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Marcus from Reilly Overhead Door in Wichita shares how missed after-hours calls were costing him $800+ spring jobs, and the missed-call-text-back playbook that turned voicemail leaks into booked appointments from the bleachers of his kid's baseball game.
Marcus of Reilly Overhead Door in Wichita walks through how a single missed after-hours call at his kid's baseball game cost him an $800 spring job — and the simple ops playbook that plugged the leak. A candid conversation about why speed beats quality in home services and how a notebook-in-the-truck system finally hit its ceiling.
In this episode:
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Eric: So it's like seven fifteen at night, phone rings...
Marcus Reilly: Phone rings. Broken spring, garage door won't open, guy's car is stuck INSIDE the garage.
Eric: Oof.
Marcus Reilly: Yeah. And I'm at my kid's baseball game. Third inning. I don't even hear it.
Eric: You don't hear it.
Marcus Reilly: I don't hear it. Phone's in the truck. So it rolls to voicemail, and my voicemail says, you know, "leave a message, we'll get back to you first thing." Real friendly.
Eric: Sure.
Marcus Reilly: I call the guy back at seven thirty the next morning. Seven thirty ON THE DOT. And he goes, "oh, hey, yeah, thanks, but I already got somebody coming at nine."
Eric: Someone else got him.
Marcus Reilly: Someone else got him. And that's a spring job, that's an install, that's probably eight, nine hundred bucks out the door. Gone. Because I was watching Little League.
Eric: And how often was that happening?
Marcus Reilly: That's the thing. I didn't KNOW how often. That's what killed me. I'd see the missed call in the morning and half the time I wouldn't even bother, because I figured, well, they already found somebody.
Eric: Right.
Marcus Reilly: So for anyone who's, you know, just picking this up, I'm Marcus, I run Reilly Overhead Door out in Wichita. Garage doors, springs, openers, the whole deal. Started nine years ago out of the bed of my pickup, and now we're three techs, two vans.
Eric: That's a real business.
Marcus Reilly: It's a real business. And the leaks were killing me.
Eric: Okay so let me play back what I'm hearing, because I've seen this exact pattern probably a hundred times with home service guys. It's not that your marketing is broken.
Marcus Reilly: No, the phone rings.
Eric: The phone rings. That's the hard part. You already did the hard part. The problem is what happens in the sixty seconds AFTER the phone rings when nobody picks up.
Marcus Reilly: Yeah.
Eric: Because a homeowner with a broken spring at seven pm is not gonna sit and wait. They're gonna call the next three names on the Google list.
Marcus Reilly: They're calling three. Minimum.
Eric: Minimum. And whoever answers first, or whoever gets a text back first, wins. It's not the best company. It's the fastest company.
Marcus Reilly: That's hard to hear but yeah.
Eric: It's hard to hear but it's freeing too, right? Because you don't have to be better. You just have to be there.
Marcus Reilly: Huh.
Eric: So how were you tracking any of this? Like, missed calls, callbacks, none of it?
Marcus Reilly: Uh. Notebook. In the truck.
Eric: Okay.
Marcus Reilly: Don't laugh, man. I had a system.
Eric: I'm not laughing, I'm... I'm laughing a little.
Marcus Reilly: Fair.
Eric: But look, that's most guys. That's most guys at your stage. The notebook works until it doesn't, and then you hit a ceiling and you can't figure out why the business feels stuck even though you're busier than ever.
Marcus Reilly: That was me exactly. Busier, more stressed, not really making more.
Eric: Right. So here's what we did, and I'll walk you through it the way we did it at my agency, because we run this same playbook for a lot of trades clients. We use an all-in-one ops platform, it's the thing we run the agency on, and the first thing, the very first thing, is you have to close the after-hours gap. Nothing else matters until that's closed.
Marcus Reilly: Okay.
Eric: So step one. Missed call, auto text back. Within about ten seconds.
Marcus Reilly: Ten seconds.
Eric: Ten seconds. Homeowner calls, you don't pick up, they get a text on their phone that says something like, "Hey, this is Marcus at Reilly Overhead Door, sorry I missed you, what's going on with your door?"
Marcus Reilly: Just like that.
Eric: Just like that. Human. Sounds like you. Not "your call is important to us."
Marcus Reilly: Yeah nobody believes that one.
Eric: Nobody has EVER believed that one.
Eric: And here's what happens. Most of the time, they text back. Because texting is easier than making another call, and they've already got their phone in their hand.
Marcus Reilly: Huh.
Eric: Now you're in a conversation. And the conversation can happen while you're still at the baseball game. You just tap out, "broken spring? I can have somebody there tomorrow at eight, does that work?" Boom. Booked.
Marcus Reilly: From the bleachers.
Eric: From the bleachers.
Marcus Reilly: Okay that alone would've saved me that job.
Eric: That alone. And we haven't even gotten to the good part yet.
Marcus Reilly: Alright.
Eric: So step two. The platform, when that missed call comes in, it doesn't just fire the text. It creates a lead. A record. So now for the first time you can actually SEE how many after-hours calls you're getting, what they're about, which ones convert, which ones ghost you.
Marcus Reilly: I've never had that number.
Eric: Nobody has that number until they have it. And usually when guys see it for the first time they're...
Marcus Reilly: Mad.
Eric: Mad. Because it's more than they thought.
Marcus Reilly: Yeah.
Eric: Way more.
Marcus Reilly: Yeah.
