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Chattanooga flooring owner Marcy Tolbert lost a $14K hardwood job because a Saturday voicemail sat until Tuesday. Hear how one unified inbox, 30-second automated text-backs, and a real sales pipeline replaced her garage whiteboard and rescued the follow-up money.
Marcy Tolbert of Tolbert Tile and Flooring in Chattanooga joins Eric to break down the $14,000 hardwood job she lost to a Tuesday callback — and the operations overhaul that fixed her leaky lead funnel.
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Eric: ...so wait, fourteen thousand dollars. That was the job that broke you.
Marcy Tolbert: Yeah. Hardwood, whole main floor, the kind of job we live for. And I found out we lost it because the guy called us on a Saturday and I didn't see the voicemail until Tuesday night.
Eric: Tuesday.
Marcy Tolbert: Tuesday. He'd already signed with somebody else by Sunday afternoon.
Eric: Oof.
Marcy Tolbert: And the worst part, Eric, is he wasn't even mad. He just said, "I figured y'all were busy." Like he gave us every chance.
Eric: That's the one that stings. Okay, for folks just tuning in, give them the lay of the land. What's the business?
Marcy Tolbert: So I'm Marcy, I own Tolbert Tile and Flooring out of Chattanooga. Me and my husband started it nine years ago, we've got a four-person install crew now. Tile, hardwood, LVP, the occasional weird custom job somebody saw on Pinterest.
Eric: The Pinterest jobs.
Marcy Tolbert: Oh my gosh, the Pinterest jobs will end you.
Eric: And the leads, where were they coming in?
Marcy Tolbert: Everywhere. That was the problem. Facebook messages, the contact form on our site, Google Business calls, voicemail, my personal cell because people get my number from the truck...
Eric: Yard signs?
Marcy Tolbert: Yard signs, referrals texting my husband directly. Nobody had one place to look.
Eric: So when somebody came in through Facebook, who saw it?
Marcy Tolbert: Whoever happened to open the app. Which honestly was me, late, after the kids were down. And by then I'd forget which ones I'd already replied to.
Eric: Right. So before we get into the fix, let me just say back what I'm hearing. Because I want to be honest, this is not a you problem. This is a structural problem.
Marcy Tolbert: Okay.
Eric: You had, what, four or five inboxes? And no single place where a lead became a thing you owed somebody a response on.
Marcy Tolbert: Yes. Exactly that.
Eric: And the dirty secret of home services is that the business almost always goes to whoever calls back first. Not best. First.
Marcy Tolbert: I know that NOW.
Eric: Right, right.
Marcy Tolbert: I used to think our quotes were what won jobs. Our quotes are great. Doesn't matter if the quote shows up on Tuesday.
Eric: Doesn't matter at all. There's research floating around that the response window that actually matters is more like five minutes than five hours. After an hour you're basically cold.
Marcy Tolbert: An HOUR.
Eric: An hour. So when you tell me Tuesday, I'm not even surprised you lost it. I'm surprised you ever won anything.
Marcy Tolbert: Thanks, Eric.
Eric: I mean it as a compliment! Your work must be incredible because the funnel was Swiss cheese.
Marcy Tolbert: It really was.
Eric: Okay so March happens. You lose the hardwood job. What do you do?
Marcy Tolbert: I cried in my truck. Then I called my cousin who runs an HVAC company over in Knoxville and I said, "How are you not losing your mind." And he told me about a setup his marketing guy put him on.
Eric: Was it the all-in-one ops platform we run our agency on?
Marcy Tolbert: It was. I'd never heard of that category even existing.
Eric: Most people haven't. Okay so walk me through what changed first, because I want people listening to be able to actually do this.
Marcy Tolbert: The first thing, and this sounds dumb, was just... one inbox.
Eric: Not dumb. Huge.
Marcy Tolbert: Every Facebook message, every website form, every Google Business message, every text to our business line, every voicemail with a transcript, all of it lands in one place now.
Eric: One thread per customer.
Marcy Tolbert: One thread per customer. So if Karen messaged us on Facebook in April and then calls in June, I see the whole history. I'm not starting from zero.
Eric: That alone is the whole game for a lot of small operators. What about the response time piece?
Marcy Tolbert: That's the part I didn't even know I needed. The second a lead comes in, no matter the channel, they get a text back within like... what, thirty seconds?
Eric: Automated first touch.
Marcy Tolbert: Automated, but it doesn't sound automated. It says something like, "Hey, this is Marcy at Tolbert Tile, saw your message about your kitchen, I'm on a job site but tell me the square footage and your zip and I'll get you a ballpark today." Something like that.
Eric: And that's not you typing.
Marcy Tolbert: That is not me typing. That goes out at ten PM on a Sunday while I'm watching Yellowstone reruns.
Eric: And the customer feels seen.
Marcy Tolbert: They feel seen INSTANTLY. And here's what nobody told me, Eric. Half of them just answer the questions right there in the text. So by the time I actually look at it Monday morning, I already know the scope.
Eric: You've pre-qualified in your sleep.
Marcy Tolbert: In my sleep.
Eric: Okay let me push on something though. Because I hear this from contractors all the time. They go, "I don't want a robot talking to my customers, my whole brand is that I'm a real person."
Marcy Tolbert: I had that exact fear.
Eric: What changed your mind?
