How to Build a Reputation for a New Trade Business in Perth

The short answer

You build it one job at a time. Care about every customer, take the small jobs early, get the reviews and referrals rolling, and show people how you work online so they trust you before you turn up. Then protect it when you hire, and own your mistakes when they happen.

How do you build a trade business reputation when nobody knows you yet?

When you’re new, your trade business reputation is basically zero. No reviews, no referrals, nobody in the area who’s had you through their house. Every early job is either building that up or knocking it down.

Mitch Suleau from MBS Building Company is a good example of how to do it. He’s a chippy from Tasmania who moved to Perth a bit over two years ago with no customer base here, got his ABN the day he had a blow-up with a boss, and has grown to a team of four. When he came on the podcast for our chat about his first two years in business, he said growing up in a small town shaped how he works.

In Perth, he reckons a dodgy operator can hide among three million people and still get work. Mitch brought the small-town mindset over anyway. Care about every job and every client. He said that’s what got the momentum going for him.

I agree with him. Perth feels big, but people still talk. It just happens in Google reviews, Facebook groups and at the neighbour’s barbecue.

Should you take the small jobs when you’re starting out?

Yes, mostly. Mitch was painting doors and doing gutter cleans for $150 or $180. There were stretches of two weeks with no work. He did the best job he could on every one, as long as materials were covered.

We did the same when I started Smartfix. We were on hipages taking any lead we could get. I remember one for a broken vacuum cable. We called him, went round, couldn’t fix it, and didn’t charge him. These days we wouldn’t even attend that lead.

Mitch’s take was that if someone tells him they’re doing gutter cleans or fixing toasters in their first year, he figures they’ll be okay, because they’re willing to put in the groundwork. Those small jobs also give you your first reviews, your first photos and a feel for what people will actually pay you to do. You can get pickier later.

Why are referrals worth so much early on?

Most homeowners can’t judge a deck footing or a switchboard before the job starts. So they look for other signs they can trust you. Who recommended you? What do your reviews say? Did you call back when you said you would?

A referral answers most of that before you’ve even spoken, which is why referrals build a trade business reputation faster than anything else early on. Mitch put it simply on the podcast: “Referrals are massive. You have the job almost as soon as someone refers you.”

Referrals come from the whole experience. Turning up on time, explaining the job properly, cleaning up, and telling the customer when something changes. Mitch made a point I liked about bigger jobs. People spending $20,000 or $30,000 have often saved for years, so you need to care about them from the first phone call and be honest about what their budget will get them.

Repeat customers matter just as much. At Smartfix most of our jobs are smaller, so we need people to come back. I did a $440 job recently where the customer mentioned she wanted a new air con and an outdoor security light. If my team follows the process and she’s happy, she’ll use us again. We leave a magnet on the fridge too, next to the other businesses, or over the top of them.

Can social media build trust for a new trade business?

It can, and you don’t need a big following. Mitch had about 150 followers when he filmed part of a deck and fireplace job in Spearwood. He shot it himself and was terrified to post it. The first video got around 30,000 views and added 250 to 300 followers.

The bigger result came later. Two clients told him they’d seen his videos before calling. Those jobs were worth roughly $20,000 to $30,000 each.

That’s what Mitch tells people on the phone now. He said a referral and someone seeing your work on socials end up doing much the same job. By the time the boys rock up, the customer has seen them five times and already trusts them.

We’ve only just started pushing social media at Smartfix, and I was scared of it for a long time. But the staff love being on camera, and customers notice. If someone watches a video with Bailey in it and then Bailey turns up to do the job, there’s instant rapport.

When should a new trade business start advertising?

Mitch started running Facebook and Instagram ads the same week he put on his first employee. He said that was the scariest part of the whole thing, because his costs jumped while he was making next to nothing.

Ads bring you attention. What people find when they look you up decides whether they call. If you’ve got a handful of good reviews, some job photos and a few videos, that ad money works a lot harder. If you’ve got nothing, you’re paying to send people to an empty shopfront.

I’ve been at the other end of this, spending up to $750,000 in a month on Google Ads. Hand-delivered flyers have still been one of our best channels. If you want to know what’s worth paying for, have a read of what marketing actually works for residential trade businesses and why you should own your leads.

What happens to your trade business reputation when you start hiring?

When it’s just you, you control everything. How you greet the customer, how the work’s done, how the site’s left. The moment someone else is wearing your shirt, that has to carry over to them.

Mitch hired a qualified tradesman off Seek about six months in. Everyone told him to get an apprentice, but he went with a tradie, and he says that’s his advice to others. Having someone with the same skill set took a lot of the mental load off him. He also documents the important parts of every job before the team starts, like footing sizes and spacings, so nothing structural gets missed.

My biggest mistake at Smartfix was hiring too fast. We grew to 130+ staff and at one stage we’d take on anyone who had their ticket. We hired some bad people and kept them too long.

Here’s why that hurts your reputation so much. One bad tradie doing three or four jobs a day can leave a bad impression on every one of those customers, and I’ve already paid good money to get them through the door. So hiring is part of marketing. If you’re getting close to that point, read what to fix before hiring more people.

How should you handle mistakes and bad reviews?

Mistakes happen, and how you deal with them does a lot for your trade business reputation. What I hate is a tradie who knows about one and says nothing.

Say one of our guys scratches a wall with his tool belt on the way out. The right move is to tell the customer and call the office, and we get someone out to fix it as soon as possible. If he genuinely didn’t notice and the customer calls us, no problem, send us a photo and we’ll sort it.

If a customer leaves a bad review, we call them if we know who they are. We ask what happened, go through it and get out there to fix it. Sometimes they remove the review or change it to five stars because they didn’t expect us to come back that fast. Mitch said it well: fix it straight away and their review goes from really good to unbelievable.

Callbacks are part of it too. If an air con we installed stops working 6 or 12 months later, we’re out there the next day at no charge to check it and handle the warranty. Customers love that, and it’s a big part of why people still pay our prices when money’s tight.

What should you focus on in your first year?

If I was building a trade business reputation from scratch in Perth tomorrow, this is the list.

• Do every job properly, even the $150 ones, and ask happy customers for a Google review.
• Take photos and short videos on site. Show the process and the people as well as the finished job.
• Stay in touch with good customers and anyone in the industry who could send work your way.
• Get a job management system in early. Mitch is moving to ServiceM8 and we’ve run Smartfix on it for years.
• When you hire, write down how you want the important stuff done and check in on it.

Mitch is also starting to step back from the tools so he can run the business, which is its own challenge. I wrote about that in how to step off the tools without losing control.

If you’re in your first couple of years and want to talk this stuff through with other owners at the same stage, come along to a Perth networking night or have a look at Hypotential membership.