Alex B

@roleandtell I'll do a visual indicator instead

A reasonable solution is they don’t need to see the queue. Don’t show them they’re 67 of 103. Have it show “2-3 weeks”. When you order a package, UPS isn’t showing you how many other boxes there are for you to compare yourself to. All you care about it when YOUR box is expected to arrive.

One of the issues we run into a lot is people taking off work for the day they were originally scheduled for the job. We're a highly weather and equipment dependent business. Wet ground and equipment repairs cause dates to move often. Sometimes forward, and sometimes back. We alert the customer in every communication with them from the time of quote to the scheduled job that the date is always subject to change and that a date could even change the night before. We have well defined scopes and processes for when a customer is not on-site for the work. They don't need to be there. We will send them before, progress, and after photos all throughout the day. However... even with all that, our number one complaint is they took off work to be there and we had to reschedule the job. Like in the case for this screenshot, we left a voicemail, sent an email, and sent a text alerting him of the date change a couple days before... but they still took off work and still got upset. This is not a one off example, it happens quite a bit. I know many companies will just say "ehh we'll be there sometime next month" but I don't think that's a good solution either. I've considered building a live job queue rather than a schedule, but that seems discouraging to see you're 74 jobs out. Honestly not sure what the solution is here. I think it's unique for a customer to work with a weather and equipment dependent business, and no matter how much we try to set expectations, it's difficult for them to understand.

@Roschili I think it can be done. I'm building it now and will make a video on it.

@bprintco We've talked a lot about Domino's Pizza Tracker. Some way to provide an estimated job time, but then provide updates when the job has been dispatched, tech is on the way, tech has arrived, problem identified, repair completed. Much easier said than done.

Yeah, we do the same thing. It's nowhere near a majority of customers but it's 2 or 3 every month. I'm making a queue system instead. It should solve this and a lot of other scheduling problems. The only thing I'm worried about is someone booking a job and seeing they're number 67 in the queue. Kinda removes the personal experience.

Odd. I’ve never once encountered that. Clearly you’re at a much higher volume but I’m upfront with people that I can get them a “pencil-in day” but due to weather etc, it’s not expected to have a firm date ahead of time. Never once has anyone had a problem with that since I’m upfront about it in-person. May be worth going back to first principles with clients, the automations are great but on the customers standpoint, it’s dehumanizing. It now feels like they’re dealing with the cable company and not a person they pressed palms with to reach an agreement on. I’m not sure how to solve it with your scale but I’d suggest whoever is running your quotes stop focusing so much on set dates/times/systems since that simply can’t work reliably.

Actually… I figured it out I think. I’ll build a custom software that’s a queue system and shows an estimated date range for completion. That estimated range will shorten as they move up in the queue. This allows us huge flexibility but also still gives them a range of estimated completion dates and an idea of how many jobs are ahead of them.

Oof. Equipment dealers were selling pre tariff and post tariff machines. Huge markups to absorb tariff increases. They get all that money back plus their markup, Americans lost that money, and the resale value of post tariff machines plummet 🤦‍♂️

@marshssg22 Who’s crying? I’m saying change your strategy to something better

@bprintco I do I get them too lol keep crying on here though that’ll fix it

PSA to agency guys… If you play the numbers game with cold outreach, you will lose. Why? Well… there’s 10x more of you than there are of your target customers. What you see when you look around at competitors are somewhat established companies. But the reality is much different. You don’t see the tens of thousands of high school and college kids that watched a YT video on how to sell an automation. These kids have a ChatGPT subscription and $500 to throw into Twilio, and they spam the fuck out of your target customers. Keep that in mind.

@marshssg22 I don’t think you comprehend the volume. If I responded to each one, it’s all I’d have time to do.

@bprintco Just say no to the email and move on with your day it’s not that serious man🤣 cold email does work though, you’d be surprised

@localgoogleguy I didn't even consider the overseas spammers. It's so bad. I'm cleaning out hundreds of cold emails a day and taking on dozens of calls and texts. If it weren't for AI being able to fight the other direction, you'd have someone full time just fielding this agency spam.

