Speed Is a Competitive Advantage in Trades. Nobody Prices It.

Speed is a competitive advantage in trades, and almost nobody prices it. You're under a sink finishing one job when the phone rings. You let it go to voicemail - you'll call back once you're done. Fair enough. But the customer with water already coming through the ceiling has another plumber's number before you've even reached for a towel. I call this Law 10 in MIDDLEMAN: Speed Is a Product. Your skill cannot win you a job you never get to discuss.

The clock is the pain, not the job

A customer does not call because they fancy a chat about trades. They call because a pipe is leaking, a tenant is shouting, a deadline is two days out and closing fast. They need the leak stopped before it ruins the room below. Every minute it keeps leaking, the damage can spread.

You treat the enquiry like admin. After this job. After lunch. Tonight, if you remember. You've put work you already won ahead of work you could still lose. The customer does not know you are busy. They only know you did not answer, and somebody else did.

Price is not the first filter. Speed is.

You can beat every other plumber on price and still miss the job, because first the customer has to hear your quote at all. Picture a homeowner with a burst pipe ringing round: one plumber never picks up, one calls back the next morning, one answers on the second ring, asks three sharp questions, and says "I can be there at two." That plumber has a chance to book the job while the other two haven't even spoken to the customer.

Speed filters the field before price ever gets a vote. You are not competing against the cheapest trade in your postcode. You are competing against whoever replies while the customer still has the phone in their hand.

Why your competitors stay slow

Here is the part that works in your favour: if nobody in your business owns the enquiry, it falls between jobs, after the current one, after lunch, and it falls through. That is not a strategy anyone chose. It is just what happens when answering the phone is everybody's job and so, in practice, nobody's.

If your competitor leaves the phone ringing, you have an opening. Answer it. Give someone in your business responsibility for the enquiry and the gap closes. Leave it to whoever is free and each person leaves it to the next. The 48 laws are full of gaps exactly like this one - obvious, unguarded, left open because the fix is mildly annoying rather than hard.

What speed actually buys you

A quick, useful reply gives the customer something to judge before your quote even arrives. Use that first reply to do three things:

• show you understand the problem
• give a clear time for confirming whether you can take the job
• ask what needs doing before you name a price

That last one matters most if you are standing in the middle rather than on the tools. Law 9 says never let the two sides shake hands without you. Answer quickly and you have a chance to become the customer's point of contact. Keeping that position takes more than picking up the phone once - it is the subject of Law 9 itself.

The cost nobody writes down

A missed call does not show up on any invoice. It just looks like quiet - a slow week, bad luck, maybe the season. A missed call tells you someone rang. It does not tell you what the job would have paid.

If you want to know whether this is costing you, start tracking it: log when the enquiry came in, when it got answered, and whether it turned into a booking. Ask the ones who don't book why they went elsewhere. Record what they tell you. Don't decide the answer before you've asked.

Review the log after a month. Look for unanswered calls and late replies. Where a customer gave you a reason for leaving, write it down. Where they didn't, leave it unknown rather than guess.

Build it into the business, not into yourself

You cannot personally answer every call forever, and trying to is how an owner turns into a hostage of his own phone. Decide who answers when your hands are full - a partner, a member of staff, an answering service. Give them a short script: take the name, take the problem, promise a time for the full answer.

None of this means handing the customer to someone else. It means someone else holds the door open until you can get to it. The call still comes back to you, the quote still comes from you, the guarantee is still yours - the only thing that changes is how fast the door gets answered.

The phone is never "whoever's free picks it up" - it is always someone's job, every hour you're open. If every reply still waits for you to put the tools down, you haven't handed over the phone. You've just added a delay with extra steps.

Set one house rule and keep it: every enquiry gets a reply inside the hour, even if that reply is only "I've got it, give me an hour." Said in the first five minutes, that beats a perfect quote sent tomorrow.

The fast answer beats the right answer that comes too late.

Put a name against the phone today. Who answers when you cannot?

Where to go next

Speed is Law 10, on the second floor of the climb - the floor about taking the position and holding it. Read it in full at Speed Is a Product, or walk the whole staircase in the 48 laws. The law right before it covers keeping the job once speed has won it: never letting clients go direct to your subcontractor.

Answer the call. Hold the customer. Read MIDDLEMAN.