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Marcy from Halverson Tile and Flooring in Eau Claire loses at least two kitchen jobs a month to slow follow-up. We diagnose the real problem (leads scattered across Facebook, email, a website form, and a notepad) and build a one-inbox pipeline with auto-text and 3-day nudges.
Marcy Halverson of Halverson Tile and Flooring (Eau Claire, WI) joins to unpack why great installers still lose jobs: the leads are hiding. We rebuild her intake into one inbox, one pipeline, and automatic follow-up so kitchens stop slipping through the cracks.
In this episode:
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Eric: So wait, go back. You said there's a notepad by the register?
Marcy Halverson: Yeah. There's a notepad by the register. There's my email. There's the Facebook messages. And then there's the form on the website that goes to my husband's email which he checks like... Sundays.
Eric: Sundays.
Marcy Halverson: Sundays. If the Packers aren't on.
Eric: Okay. And how many of those are quote requests in a given week? Ballpark.
Marcy Halverson: Oh man. Fifteen? Twenty if it's spring. Everybody wants their kitchen done before Easter and then nobody wants anything done in August.
Eric: Right.
Marcy Halverson: And I know... I KNOW... we lose at least two kitchens a month. Easy. Just because nobody circled back inside a week.
Eric: Two kitchens a month.
Marcy Halverson: Minimum. Probably more. The ones that sting are when I run into them at the hardware store and they're like, oh yeah, we ended up going with somebody else, you guys never called back.
Eric: Yeah. That one hurts.
Marcy Halverson: That one hurts.
Eric: Okay so Marcy, before we even get into what to do about it, just... tell people what you actually do. Who you are.
Marcy Halverson: Sure. So I'm Marcy, I own Halverson Tile and Flooring. We're out of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Me and my husband started it about eleven years ago, right after he left the union. We've got four installers now including him, and I do pretty much everything else. Quotes, scheduling, materials, payroll, you name it.
Eric: And the work itself, kitchens, bathrooms...
Marcy Halverson: Kitchens, bathrooms, we do a lot of mudrooms up here because of the salt and the snow. Some commercial, not a ton. Mostly residential remodels.
Eric: Got it. So the work is good.
Marcy Halverson: Work is great. Guys are busy. That's not the problem.
Eric: The problem is upstream of the work.
Marcy Halverson: The problem is the inbox. Three inboxes. And a notepad.
Eric: Right. Okay so here's what I want to do. I wanna diagnose this before we fix it, because I think most people in your spot think they have a follow-up problem and they actually don't.
Marcy Halverson: Okay.
Eric: You don't have a follow-up problem. You have a... everything-lives-in-a-different-place problem.
Marcy Halverson: Hm.
Eric: Follow-up is downstream of that. You can't follow up on something you can't SEE. Right? If a lead comes into Facebook on Tuesday and you don't look at Facebook till Friday, that lead is already cold, and it has nothing to do with your discipline. It has to do with the fact that the lead is hiding.
Marcy Halverson: Oh that's... yeah. That's it. It's not that I'm lazy. It's that I don't know they exist.
Eric: You're not lazy. You're on a jobsite for ten hours. The idea that you're gonna come home and go hunt across four places for people who want to give you money, that's insane. Nobody does that.
Marcy Halverson: Well I don't.
Eric: Nobody does. So step one isn't a CRM. Step one is just... one inbox. All the leads land in one spot. I don't care where they came from. Facebook, website form, somebody texting the business line, somebody emailing you... they all show up in one list.
Marcy Halverson: Okay.
Eric: And that's actually the thing that we solved for our agency a couple years ago, and it's the same thing we end up setting up for most of the trades people we work with. We run everything on an all-in-one ops platform. Lead capture, texting, email, pipeline, calendars, invoices, all of it in one window.
Marcy Halverson: One window.
Eric: One window. One tab. So when a form fills out on your website, it doesn't go to your husband's email anymore. It goes into the platform, it pings your phone, and it also fires off an automatic text to the lead that says, hey Marcy here from Halverson, got your request, I'll have a real number for you within forty-eight hours.
Marcy Halverson: Wait. Automatic?
Eric: Automatic.
Marcy Halverson: And it's from me.
