systemise trade business
The One-Man-Band Operations Manual: Systemise Your Trade Business
Right now, your business probably lives entirely in your head - prices, suppliers, wording, standards, the lot. That works until you're ill, buried, or trying to hire, and it makes the business worth almost nothing without you in it. An operations manual fixes this in a few evenings: one document holding your quoting formula, rate card, merchants, standard replies, checklists and payment terms. Here's how to build it.
Why a one-man band needs a manual
Three reasons. Illness and holiday: with nothing written down, a week off means the business simply stops. Consistency: decisions made fresh every time drift - especially prices quoted at 9pm when you're knackered. Value: a business that runs on a documented system can one day take on staff or be sold; a business that runs on your memory can't. The manual isn't corporate box-ticking - it's you, written down.
Step 1: Write down your quoting formula and rate card
Start with the money. Write the actual formula you use, even if you've never said it out loud:
Then the rate card: your ten most-quoted jobs with standard prices, plus day rate, call-out fee, and your materials markup. Two things happen the moment this exists on paper: your quotes stop drifting cheaper when you're tired, and you can hand pricing to someone else - an app, an office half-day, eventually an employee - without the numbers wobbling.
Step 2: List your merchants, accounts and go-to products
One page: each merchant, your account number, the branch and contact you deal with, and the products you fit as standard - the exact consumer unit, the exact tap cartridge, the silicone you trust. This page is what lets a subbie cover your week, and it's also quietly useful to you: standardised products mean fewer surprises, easier warranties and faster quoting.
Step 3: Save your standard replies
You already have perfect wording for the messages you send ten times a week - you just retype it from memory every time. Capture the enquiry response, the quote follow-up, the running-late apology, the invoice email and the payment chase, and store them where your thumb can find them. Replying to a new enquiry in ninety seconds with a polished message, from a trench, is a genuine competitive weapon.
Step 4: Turn each job type into a checklist
- ✓ Arrival: park considerately, dust sheets down, confirm scope with the customer
- ✓ Before photos taken and saved to the job
- ✓ The work itself, in your standard order
- ✓ Certificates or test results issued where relevant
- ✓ After photos, tidy-up to your written standard, walk-round with the customer
- ✓ Invoice sent before you leave the street
Adapt that skeleton per job type. The point isn't that you'd forget - it's that on the busiest weeks, the small finishing touches are exactly what slips, and they're what reviews and call-backs hang on.
Step 5: Fix your warranty terms and chase cadence
Decide once, in writing: what your workmanship warranty covers and for how long, your payment terms, and the chase sequence - for example invoice on completion, friendly reminder at day seven, phone call at day fourteen, no new work for that customer beyond day thirty. Late payment thrives on vagueness; a written cadence you follow every time gets you paid without a single awkward improvised conversation.
Step 6: Store it where you work and review it quarterly
One document, cloud storage, phone shortcut - never a binder in the office you don't have. Put a repeating reminder in your calendar for the first Sunday of each quarter: update prices against what materials now cost, add any new reply you've caught yourself typing twice, delete what's stale. Twenty minutes a quarter keeps it alive; a manual nobody updates dies within a year.
From the tools: my brother built his manual the hard way - a shoulder injury in 2023 took him off the tools for nearly three weeks with nothing written down. Jobs stalled, two customers walked, and his subbie rang him at the physio's about which RCBOs he fits. Afterwards he spent two evenings writing everything into one document: formula, rate card, merchants, replies, chase cadence. Last winter, flu - his subbie ran a full week off the manual and rang him exactly twice. He reckons those two evenings of writing were worth more than any tool in the van, because they turned three lost weeks into one slightly awkward one.
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