We make Diract, software that keeps a trade business's quotes, jobs, invoices, website and customer list in one place. Plenty of good tradespeople have never done any marketing. They have no proper website. They have barely touched Google. They track nothing.
·4 min read
Every business believes it loses on price. The ones that record the reason usually discover they lose on silence.
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Everybody needs to find a customer's phone number. Not everybody needs to see what that customer pays.
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A firm that cannot name its top five referrers is thanking the wrong people and has not noticed the one who went quiet.
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The spreadsheet did not break. It just stopped being able to answer the questions the business started asking of it.
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Every integration is a promise to keep two systems agreeing forever. Three of those are worth making.
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The monthly figure is rarely the problem. The problem is the third feature you need, sitting two tiers higher.
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The subcontractor's certificate expired in March. Nobody knew until a site office asked for it in June.
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The technician who has never been to this address is about to learn everything the last one already knew.
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The client's company review falls due in March. The firm learned that in February two years ago, and nobody recorded it.
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A monthly report describes a month that has already happened. A morning screen describes something you can still change.
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Six people are involved in this conveyance. The file records one of them, and the other five live in somebody's sent items.
·5 min read
Nobody wants to install an app to buy a coffee. They do want the person behind the counter to know their name.
·4 min read
Every name on that list has already trusted you with money. No advertising reaches a colder audience more expensively.
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A demonstration shows you the parts that work beautifully. Nine questions find the parts that will not.
·5 min read
The contract exchanged in March. The purchaser will hear from somebody about eleven more things before they get a key.
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The lender wants the unconditional count today. The agent sends a spreadsheet on Fridays.
·4 min read
If two people disagree about which stage a deal is in, the pipeline is not a report. It is a shared guess.
·5 min read
The record gets written in the ten minutes between jobs, or it gets written from memory at nine at night. Those produce different records.
·5 min read
If your team has an unwritten convention for what goes in Notes, Notes is doing the job of a table that nobody built.
·4 min read
Every failed CRM rollout has the same middle chapter: for a few weeks, both systems were half right.
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Somebody rang three weeks ago about a dispute. Nothing in the firm's systems knows they exist.
·5 min read
The worst matter a small firm takes is rarely the one that lost money. It is the one that consumed the weeks a better matter needed.
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The same update reaches a developer, a widow and a referring accountant. Two of the three delete it unread.
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You already know what this customer buys, how often, and what they said yes to last time. The record just has to say it.
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The question is not whether you will leave. It is whether leaving would cost you eleven years of history.
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Nobody refuses to use a CRM. They just find that entering the data costs them more than it gives them.
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A thirty person booking is worth more than a busy Saturday, and it arrived as a direct message on a Sunday.
·5 min read
A plumber's customer is a person. The work is at an address, and the address is often not theirs. Two records, not one.
·5 min read
A CRM built for a sales floor asks a business of five to run a process it does not have. The useful half is much smaller.
·6 min read
A developer can name every line of the feasibility and cannot say which agent introduced the buyer of lot seven.
·5 min read
A firm can tell you everything about matter 4521 and very little about the client who has brought it eleven matters.
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A venue does not need a record of everybody who buys a coffee. It needs one for everybody who books, orders ahead or delivers.
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Nobody ever decides to stop chasing. The follow up just never became anybody's job, on any particular day.
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Three enquiries arrive three ways: a call, a web form and a text to somebody's mobile. Only one of them gets quoted.
·4 min read
The person covering on Friday cannot read Tuesday's promise, because it sits in somebody else's mail.
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Three records for one customer means three partial histories, and a report that counts them as three customers.
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Every empty field on a contact form is a question somebody decided not to answer. Forty fields produce twenty answers.
·5 min read
The traffic engineer who turned a six week job into four is worth remembering. Two projects later, nobody can recall their name.
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A conflicts search that only reads client names will never find the other side of a matter you ran three years ago.
·5 min read
The same office rings every month, and every month somebody asks them the same six questions from scratch.
·5 min read
Two buildings with identical glass can be a two hour job and a two day job. The glass is never what makes the difference.
·4 min read
Every trade business loses tools. The ones that recover quickly are the ones that can say exactly what they had.
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December decides how March feels. By the time the phone slows down, the selling window has already closed.
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Nothing announces an expiry. A builder's site office does, usually on the morning the work was meant to start.
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A customer thinking well of you does nothing at all. A customer writing it down works for years.
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The manufacturing is the predictable part of a sign job. The permit and the lift are where the weeks and the money go.
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An installer without monitoring sells a box once. An installer with it owns a relationship that pays every month for years.
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Two three bedroom houses can differ by half a truck. Bedrooms describe a floor plan, not what is inside it.