Eric: It's from your number. From your business number. Says your name. Reads like you typed it.
Marcy Halverson: Okay. That alone...
Eric: That alone changes the game. Because now the lead doesn't go find another tile guy on Thursday. They got a text back inside four minutes. In their head, you already won.
Marcy Halverson: Yeah.
Eric: Even if you don't call them back till the next evening. Doesn't matter. They heard from you.
Marcy Halverson: Everybody else is still radio silent.
Eric: Everybody else is still radio silent. In the trades, speed of response is almost the entire ballgame. The folks who get back to the lead first, they win the job something like... I don't want to throw a specific number out, but it's a LOT.
Marcy Halverson: Yeah I've heard that.
Eric: Okay. So that's the capture piece. Now the second thing, and this is where it gets good for you specifically.
Marcy Halverson: Mhm.
Eric: You said at least two kitchens a month slip because nobody circles back inside a week.
Marcy Halverson: Right.
Eric: What if you literally never had to remember to circle back?
Marcy Halverson: Oh sure, Eric.
Eric: No, hear me out. Inside this platform there's a pipeline. Think of it as a row of buckets. Bucket one, new lead. Bucket two, quote sent. Bucket three, follow-up needed. Bucket four, booked. Bucket five, done.
Marcy Halverson: Okay.
Eric: And every lead is a card. The card moves across the buckets. When you send a quote, you drag the card into quote sent. The second it lands in quote sent, a timer starts in the background.
Marcy Halverson: A timer.
Eric: A timer. Three days go by, nothing happened, the card auto-moves itself into follow-up needed AND it fires a text to the customer. Hey, just wanted to see if you had any questions on the number I sent over. That's it.
Marcy Halverson: And I don't do anything.
Eric: You don't do anything. You SET it one time.
Marcy Halverson: oh my god.
Marcy Halverson: No because that's the whole thing. That's EXACTLY the thing. I write the quote, I feel good, I send it, and then it's just gone. It falls off the earth. And a week later I'm standing in front of a shower pan going, wait, did the Johnsons ever get back to me?
Eric: Right. And the Johnsons didn't get back because the Johnsons forgot too. They're busy. They've got jobs. They've got kids. Everybody forgot.
Marcy Halverson: Everybody forgot.
Eric: Nobody's mad. Nobody's lost interest. They just... forgot. And a seven dollar automated text pulls that job right back out of the fire.
Marcy Halverson: Okay. Keep going.
Eric: Then the third piece. And this one's the one that your husband is gonna love.
Marcy Halverson: Oh boy.
Eric: The calendar.
Marcy Halverson: Oh.
Eric: You stop playing phone tag to book the in-home measure.
Marcy Halverson: HOW.
Eric: When somebody's a hot lead, you text them a link. One tap. They see your actual availability. They pick a Tuesday at ten. Boom. It's on your calendar, it's on his calendar, and the customer gets a reminder the morning of.
Marcy Halverson: Wait so I'm not texting back and forth going, does Thursday work, no how about Friday, no how about...
Eric: You're not doing any of that. That whole dance, which by the way can take four or five texts over two days, is gone. One link. One tap.
Marcy Halverson: I spend... I probably spend an hour a day on that dance.
Eric: An hour a day on scheduling.
Marcy Halverson: Easy.
Eric: That's five hours a week. That's half a day of actually bidding work. Or being on a jobsite. Or not being at your dining room table at nine at night.
Marcy Halverson: Or sleeping.
Eric: Or sleeping. Yeah.
Marcy Halverson: Okay. So. Hitting pause for a second. This all sounds great. How complicated is it to set up? Because I am not a tech person, Eric. I am a tile person.
Eric: Totally fair question. The honest answer is the first setup is not something I'd want you to do on a Tuesday night by yourself. It's not hard, but there's a few decisions to make. What are the stages of your pipeline. What exactly does the first text say. How many days until the follow-up. That kind of thing.
Marcy Halverson: Right.
Eric: So the way we usually run it, we sit down with somebody for about an hour, we build the pipeline together, we write the texts in their voice...
Marcy Halverson: In my voice.
Eric: In your voice. The texts have to sound like you. If a Marcy text goes out and it sounds like a robot wrote it, your customers know. They've heard you talk.
