shown on public tradie profiles the way positive feedback is, so treat it as a lead channel and not as a reputation one. |
| Google Ads | No credible Australian benchmark exists | We looked. Anybody quoting you a cost per lead for your trade in your suburb is quoting you their own account or somebody else’s guess. Worth a capped test, measured on your own numbers. |
| Oneflare | Closed | Retired into Airtasker. oneflare.com.au redirected when we checked it on 20 August 2026, and the shutdown completed on 30 June 2026. |
Sources + notes
- Platform statuses checked against the live sites on 20 August 2026 and recorded with their dates in our own research notes. The hipages and ServiceSeeking figures are reported industry-wide rather than read off a live checkout, and lead pricing on both varies by trade and postcode. The hipages review-display point comes from a published Australian analysis rather than from hipages. On Google Ads: no verifiable Australian cost-per-lead benchmark for trades could be found, which is a finding rather than an omission.
Your job app is charging you five times the going rate for a text.
One of the mainstream Australian job-management apps charges about AU$0.20 a message on top of its per-user subscription. An Australian SMS gateway starts around 3.7 cents at volume, before GST. That is three to five times the price for an identical text arriving on an identical phone.4
On a hundred job updates and reminders a month it is not worth the argument. On a thousand it is around AU$160 a month for nothing. Whether it matters depends entirely on your volume, which is why the first thing we do is count rather than recommend.
Worth knowing too: of the tools we priced, exactly one publishes a GST-inclusive figure. Most say nothing about GST at all, so the comparison you did in your head is probably out by ten per cent in one direction or the other.
If you text customers, your sender name has to be registered
The SMS Sender ID Register became mandatory on 1 July 2026. ACMA: messages sent with unregistered sender IDs “will have the sender ID replaced with the word ‘Unverified’”, are grouped into one thread on the phone, and “people will likely treat unverified messages as scams”.5
So a customer waiting on your arrival window now gets it filed next to the toll-road scams, under the word Unverified. Registering against your ABN needs the authorised contact on the Australian Business Register to be current, and plenty are not. ACMA publishes no fee, which is not the same as saying it is free.
Sources + notes
- Vendor pricing pages read 29 August 2026. Per-message rates and subscription prices move, and GST treatment is reported exactly as each vendor reports it. Two well-known missed-call products sold into this market publish no price at all.
- ACMA, About the register, acma.gov.au, page last updated 20 July 2026, read 29 August 2026.
What we would actually do, and in what order.
Three fixed-price projects. For a trades business the order is almost always the one below, because automating replies to enquiries you are not getting is an expensive way to feel busy.
- What is included, in detail
Get Found, and for a trade this is almost always first
The detail + the price
The service-area profile set up the way Google actually documents it, the review routine your partner or your office person can run in two minutes a day, and the handful of pages that make a search for your trade plus a suburb land on you. From AU$990.
- What is included, in detail
Sell More, once the phone is ringing
The detail + the price
A text back inside a minute when you cannot answer, quote follow-ups that go out on a schedule and stop the second somebody replies, and every enquiry landing in one place. Set up under Australian consent law rather than the American assumptions in most tools. From AU$1,790.
- What is included, in detail
Get More Done, when the nights are the problem
The detail + the price
Quotes drafted from the notes you took on site, invoices chased without you remembering, receipts coded from a photo, and your BAS information arriving accurate instead of reconstructed from a glovebox. From AU$2,490.
Close enough to stand in your yard.
Based in Blaxland. Glenbrook, Warrimoo, Lapstone, Valley Heights, Winmalee, Springwood, Faulconbridge, Woodford, Hazelbrook and Lawson are all inside twenty-five minutes. So are Penrith, Emu Plains, Kingswood, Cranebrook, Glenmore Park, St Marys and Werrington. Richmond and Windsor sit at the eastern edge and we still come.
The upper mountains are in, up to and including Katoomba. Worth knowing what that actually means, because the map lies about it: Katoomba is 28km from Blaxland in a straight line and 38.6km by road, since west of here the only route is the highway threading the ridge.6 It is about three quarters of an hour, not the twenty minutes the distance suggests. We come anyway, and we would rather you knew the drive than found out when we were late.
23.7%
of registered businesses in the Penrith local government area are construction businesses, against 17.0% across New South Wales. Out of roughly 20,400 registered businesses there, construction is the single largest sector by count.7
Which is to say your competition for the top three map results is denser here than almost anywhere in the state, and thinner in the mountains suburbs, where a complete listing still gets you a long way on its own.
Sources + notes
- Straight-line distances calculated from published coordinates using the haversine formula on 20 August 2026 and checked. The Blaxland to Katoomba road distance of 38.62km is published by distance-cities.com, accessed the same day. Road distance runs 30 to 40% above straight-line west of Blaxland, where the Great Western Highway and the rail line share one corridor along the ridge, and 10 to 20% above it east toward Penrith, where the Cumberland Plain has a proper road grid. The drive-time estimates are ours, derived from those figures rather than measured with a stopwatch.
- economy.id, Penrith, sourced to the Australian Business Register and the ABS Business Register, accessed 20 August 2026. Published rather than independently verified: economy.id returned an error to direct fetch and the reference year is not stated in what we could read, so treat it as approximately 2024 to 2025. The Blue Mountains equivalent has two figures from the same publisher that do not reconcile, 5,684 and 6,558, which is why no mountains business count appears on this page.
- You are missing calls and you do not know how many
- Quotes go out late, or go quiet, or both
- Your Google listing shows your home address, or you have two of them
- Invoicing and the BAS happen at night and on Sundays
- You are paying per lead while your own listing is half-finished
- You are booked out six months and turning work away. More enquiries would make your year worse
- All your work comes from two builders you have known for a decade. Spend the money on something else
- You want somebody to answer the phone as you, in a voice that passes as human. We think that is the wrong trade at this size and we will say so
- You want guaranteed first place on the map. Google says plainly that nobody can sell you that
The questions tradies ask first.
If yours is not here, ask it on the call. We would rather answer it than have you guess at it.
Whether an AI receptionist is worth it
For most trades of this size, not yet, and we will say so on the call. A voice that answers live calls is a bigger commitment, it goes wrong more publicly, and the failures are heard by a customer rather than seen by you. The text version gets you most of the benefit for a fraction of the money and a fraction of the risk. If you genuinely want the voice version we will tell you honestly what it involves rather than talk you out of it.
Whether you can fix quoting
Partly, and honestly the biggest win is usually not software. Most tradies lose more to quotes going out three days late than to the quoting tool being wrong. Drafting the quote from your on-site notes while you are still in the ute takes the three days down to twenty minutes, and that is a bigger change than any feature comparison.
Whether this needs you to change job-management apps
No, and we would push back if somebody suggested it as step one. Migrating a trade business off the app that holds its job history is expensive and disruptive and rarely the actual problem. Most of what is broken sits between the apps rather than inside one.
How much time this takes out of your week
About three hours for Get Found or Sell More across four weeks, and about six for Get More Done across five, front-loaded into a mapping session. If you cannot spare that this quarter, say so on the call and we will tell you which single piece is worth doing on its own.
Whether you work with builders as well as trades
Yes, and with anybody whose work arrives by phone and leaves by invoice. Plumbers, sparkies, chippies, roofers, landscapers, tilers, pest control, mobile mechanics, arborists. The pattern is the same and only the words change.
Half an hour, on site or on the phone.
We will look at your Google listing while you are on the call and tell you what is wrong with it, free, whether or not you ever hire us. If the honest answer is that you do not need us, that is what you will hear.