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A workshop keeps the car until the part arrives. A mobile mechanic has to leave, and leaving turns one job into two.
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A precedent nobody can find is a document that exists and does no work. Most firms have a library like that.
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Clients rarely object to paying for work they agreed. They object to discovering it afterwards.
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A matter that finished in March and closed in November spent eight months making every figure in the firm slightly wrong.
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A client who has not heard from their lawyer for six weeks assumes nothing is happening. Usually something is, and nobody told them.
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A kitchen built to the wrong dimension is firewood. Every protection in a joinery business exists because of that single fact.
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An irrigation system fails underground and reports it on the surface, weeks later, in a place that has nothing to do with the cause.
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Every gutter cleaner has a fortnight where the phone rings constantly and a quarter where it does not. The round is what flattens that.
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An install happens once a decade. A spring, a motor and an annual check happen far more often than that.
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Floor area tells you how much room there is. It does not tell you how many boxes to order, and the difference comes out of somebody's margin.
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An excavator earns only while it digs, and it costs from the moment it leaves the yard. Most rates price the first and ignore the second.
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A plan of subdivision does not create a lot. A registered plan does, and a great deal happens between the two.
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A developer sets up a strata scheme once and then leaves. The owners live inside those decisions for decades.
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A month's delay does not cost a month's inconvenience. It costs a month of interest on everything drawn so far.
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Somebody drafts a joint venture agreement while everybody is optimistic, and reads it while somebody is unhappy. The second reading matters most.
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Every party to a development assumes somebody else's policy covers the thing that went wrong. Quite often nobody's does.
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A defect found before the final payment is a conversation. The same defect found afterwards is a claim.
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A dine-in meal arrives on a plate the venue already owns. The same meal in a bag carries five things the venue buys every week.
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The best supplier deal is rarely the lowest price. It is the one where both sides still want the relationship in two years.
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The first venue works because the owner is in it. That is exactly why the second one is hard.
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Every kitchen holds a machine somebody bought with enthusiasm and nobody has touched in a year. Space is the most expensive thing in the room.
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Selling a voucher feels like a sale. It is closer to a loan from the customer, repayable in food.
·4 min readAustralia
A function is the most profitable booking a venue takes, and the easiest one to lose money on it. The paperwork decides which.
·4 min read
A customer complaining in the room is a customer who has not written the review yet. That window is worth a great deal.
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A café can survive a mediocre menu. Very few survive mediocre coffee, and almost none survive coffee nobody has costed.
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Two walls holding the same number of bricks can differ by two days. The difference sits in the openings and the access.
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Nobody sees waterproofing again until something goes wrong, and by then it sits under a finished floor.
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Most trade businesses know the repayment and guess everything else. The guess is usually half the real figure.
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Most trade overspend surfaces at month end, once the job has finished and the money has gone.
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Most trade businesses know which jobs felt bad. Very few know which ones lost money, and they are rarely the same list.
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A sole trader hiring their first employee is not adding capacity. They are becoming a different business with a payroll.
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An invoice ignored for ninety days is rarely a customer refusing to pay. It is a business that never asked twice.
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Profit and cash are different numbers, and the one that closes a business is cash.
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A solar customer rings about production in week two because nobody showed them a normal day.
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A scaffolding business owns a finite amount of steel. Every week it stands unbilled on a slow site is a week it cannot earn elsewhere.
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Pool servicing looks like a fixed monthly fee. The cost underneath it swings with the weather, and most rounds never reprice.
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A plasterer controls when the work starts and not when it dries. Every trade behind them inherits that, and most schedules ignore it.
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Time sitting unbilled for six months rarely bills in full. The delay has usually made the decision already.
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A matter opened in ninety seconds costs hours later. Everything missing at opening gets chased at the worst possible moment.
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Most practices can produce a file that is missing half the correspondence, because half of it sits in somebody's inbox.
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A practice can lose more to unrecovered disbursements than to any single bad debt, and it never appears as a loss anywhere.
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Glass is the one material nobody trims on site. A measurement out by three millimetres is a new sheet and another week.
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Two hundred metres across flat clear ground is one job. The same figure on a slope behind a house is another.
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A short valuation feels like a verdict on the project. It is usually a verdict on the evidence the valuer had.
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Every developer has bought a site whose problem was discoverable. The cost of finding it later is the whole reason due diligence has an order.
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Most developers can name their build cost and not their monthly holding cost. The second number is what a delay actually costs.
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A funded project can still run out of cash for three weeks at a time, and the builder is the one who finds out first.
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The hardest part of selling off the plan is not the first contract. It is keeping forty buyers committed through two years of construction.
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A tender that comes in well under the others is telling you something, and it is rarely that the builder is more efficient.
