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San Antonio's Sabinal Tile and Stone owner unpacks how juggling three inboxes, voicemail, and Instagram DMs was costing him jobs. We diagnose the real problem (surface area, not speed) and lay out a one-inbox ops stack with 3-minute auto-text and missed-call text-back.
The owner of Sabinal Tile and Stone in San Antonio walks through the chaos of chasing leads across five surfaces — and the simple automation shape that fixes it. If you run a trades or home-services business, this one is for you.
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Eric: ...okay so before we hit record you said "three inboxes plus voicemail plus the DMs." I want you to say that again on tape because I think every operator listening just felt something in their chest.
Marisol Trevino: Yeah. Three inboxes. Plus voicemail. Plus Instagram DMs. And honestly? Sometimes Facebook Messenger too, if somebody found the old page.
Eric: Of course.
Marisol Trevino: So it's like... a quote request comes in and it could be in any of five places, and I'm on a job site with tile dust in my hair, and my guys are texting me about a substrate issue, and by the time I sit down at night the lead is twelve hours old.
Eric: Twelve if you're lucky.
Marisol Trevino: If I'm lucky, yeah. Sometimes it's two days. And I KNOW, I know what happens after two days.
Eric: They booked somebody else.
Marisol Trevino: They booked somebody else. Or worse, they reply and they're already annoyed. Like, "oh, you finally got back to me." And now I'm starting the conversation from behind.
Eric: Yeah. And for people who don't know you, tell them what the business is.
Marisol Trevino: Sure. So I run Sabinal Tile and Stone. We're in San Antonio. Flooring, backsplash, showers, a little bit of countertop work when it makes sense. Five of us total. I started it nine years ago after I left a commercial GC where I was, um, mostly project managing.
Eric: Nine years. That's not a startup, that's a business.
Marisol Trevino: It's a business. And that's the thing that was killing me. Because I'd built the business, but the front door of the business was falling apart.
Eric: Say more about that.
Marisol Trevino: Like, everything past the sale? Dialed. We show up when we say. The install is clean. Our repeat and referral is honestly what's kept us alive. But getting somebody FROM a form fill or a DM to a scheduled walkthrough? That was chaos.
Eric: And you told me you thought you were losing what, two or three jobs a month to it?
Marisol Trevino: At least. And these aren't small jobs. A backsplash is one thing but a master bath, a whole first floor... that's real money walking out the door because nobody hit reply fast enough.
Eric: Okay. So can I diagnose for a second? Because I don't think your problem is what you think it is.
Marisol Trevino: Go ahead.
Eric: You think your problem is speed. Right? "I need to reply faster."
Marisol Trevino: Yeah.
Eric: Your problem is actually surface area. You have too many surfaces where a lead can land, and no single place where they all show up as ONE list of humans who want to give you money.
Marisol Trevino: Yeah. When you say it like that.
Eric: And so every time you sit down, you're not working a list. You're doing a scavenger hunt.
Marisol Trevino: That's exactly it. That's exactly what it feels like. And I tried, I mean, twice I tried to fix it with a shared spreadsheet.
Eric: How'd that go.
Marisol Trevino: How do you think it went.
Eric: I know how it went. I just want you to say it.
Marisol Trevino: It worked for like eleven days. Both times. Almost exactly. And then we'd get slammed on a job and nobody's updating the sheet, and then it's just... a graveyard of half-entered leads and I'm the only one still typing in it, and then I stop too.
Eric: Right. Because a spreadsheet is a place you have to REMEMBER to go. And when you're busy, the thing you forget first is the thing that isn't yelling at you.
Marisol Trevino: Yes.
Eric: Okay, so let me tell you what we did for our agency, and honestly what we now set up for a lot of the trades clients we work with, because your situation is basically the standard situation.
Marisol Trevino: Please.
Eric: So we run everything, and I mean everything, on one all-in-one ops platform. I'm not going to name it because it doesn't matter, there's a few good ones and the specific one is less important than the shape of it.