Eric: Step three, and this is where it starts to actually feel like a business instead of a hustle. That lead goes into a pipeline. Just a simple pipeline. New lead, contacted, quoted, booked, done. Five columns.
Marcus Reilly: Like a Kanban thing.
Eric: Exactly like a Kanban thing. And we actually keep the customer-facing knowledge base, like the FAQ, the pricing sheet, the internal SOPs, in Notion. That part we name. Notion's just the workspace. But the lead flow, the texts, the calls, the calendar, that all lives in the platform.
Marcus Reilly: Why split it?
Eric: Because Notion is great for documents and terrible for phones. And the platform is great for phones and, honestly, fine for documents but not great. Use each tool for what it's good at.
Marcus Reilly: Okay that makes sense.
Eric: Step four. Follow-up. This is the one nobody does.
Marcus Reilly: I definitely don't do it.
Eric: Nobody does it. Somebody calls, you quote them, they say "let me talk to my wife," and then...
Marcus Reilly: Never hear from 'em.
Eric: Never hear from 'em. So we set up a little sequence. Three touches over about a week. Text on day two, text on day four, text on day seven. Not sales-y. Just, "hey, any questions on that quote?" "Hey, spring's still under warranty on our end if you want to lock it in this week." That kind of thing.
Marcus Reilly: And that runs by itself.
Eric: Runs by itself. You set it up once.
Marcus Reilly: How many of those come back?
Eric: In your world? I'd guess somewhere around one in five. Which on a spring job is real money.
Marcus Reilly: That's real money.
Eric: That's real money. And it's money you already spent to earn once, right? You already paid to get that phone to ring. You're just not letting it fall on the floor.
Marcus Reilly: Yeah.
Eric: So Marcus. Walk me through what actually changed for you. Like, week one, week two, what did it feel like?
Marcus Reilly: Honestly? Week one was weird. Because I kept checking my phone to see if the auto text went out, like I didn't trust it.
Eric: Everybody does that.
Marcus Reilly: I'd miss a call on purpose almost, just to see.
Eric: To see if it fired.
Marcus Reilly: To see if it fired. And it fired. Every time.
Eric: Every time.
Marcus Reilly: And then like, I want to say the second week? I booked a job at nine forty at night. From my couch. In sweatpants.
Eric: There it is.
Marcus Reilly: In sweatpants, man. And I'm sitting there going, this is the job I would've lost.
Eric: That's the job you would've lost.
Marcus Reilly: That's the job I would've lost a hundred percent. And my wife looked over and she goes, "did you just book a job on your phone?" And I go, "yeah." And she goes, "while we're watching TV?" And I go, "yeah."
Marcus Reilly: That was the moment.
Eric: That's the moment.
Marcus Reilly: And then the pipeline thing, I gotta tell you, the pipeline thing changed how I run the mornings. Because I used to start the day going through the notebook and my texts and my voicemails and trying to figure out what's what.
Eric: Sorting.
Marcus Reilly: Sorting. Every morning, forty five minutes of sorting before I even swing a hammer. Now I open the thing, I look at the "new lead" column, I look at the "quoted" column, I know who to call, I know who my tech is going to, done. Ten minutes.
Eric: Ten minutes.
Marcus Reilly: Ten minutes. That's half an hour a day back.
Eric: That's two and a half hours a week.
Marcus Reilly: That's a service call.
Eric: That's a service call. Every week.
Marcus Reilly: Every week.
Eric: And I want to be careful here because I'm not going to sit here and tell everybody listening they're going to double their revenue or whatever, because I don't know their business. But I will tell you the pattern. The pattern is, when you stop leaking leads after hours and you actually follow up on quotes, the business you already have gets bigger without you doing anything different.
Marcus Reilly: Without hiring.
Eric: Without hiring. Without more marketing spend. Without a new van.
Marcus Reilly: That was the part that got me. I was about to buy a third van.
Eric: You were about to buy a third van to catch demand you were already losing.
Marcus Reilly: To catch demand I was already losing.
Eric: Yeah, that's the trap.
Marcus Reilly: That's the trap.
Eric: Okay so if somebody's listening and they're a Marcus. They're a plumber, HVAC, electrician, roofer, whatever. Garage doors.
Marcus Reilly: Garage doors.
Eric: What's the one thing? If they do nothing else this week.
Marcus Reilly: The auto text back. Just that.
Eric: Just that.
Marcus Reilly: Missed call, auto text back. That's it. Don't build the pipeline yet, don't do the follow-up sequence yet, don't do any of it. Just get the text going out when you miss the call.
Eric: Because?
Marcus Reilly: Because you'll see it work in the first day. First day. And then everything else feels worth doing.
Eric: That's the exact right answer. Start with the thing that produces a result you can feel by dinner.
Marcus Reilly: By dinner.
Eric: If you try to build the whole system on day one you'll never turn it on. But if you get one win, one booked job you would've lost, you're gonna go, "okay, what's next."
Marcus Reilly: What's next.
Eric: What's next. That's how you build it.
Marcus Reilly: Yeah.
Eric: Marcus, thank you man. This was great.
Marcus Reilly: Thanks for having me. And thanks for, you know, not making me feel dumb about the notebook.
Eric: The notebook got you to three techs and two vans, brother. The notebook did its job.
Marcus Reilly: Fair.
Eric: Alright. If you got something out of this one, do us a favor, hit subscribe, it genuinely helps us keep doing these. We'll see you next week.
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