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Timber moved more in two years than in the decade before it. A quote with no expiry hands that movement to whoever wrote it.
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Most cafes tolerate a daily variance because chasing it feels expensive. Tolerating it is what makes it grow.
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Most cafes stocktake once, thoroughly, and then never again. A shorter count done weekly beats it every time.
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A new starter thrown into a Saturday learns to survive rather than to work well, and the habits from that shift last for years.
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A roster copied from last week is a guess dressed as a plan, and it is usually wrong in both directions on the same day.
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A cafe owner can name their rent to the dollar and rarely their power bill. Rent holds steady; power reflects choices.
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Commission is the obvious cost of a delivery platform. The packaging, the kitchen disruption and the discounting are the ones that decide whether it pays.
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One table lost for a Saturday night is a real share of the night's takings, and most venues do nothing to prevent it.
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Most allergy mistakes happen at the handover, not in the kitchen. The information stops somewhere between the counter and the plate.
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Height is the number a customer quotes back at you. Almost everything expensive about tree work sits underneath it.
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The first visit earns the fee. The second one spends it, and the customer remembers only that the repair took two weeks.
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Most trade businesses treat a callback as bad luck. Logged properly, the same three causes explain most of them.
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Most trade safety paperwork gets completed properly and filed somewhere nobody can find. The filing is the part that fails.
·3 min read
Most trade businesses chase new enquiries while sitting on a database of people who already paid them once.
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A rate that has not moved in three years has moved. Your costs went up and you absorbed the difference.
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An apprentice slows you down for a year. How much, and for how long, depends almost entirely on the jobs you give them.
·3 min read
Ten per cent wastage is a habit, not a calculation. The real figure depends on the pattern, the tile size and how square the room is.
·3 min read
Climbing every roof you quote costs you an hour a job. Most of those hours buy you nothing you could not see from the ground.
·4 min read
Two rooms of the same size can differ by a day in preparation. A price per square metre hides that difference until you are standing in the room.
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The second trip is where a locksmith's margin goes. It is nearly always caused by one part that cost twelve dollars.
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A development sells over two years and settles in six weeks. Everything that was not ready arrives at once.
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A developer with sixty per cent presold and a lender who counts forty is not arguing about sales. They are arguing about conditions.
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Nobody budgets for their twelfth consultant. The line grows one reasonable engagement at a time, and it grows fastest before a project earns anything.
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A concreter loses days to rain that never fell, because the whole week was built around one pour that could have moved.
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Most cafe problems arrive at the shift change. The morning team knew, and nobody left a record.
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A cafe measures its day in takings and its future in regulars. Only one of those usually gets counted.
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A cafe usually prices a new menu from the old one's habits. That is how a cafe launches a dish that sells beautifully and earns nothing.
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Cafe equipment fails at the worst possible moment, because the worst possible moment is when it works hardest.
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Most equipment lists were built for the accountant. The one you need answers a different question: what can go out on a job tomorrow.
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A deposit is not a favour the customer does you. It is how a job funds its own materials, and it is the cheapest test of whether the work is actually happening.
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The cost of a subcontractor is easy. The hard part is knowing which job it belonged to, and finding that out months later is how margin disappears.
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The tag on the lead is for the person holding the tool. The register is for you, and it answers questions a tag never can.
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Retention gets treated as a discount discovered later. It is cash you have already earned, and most of it is lost to nobody asking.
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The callout is not expensive because the work is hard. It is expensive because it moves four other jobs, and most plumbers price only the first part.
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Markup is not a tax on the customer for your supplier relationship. It pays for the hours between ordering a part and installing it.
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Most landscaping businesses price the install carefully and the maintenance from memory. The maintenance is the half that pays the quiet months.
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The best time to sell a service agreement is the day the unit goes in, and almost nobody asks then.
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A cafe checks the price of every dish on its menu, and almost none of the prices its suppliers charge. The second list moves more often than the first.
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A feasibility that returns a single margin tells you what happens if every assumption holds. None of them will.
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The conditions that delay a start are rarely the difficult ones. They are the ones nobody read until the week they were needed.
·4 min readAustralia
Nearly every cleaning contract that goes bad goes the same way. The price went in writing, and the scope went by word of mouth.
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Food cost tells you something went wrong last month. Wastage tells you what, and it is the only one of the two you can act on this week.
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Every cafe has opening and closing checklists. Most of them get ticked in one pass at the door, which is the same as having none.
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A catering order is a second business running inside the first one, at exactly the hours the first one is busiest.
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A progress claim is a question about the contract, not an invoice with a bigger number. It is read by somebody looking for a reason to hold it.
