I am Stephen Higgins. My day job is assistant project manager at a general contractor company on Cape Cod. There are actually two businesses under that roof, a custom home builder and a modular home builder, and part of my job is being first contact for every homeowner who calls either one.
I would be on a jobsite when the phone rang, and by the time I called back that afternoon they had already hired somebody else. Not because we were more expensive or worse at the work. Because somebody answered first.
So I built the fix for myself. A text back on missed calls, because that was the loudest leak. Then instant replies on the website form. Then self-booking, reminders, review requests. Then I started pulling my own paperwork into it, the call notes and the follow-up drafts and the schedule checks that used to eat my Fridays.
It now runs the lead flow for both companies, and I stopped being the bottleneck.