Marcy Halverson: Yeah they have.
Eric: So we write it in your voice. Little grammatical quirks and all. And then after that first hour of setup, you just... work the pipeline. Drag cards. The system does the chasing.
Marcy Halverson: And where does Notion fit? Because somebody told me I should be using Notion.
Eric: Yeah. Notion's great. We use Notion. But Notion is a workspace. It's where you put your SOPs, your onboarding docs, your material supplier list, your template for a bathroom bid. It's your filing cabinet. It's not where leads live. People try to run leads out of Notion and it falls apart about four weeks in.
Marcy Halverson: Because it doesn't text people.
Eric: Because it doesn't text people. Notion's a brain. The ops platform is a nervous system. You want both, but you want them doing their job.
Marcy Halverson: Okay. Nervous system. Filing cabinet. Got it.
Eric: Yeah.
Marcy Halverson: So let me ask you this. The two kitchens a month I think I'm losing.
Eric: Mhm.
Marcy Halverson: Realistically. If I just did the one-inbox, instant-text-back, three-day-follow-up thing. How much of that comes back?
Eric: I don't wanna throw you a number because every market's different. But I will tell you, almost every tradesperson we've put through this setup, the first thing they say inside sixty days is some version of, I booked a job this week that I would have missed. Just one. One job pays for the whole thing many, many times over.
Marcy Halverson: Yeah a kitchen pays for a lot.
Eric: A kitchen pays for a lot.
Marcy Halverson: Okay.
Eric: And look, I don't want anybody listening to this thinking, oh I'm gonna install this tomorrow and double my revenue. That's not how it works. What it does is it stops the bleeding. The leads you ALREADY paid for, whether that's your website, your yard signs, word of mouth, your Facebook page... those leads stop falling through the cracks. You're not generating more. You're just not losing the ones you have.
Marcy Halverson: Plug the holes.
Eric: Plug the holes. That's the whole first phase. Plug the holes. Then down the road, once you can see what's coming in and what's converting, THEN you turn on more lead sources. But not before. Because if you turn on more lead sources into a leaky bucket, you just lose more leads and spend more money.
Marcy Halverson: Right. Bigger bucket, same holes.
Eric: Same holes. Yeah.
Marcy Halverson: Okay. So. What's the one thing. If somebody's listening to this, they're me, they're sitting in a truck right now with a notepad in the console...
Eric: Yeah.
Marcy Halverson: What do I do this week?
Eric: One thing. Just one. This week, pick ONE place leads come in that you don't check often. For you it's probably your husband's email with the website form.
Marcy Halverson: Yep.
Eric: Forward it. Just forward that inbox to the inbox you actually read. That's it. That's the whole move. Doesn't cost anything. Takes four minutes. And it means that one source of leads stops disappearing into a Sunday afternoon.
Marcy Halverson: Just forward it.
Eric: Just forward it. You don't need a platform to do that. You don't need me. You don't need anything. You just need to admit which inbox is the one you actually look at, and point everything there. ONE place. Even just getting from three places to two is a win.
Marcy Halverson: That's... that's so stupid simple.
Eric: It's stupid simple. And then once you've lived with that for a week and you can feel the difference of just seeing them... THEN you call somebody and talk about pipelines and automations and all the rest of it.
Marcy Halverson: Don't buy the fancy thing first.
Eric: Don't buy the fancy thing first. See the leads first. Everything else is downstream.
Marcy Halverson: Okay. I can do that. I can do that tonight.
Eric: You can do that tonight. On your couch. In like four minutes.
Marcy Halverson: In four minutes.
Eric: Yeah.
Marcy Halverson: Alright.
Eric: Marcy, thank you. This was really good. I think a lot of people are gonna hear themselves in this one.
Marcy Halverson: Oh I hope so. I feel like I just confessed in a church.
Eric: Hey, the notepad behind the register is in a lot of churches.
Marcy Halverson: It is in a lot of churches.
Eric: If you're listening and this sounded like your business, do us a favor, hit subscribe so the next one shows up for you. We've got more operators like Marcy coming on, same kind of conversation, real pain point, real fix, no fluff.
Marcy Halverson: And forward the inbox.
Eric: And forward the inbox. That's your homework. We'll see you next week.
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