This is what killed lead generation, SEO and all sorts of other revenue generating activities for me. Between the overseas spammers and, now AI, with people who have no idea of what damage they are really doing, it's quite the mess. So, I'm building a local directory for non-PE home services. Super niche.

@Roschili Oh okay, I always thought it was Pier-Tech

@bprintco Purr-tech youtube.com/watch?v=IvkXJD…

What if I told you, you could completely automate a year of social media content for your business with AI and it doesn’t look like AI slop? What if I told you it could be done for a few cents? Video and photos. 365 unique images and 52 unique videos can be generated simply from a single prompt and automatically scheduled and optimized to every social media platform for an entire year’s worth of content. GPT 5.6 unlocked this problem I’ve been working on for a while. It generates the Hyperframes templates and prompts to train a lesser local model to pump out quality content. The frontier model templates and prompts are passed to a rack of Nvidia DGX Sparks that pump out the content fast and for free with local models and open source software. This is the same thing I’ve been doing with Brushworks for a year that gets 200k views per week. Except I finally was able to package this content marketing and do it for any business. You can provide the raw images and videos you want, or we’ll make them for you. Sign up for the list at heavymetric.com to get updated when we launch. SMB first. Agencies pay double.

@Roschili I still don't know how to pronounce Pirtek 😂

@bprintco Signed up. Let's ride

@nijaboarder @realalitrades Dude, there's something about agency guys that lose their shit when you encourage business owners to handle their own marketing or create something they could never figure out because nobody made a step by step "How To" video on YT for it lol

@realalitrades @bprintco Ali is salty 🧂🤣

@realalitrades lol agency owners like you make up 99% of my block list. How dare business owners do their own marketing!

@bprintco Looks like shit

@ZachLaughlin @marshssg22 There are many more local businesses that will get better results from offline marketing than online Zach

@bprintco @marshssg22 The exception proves the rule Alex

One of the biggest perks of running the marketing for your own business is you don’t have the handcuffs an agency does. An agency has to prove itself every month, so they chase stuff that’s easy to measure. Someone saw an ad, clicked the link, filled out the form, bought the thing. That’s not bad. Good agencies are worth a lot of money, but it also means everybody ends up fighting over the same few channels. Google ads. Facebook ads. Landing pages. Retargeting. Whatever. Meanwhile, a $25 yard sign in the right neighborhood might beat all of it. A wrapped truck sitting on the right road might bring in more calls than a “perfect” ad campaign. A banner at the right local event might get you in front of 500 people who want to buy what you're selling. A good relationship with a realtor, builder, excavator, tree guy, or insurance agent might be worth more than your entire ad budget. The problem is none of that fits neatly into a dashboard. Nobody fills out your form and says, “I saw your truck three times, then saw your yard sign, then asked my neighbor, then Googled you.” They just show up as a website lead and digital gets the credit. Digital marketing is useful. We use it, but it's small potatoes compared to our offline lead sources. If you run a local service business and your entire marketing plan lives on a screen, you’re missing the best stuff

@RepresentUsPlz Ah man, that reminds me of a quote I did once. This lady had a crazy dog that was jumping all over me the entire time. It ripped my shirt and everything. She didn't try to stop it, apologize, or anything. Just acted like it wasn't even happening.

@bprintco Real text from a customer yesterday after receiving a message that set the expectation that he will secure all his pets (we’ve had a tech get before, hence the policy!) unbelievable

😂😂😂

@ZachLaughlin @marshssg22 It depends on your business. If you sell trail cutting, I guarantee you'd get 10x more customers sponsoring a horse show or off road event than you'd ever get on the internet.

@marshssg22 @bprintco Agreed and insane original take Nothing beats paid media for scale and velocity

GPT 5.6 is out. New AI model releases make me feel like when I was 15 and a new video game came out. Load up the mini fridge with energy drinks and I’ll be unreachable for at least the next 24 hours ✌️