Marisol Trevino: Okay.
Eric: The shape of it is: every lead source pipes into one inbox. Your website form, your Facebook lead ad, your Instagram DMs, your Google Business messages, your missed calls, your voicemails transcribed. One inbox. One list. One place.
Marisol Trevino: One place.
Eric: One place. And the SECOND a lead hits that inbox, an automation fires. Not you. The system.
Marisol Trevino: What does the automation do.
Eric: For your business I'd do something like this. Inside of, call it, three minutes, that lead gets a text. Not an email. A text. From your business number. Something like, "Hey, this is Marisol at Sabinal, saw your request about the backsplash, are you still looking? I can get you on the calendar this week for a walkthrough."
Marisol Trevino: Within three minutes.
Eric: Within three minutes. And here's the thing, that text isn't you typing. That text goes out whether you're on a scaffold, whether you're asleep, whether you're at your kid's game.
Marisol Trevino: Okay.
Eric: And when they reply, THAT'S when a human gets pulled in. But now the human, you or whoever, is replying to a warm conversation, not cold-starting from a form fill.
Marisol Trevino: That's a different job.
Eric: That's a completely different job. That's the job you can actually do at nine pm on the couch instead of dreading it.
Marisol Trevino: And all five sources go into the same inbox? Even the DMs?
Eric: Even the DMs. Even the missed calls. The missed call one is honestly the sneaky big one for trades.
Marisol Trevino: Say more.
Eric: So the platform watches your business line. If somebody calls and you don't pick up, it fires a text back to them within, like, thirty seconds. "Hey, sorry we missed you, this is the fastest way to reach us, what's going on?"
Marisol Trevino: Oh my god.
Eric: Yeah.
Marisol Trevino: Because right now a missed call is just... gone. Unless they leave a voicemail, and nobody leaves voicemails anymore.
Eric: Nobody leaves voicemails. And a missed call from a homeowner who's ready to spend money, that is the most expensive silence in your business.
Marisol Trevino: I've never thought about it that way.
Eric: And that one automation, missed call auto-text, I have seen that alone recover more revenue for small trades operators than almost anything else we set up. It's not clever. It's just... plumbing.
Marisol Trevino: Plumbing.
Eric: The whole thing is plumbing. You're not being smarter, you're just making sure water doesn't leak out of five different holes.
Marisol Trevino: Okay so walk me through what happens after the text back. Because that's where I get scared. I don't want it to feel like a bot.
Eric: Great instinct. So the first message should sound like you, because it IS from you, it's just pre-written. Short. Human. First name. Reference what they asked about. That's it. Don't try to book them, don't try to qualify them, don't send a link to a scheduler.
Marisol Trevino: Why not the scheduler right away?
Eric: Because a scheduler link to somebody who hasn't said yes to a conversation yet feels like a form. And they just filled out a form. They don't want another form. They want a person.
Marisol Trevino: Okay.
Eric: So the first text is just, are you still looking, essentially. When they say yes, THEN the follow-up can say, "great, easiest thing is grab a slot here, or reply with a couple times that work for you." Give them both. Some people want the link. Some people want to text you three options.
Marisol Trevino: And the platform tracks all of this.
Eric: Tracks all of it. Every lead has a little timeline. When they came in, what source, every message back and forth, when the walkthrough got booked, whether the quote went out, whether they said yes. So now at the end of the month you can actually look and go, huh, my Instagram DMs convert better than my website form, I should probably spend more time on Instagram.
Marisol Trevino: I have never once known that number.
Eric: Nobody has that number. Because nobody's measuring the top of their own funnel.
Marisol Trevino: I don't have a funnel. I have a swamp.
Eric: You have a swamp, and we're going to give you a funnel. And listen, we keep our own team notes and SOPs in Notion, that part's separate, but the customer-facing plumbing all lives in the one platform.
Marisol Trevino: Okay so honest question. What does this cost me in TIME to set up. Because I don't have a week.
