Every customer who calls you already assumes you can do the job. That’s not a compliment, it’s the bare minimum. What actually decides whether they hire you, come back, or refer you to a mate is a set of things most trade business owners have never once thought to measure.
Matt Jones sat down with Justin Herald, entrepreneur, speaker and author of nine books, to talk about customer experience for trade businesses, and specifically the eight things Justin says every customer is silently evaluating, whether they realise it or not. Justin’s not a tradie himself, but he’s built and sold businesses, spoken at more than a hundred conferences, and spent years studying exactly why customers stay loyal to some brands and quietly disappear from others. His latest book, Service Rebellion, is built entirely around this idea.
The Eight Things Your Customers Are Silently Scoring You On
Justin calls them the invisible evaluations, and they run in this order: importance, emotion, expectation, effort, certainty, understanding, personalisation and consistency.
Importance is whether the customer feels like more than a transaction. Emotion matters more in trades than almost any other industry, because you’re working in someone’s home, and there’s a real emotional attachment to that property that has nothing to do with logic. Expectation is about understanding what the client actually wants, even when it’s unreasonable, so you can either meet it or reset it. Effort and certainty are close cousins: customers are quietly clocking how much effort you’re putting in and whether they’re certain you know what you’re doing. Understanding means explaining things in language the client actually gets, not the jargon that makes sense to you. Personalisation is not treating every client the same way. And consistency is making sure your team delivers the same standard the owner set at the first impression, because there’s no second chance at that.
None of these show up on a job sheet. All of them decide whether you get referred.
The Phone Call That Cost Four Businesses The Job
Justin told a story that lands hard for anyone running a trade business. He needed some odd jobs done at home, so he went looking at five different websites. Four of them had no phone number listed anywhere. He tracked down a number for one of them, rang it, and the woman who answered told him he’d need to fill out the contact form first.
He asked her directly: are you the person who’s going to call me back? She said yes. He asked if they could just skip the form and have the conversation right then. She said no.
So he found the one business with a phone number up front, rang them, and had someone at his door that afternoon doing the job. All he wanted to do was spend money, and four businesses made it too hard for him to do it.
The lesson isn’t that forms are wrong, it’s that how your team handles the phone and the first point of contact can lose you a job before the work even starts. If there’s a reason behind a process, like a form, tell the customer why. Justin’s counterpart on this one, Matt, made the same point from the agency side: build a reason into every step that might otherwise look like a roadblock, because customers who understand why will tolerate almost anything, and customers left guessing won’t.
Say Something, Even If It’s Nothing
One of the simplest ideas in the episode was also one of the most repeated. Justin’s rule: if you’ve got nothing to tell your customer, tell them there’s nothing to tell them.
Silence doesn’t read as “everything’s fine” to a customer. It reads as doubt. Are they on top of this? Have they forgotten about me? Customers left without an update will fill that gap themselves, and the story they invent is rarely generous. A short “nothing to report today, still on track” message costs nothing and closes that gap before it opens.
This is also where turning missed calls into closed jobs starts, long before the quote is written. The businesses winning repeat work aren’t the ones with the flashiest tools, they’re the ones who never let a client wonder what’s happening.
The Referral Market You’re Not Tapping
Justin pays 10% of his speaking fee to anyone who sends him a booking. One bloke has referred him roughly 15 times a year for six years straight, including a major overseas gig. When Justin finally asked him where he’d first heard him speak, the answer was: never. Not once. He refers Justin purely off what other people say about him.
Most trade businesses assume their referral network is limited to past customers. It isn’t. There’s an entire market of people who’ve never hired you but know people who will, and they’ll send work your way if you’ve made it worth their while and easy to do. That’s the whole logic behind a proper referral marketing system: paying for results, not hoping people remember to mention you at a barbecue.
Key Takeaways
- Being technically good at your trade is the entry fee now, not the differentiator. Customers are scoring you on importance, emotion, expectation, effort, certainty, understanding, personalisation and consistency, mostly without realising it.
- A missing phone number or an inflexible contact process can cost you a job before the work has even been discussed. Make it easy for people to talk to a human.
- If there’s nothing to update a client on, say so anyway. Silence gets filled with doubt, not patience.
- Build a paid referral structure rather than hoping past clients remember to mention you. The people who refer you most may never have used you themselves.
- Consistency across your team matters as much as the first impression you personally created. Whoever shows up after you has to carry the same standard through.
If you’ve ever done technically flawless work and still lost the repeat client or the referral, this episode explains exactly where that gap comes from, and it’s rarely the thing you’d expect.
Have a listen to the full conversation with Justin Herald, then go check whether your own business would survive the phone number test.
About the Guest: Justin Herald Justin Herald is an entrepreneur, speaker and the author of nine books, including his latest, Service Rebellion. He built his first business, the Attitude clothing brand, from a $50 loan into a licensed brand sold in every country through more than 180 companies, before selling it and moving into speaking and writing full time. He now speaks at more than 100 conferences a year and works with businesses, plenty of them trades, on the customer experience standards that keep clients loyal and referring.
Website: www.ServiceRebellion.com
Referral system mentioned in the episode: www.ReferUsNetwork.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinherald/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/justinherald