Marcy Tolbert: Honestly? I realized the robot was more responsive than I was. Like, which version of me does the customer prefer. The one that texts back in thirty seconds sounding like me, or the real me on Tuesday.
Eric: That's the whole bit right there.
Marcy Tolbert: And we wrote the messages. It's our voice. It's not some generic "Thank you for your inquiry."
Eric: That matters. The tone has to be yours. Okay, so one inbox, instant text-back. What was next?
Marcy Tolbert: The pipeline. Which, before, was a whiteboard in our garage.
Eric: A literal whiteboard.
Marcy Tolbert: A literal whiteboard with my husband's handwriting that nobody else could read.
Marcy Tolbert: Now every lead moves through stages. New, contacted, measured, quoted, scheduled, done. And if somebody sits in "quoted" for more than three days without a response, I get a nudge.
Eric: The follow-up nudge.
Marcy Tolbert: That's where the money was hiding, Eric. I'm not kidding. The follow-up.
Eric: Say more.
Marcy Tolbert: So we send a quote. Customer says, "Let me think about it, talk to my husband." Old me, that lead is gone. I'm not calling them back, that feels pushy.
Eric: Right.
Marcy Tolbert: New setup, day three a friendly text goes out. "Hey, any questions on that quote? Happy to walk through it." Day seven, another one. Day fourteen, one more. And then it stops.
Eric: Not annoying, just present.
Marcy Tolbert: Just present. And the number of people who go, "Oh my gosh, thanks for the nudge, yes let's book it" is... I would not have believed it.
Eric: This is the part that I think gets undersold. Most small businesses don't have a lead problem. They have a follow-up problem.
Marcy Tolbert: Preach.
Eric: You're spending money on Facebook ads, on Google, on yard signs, on referrals, and then the leads die in a voicemail box.
Marcy Tolbert: Or on a whiteboard.
Eric: Or on a whiteboard. Okay, what about the team? You've got four people on the crew. How do they plug in?
Marcy Tolbert: So my lead installer, Dre, he doesn't touch the lead side. He doesn't need to. But when a job moves to "scheduled," it auto-creates the job card with the address, the scope, the materials list, and that lands in his view.
Eric: And you keep that in Notion or in the platform?
Marcy Tolbert: We do the job execution stuff in Notion. The crew likes it, it's clean, it's got the checklists. But the lead-to-quote-to-scheduled part all lives in the platform.
Eric: That's a good split actually. Use each tool for what it's good at.
Marcy Tolbert: Yeah, I tried to do everything in one place at first and it got muddy.
Eric: It always does. Okay, results. Because people are gonna want to know. And I want to be careful here, we're not making income claims, but qualitatively, what changed?
Marcy Tolbert: Qualitatively. I sleep.
Eric: That's a result.
Marcy Tolbert: That's the first one. I sleep. I don't wake up at two AM thinking about who I forgot to call.
Eric: What else.
Marcy Tolbert: The leads that used to fall through the cracks don't anymore. I can't give you a percentage that I'd swear to in court, but it's a lot. It's the difference between feeling like we were leaking and feeling like we're holding water.
Eric: That's a great way to put it. Holding water.
Marcy Tolbert: And the customers are happier even when we DON'T win the job. Because at least we showed up. At least we answered.
Eric: That's reputation compounding. Those people refer you later.
Marcy Tolbert: They already have. We had a guy this spring who we quoted in October, didn't pick us, then his sister needed a bathroom done and he sent her our way because we'd been "so on top of it."
Eric: That's the long game right there.
Marcy Tolbert: That's the long game.
Eric: Okay. The thing I always ask. Somebody is listening to this in their truck right now. They're a one-person, two-person, four-person operation. They are bleeding leads. What is the ONE thing they should do this week?
Marcy Tolbert: One thing. Okay. Set up an automatic text-back on every single channel where a lead can reach you.
Eric: Just that.
Marcy Tolbert: Just that. Even if you don't do the pipeline, even if you don't do the follow-up sequences, even if you don't change anything else. If somebody messages you, they get a text back within a minute that sounds like you and asks the two questions you need to quote them.
Eric: Why that one?
Marcy Tolbert: Because it's the one that buys you time. It turns a five-minute window into a five-hour window. And it costs you almost nothing to set up.
Eric: That's the right answer. I'd add one tiny thing, which is, write the message in your own voice. Read it out loud. If it sounds like a corporation, rewrite it.
Marcy Tolbert: Yes. Mine has a typo in it on purpose.
Eric: Wait, really?
Marcy Tolbert: There's a missing apostrophe. Because that's how I text.
Eric: That's brilliant. That's the kind of thing that makes people go, "Oh, a real person."
Marcy Tolbert: A real person who happens to be very fast.
Eric: A real person who happens to be very fast. Marcy, this was great. Thank you for being honest about the hard part. The truck-cry part.
Marcy Tolbert: Listen, somebody needed to hear it.
Eric: Somebody definitely needed to hear it. Hey, if you're listening and any of this hit a nerve, do me a favor and hit subscribe so the next one finds you. We're doing more of these conversations with operators who actually run the thing, not gurus.
Marcy Tolbert: Not gurus.
Eric: Not gurus. Marcy, where can people find your work if they're in Chattanooga?
Marcy Tolbert: Tolbert Tile and Flooring. We're on Facebook, we're on Google, and now... we'll actually answer.
Eric: Now you'll actually answer. That's the show. We'll see y'all next week.
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