Google Ads can now bill you for calls you miss
Twenty seconds on the line during business hours is enough.
A twice-weekly read for Iowa shops that work with their hands. Phones, pricing, code changes, and the jobs that quietly walk away. No pitch, no jargon — just what actually moves money in a trades business, written by one guy in Boone who talks to owners all week.
Twenty seconds on the line during business hours is enough.
You saw the call, you meant to return it, and you did, at 6. By then the homeowner had booked whoever answered at 2, and you never heard a word about it.
Trane's first cold-climate heat pump for homes keeps full heat at 5°F. Most contractors using AI still don't trust it. Construction layoffs hit a record low, and Iowa heating help.
You don't need a twelve-slide deck to explain what protects your phone. One sentence covers it, and the homeowner on the other end only needs that sentence to be true.
A2L changeouts punish bad airflow and charge habits, construction unemployment hit a record-low 3.1%, and storm contracts that wait on the carrier are getting riskier.
When your phone won't stop ringing, it feels like proof the business is winning. It's also the week the biggest, most urgent jobs slide to voicemail, and here's why those are the.
U.S. hiring has crawled for a year, but construction just posted its sixth straight monthly gain. And a Cedar Rapids contractor walking off two jobs shows what wins the next one.
You've seen the ads for AI that answers your phone for a few dollars a month. So I ran the same plumbing emergency through a bargain bot and a dedicated agent. The gap isn't the.
A federal court upheld Iowa's limits on contractors handling insurance claims, and the Fed signaled cheaper money isn't coming soon. Both reshape a conversation your phone has.
You have no reason to take an ad's word that an AI can answer your phone well, and you shouldn't. So, here's the number instead. Call it, try to trip it up, and judge it yourself.
Iowa businesses shed 3,100 jobs in July, yet construction added more than any other private sector, powered by a Cedar Rapids building boom. National builder confidence tells a.
Mondays, something you can use. Wednesdays, the longer story. Written for shops in Boone, Ames, Des Moines and every town on Highway 30.
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I'm Wayne Turner. I live in Boone and I spend my weeks talking to owners about one unglamorous thing: what happens to the phone when everybody's on a job.
I write this because the answer is almost always worse than owners think, and because nobody sends a trades shop a straight explanation of a code change or a price move without trying to sell them something in the same breath.
If you run a shop in Iowa and want to be a source rather than a subscriber, reply to any issue. I answer my own email.