The approved-work report every contractor should run

A note on what this is. We have not measured how much approved-but-unscheduled work a company usually gets back. So there is no number here. It describes where the work sits and how to get at it.

Two leaks, one of them quiet

The obvious one is new calls going to voicemail. It gets attention because you can hear it: the phone rings out.

The other one is quieter. A customer gets the quote, says go ahead, and then nothing gets booked. The tech was already on the next call, and the office figured somebody else had it. The job becomes a row in the system with a status nobody looks at. Nothing rings. Nobody complains. It does not show up in any report anyone opens on a Monday.

Why this is different from chasing leads

A cold lead is somebody who might want the work. An approved-but-unscheduled job already said yes, to a company they trust, at a price they accepted. What is missing is a slot on the calendar. And a reason to sort it out this week instead of someday.

That is why the follow-up reads differently. It is closer to a reminder that something already agreed on has not happened yet. It is not marketing.

Getting the list out

Every major dispatch system can pull this, though none of them make it the first thing you see. The report is usually under estimates, not scheduling. The filter you want: status approved, no job attached, quoted within a set window.

• • Pick the window on purpose. Six to eighteen months back is usually where the recoverable work sits. Recent enough that the quote still roughly holds, old enough that the customer has drifted.
• • Leave out anything already on the schedule, including maintenance visits. Otherwise the list fills with noise and gets dropped.
• • Keep the list short. You need a name, a way to reach them, their language, the address and the job value. You do not need the full scope of work. The shorter the list, the less of it goes stale.
• • Sort by value, but work by age. The oldest quotes are the ones about to become unrecoverable, because the price no longer holds.

Working it without it becoming somebody’s Friday job

The list rarely goes unworked because nobody knows about it. It goes unworked because doing it by hand means one person, one afternoon, one phone call at a time. And that afternoon is the first thing to go when the schedule fills up.

The fix is the same as the rest of the phone. The follow-up becomes a set of messages instead of a task. It goes out in the language the customer uses. It stops the moment somebody books or asks to be left alone. And every reply lands in one place where the office can see the whole history. Not in one person’s voicemail.

What to do this week

Run the report before building anything. Sort it by value, look at the total, then look at the date on the oldest quote. Those two numbers take about ten minutes to get. They will tell you whether this is worth any more of your time.

Questions we get asked about this

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