·4 min read
A second site is not a second business needing its own login. Rostering, routes, pay and the staff list all follow a chooser at the top of the screen instead.
·6 min read
Six jobs and three vans is a scheduling problem people solve in their head every morning, badly. The fix is not a better memory, it is putting the drive time on the screen.
·6 min read
The gap between finishing a job and getting paid is mostly a gap in your own process. The cheapest way to close it is to take the money while you are still standing there.
·5 min read
Geofenced check in was built for businesses where everybody comes to one building. For a cleaner or a plumber, the only place that matters is whichever site they have reached.
·5 min read
The roster says what you planned. The timesheet says what happened. Payroll pays what somebody typed. The pay review screen sits between them.
·5 min read
A new starter exists in your business a fortnight before they exist in your software. That gap is where the roster gets written on paper and never makes it back.
·6 min read
The owner asks on the frame walk. You say yes. Under the Domestic Building Contracts Act, that may be the whole paperwork, and it is not enough.
·7 min readAustralia
Standard mix, weighed bowls, formula cards in grams, and a price list that says what happens past the standard.
·4 min read
Delivery apps keep a slice of every order. How to move your regulars onto ordering you own, and run the kitchen from a board instead of dockets.
·8 min read
The price depends on what the plans show and what is still in the ground. So quote the part you can see first.
·4 min read
Listings in one place, vendors in another and key dates in someone's diary. The software setup that brings a small agency or property business together.
·7 min read
The hot water unit gets charged. The second trip to the counter often does not.
·5 min read
The list is short. What trips businesses up is where the record goes after the technician writes it.
·5 min readAustralia
Two rounds with the same weekly cut do not sell for the same price. The difference is the driving.
·4 min read
"The kitchen wasn't done again." What you can show about last night decides how that email ends.
·4 min read
Priced per site, serviced per unit, per ladder, per roof. Where maintenance contracts lose their margin.
·4 min read
Two certificates, two clocks, and the forms that do not count. Quoted from the Electricity Safety Act 1998.
·5 min readAustralia
The standard never says temperature log. It names nine clauses. Here they are, with the moment in a cafe's day that each one suits.
·6 min readAustralia
The first professional quote sets the price every later one has to beat. What a quote holds, how a variation gets recorded, and what a follow up involves.
·6 min read
The gap between finishing a job and being paid for it is working capital you are lending out for free. What it costs, and the routine that closes it.
·6 min read
A plumbing book is two businesses under one licence: fast maintenance work and quoted projects. What each needs from software, and how the setup differs.
·6 min read
Five connected lists and three screens run most trade businesses. What each one holds, and how to set them up in Diract without a developer.
·6 min read
Electrical work has a compliance spine most trades do not: the certificate. How to run every job along one line, from enquiry to paid, with nothing left open.
·6 min read
Changes a builder writes down get paid. Changes waved through on site end in arguments. Five fields and one Friday routine that keep a job's variations paid.
·5 min read
Every second email asking a new client for something is a question the form could have asked. What to collect, in what order, and at which stage.
·4 min read
The usual par formula left one cafe 7 litres short of milk on a Sunday and over-ordered on Monday. Setting a par for each delivery instead.
·4 min read
Two things the menu price hides decide whether a dish makes its margin. What gets trimmed before food reaches the plate, and the GST in the price.
·4 min readAustralia
Costs rose $300,000 and a valuation came in 10% low. Which lending cap binds decides who pays for that, and it can change halfway through a project.
·4 min readAustralia
A build 40% paid, inside every budget line, can already be $50,000 over budget. The report columns that show it, and a monthly routine to keep them honest.
·4 min read
$50,000 of recorded time became $40,500 in the bank in one worked example. How to record every reduction so you can see which part is growing.
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Time left until the end of the week loses half its hours. How to record it the same day, and write entries that survive the partner's review and the client's reading.
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Access rarely goes wrong in one decision. It grows through exceptions that each seemed reasonable. How to set roles up so it does not.
·4 min read
Four rostering habits that never feel like a decision can take two thirds of a week's profit. How to cost the roster before it goes out, and catch them.
·4 min readAustralia
A 5% fall in sale prices took 35% off the land value in this example. The inputs a residual calculation needs, and the two to test before making an offer.
·4 min readAustralia
On one $2.4 million loan, interest ran from $103,067 to $119,718 depending only on the day each claim was paid. How to track it against the feasibility.
·4 min read
Most conflict check advice assumes a conflicts team. This is the process for when the person searching is also the person deciding.
·5 min readAustralia
Numbering schemes rarely break on day one. They break several years later. What breaks them, and a format that lasts.
·5 min read
Build exactly what you need, or bend your business around someone else's software? The real trade-offs, and a third option.
·7 min read