Eric: Fair. If you do it yourself, from cold, and you're learning the platform, realistically a weekend of focused work to get the inbox unified and the first two automations, the new lead auto-text and the missed call auto-text, live and working.
Marisol Trevino: A weekend.
Eric: A weekend. If somebody who knows the platform sets it up for you, a couple of hours of your time to answer questions about your business, and they can have you live in a few days.
Marisol Trevino: And the automations, I can change what they say.
Eric: You SHOULD change what they say. The default templates are fine but they sound like default templates. Rewrite them in your voice. Use the words you actually use. If you say "y'all," the text should say "y'all."
Marisol Trevino: I definitely say y'all.
Eric: Then the text should say y'all. Because the whole point is the first touch feels like Marisol, not like a system.
Marisol Trevino: Okay. Okay. I'm actually a little emotional about this.
Eric: Yeah?
Marisol Trevino: Because... I've been carrying this for years. Like, the weight of knowing leads are falling through and it's not because we're bad at the work, it's because I'm bad at the inbox. And I've felt so stupid about it.
Eric: You're not stupid about it. You're a tile installer. Nobody trained you to be a response-time engineer. That's a whole other job, and until pretty recently the tools to just... hand that job to software didn't really exist for a five-person shop. They existed for enterprise. They didn't exist for you.
Marisol Trevino: Right.
Eric: Now they do. That's the whole shift. That's the only reason we're having this conversation.
Marisol Trevino: So what should I expect. Like, realistically, once this is running. I don't want you to hype it.
Eric: I'm not going to give you a number because I don't know your market and I'm not going to make one up. What I can tell you is what I've seen with operators in your shape. The first thing that changes is you stop losing sleep. Like, physically, you sleep better. Because the anxiety of "did I reply to the Rodriguez lead" goes away. The system replied to the Rodriguez lead.
Marisol Trevino: Yeah.
Eric: The second thing is your close rate on the leads you were already getting goes up. Not because you got better at closing. Because you're now actually talking to people who, two months ago, would have ghosted you before you ever spoke.
Marisol Trevino: Because I got there in time.
Eric: Because you got there in time. Speed to lead is not a marketing metric. It's a respect metric. The first person who replies like a human wins.
Marisol Trevino: The first person who replies like a human wins. I might put that on the wall.
Eric: Put it on the wall. Okay, we should probably land this. If somebody listening is basically you six months ago, three inboxes, voicemail, DMs, spreadsheet graveyard, what's the ONE thing you'd tell them to try this week.
Marisol Trevino: I feel weird giving the advice, I'm the one who just got it.
Eric: That's exactly why you should give it. You remember what it felt like on the other side.
Marisol Trevino: Okay. The one thing. Set up the missed call auto-text. Just that one. Even if you don't do anything else this week, even if you don't unify the inboxes yet, even if the spreadsheet is still a graveyard. If somebody calls your business and you don't answer, they should get a text back inside a minute that sounds like you. That's it. Start there.
Eric: That's the right answer. It's the smallest possible piece of plumbing and it stops the biggest leak.
Marisol Trevino: And once you feel what that's like, once you get the first "oh hey yeah I was calling about..." text back from somebody you would have lost, you'll want the rest of it.
Eric: You'll want the rest of it. That's how it always goes.
Marisol Trevino: Yeah.
Eric: Marisol, thank you. Genuinely. This was the conversation I wish somebody had recorded and handed me eight years ago.
Marisol Trevino: Thank YOU. I mean it.
Eric: If you're listening and this hit, do us a favor and hit subscribe so the next one shows up. We'll be back next week with another operator who figured something out the hard way so you don't have to. Take care of yourselves.
A daily 10-minute show for service business owners. AI tools, automated workflows, and the boring-on-purpose tactics that save you 5 hours a week. Each episode picks one niche, one workflow, and one tool — and walks you through it like a friend at a coffee shop.