How to Get More Foundation Repair Jobs

The honest answer to how to get more foundation repair jobs is that most shops do not have a lead problem. They have one leaking step somewhere between a homeowner noticing a crack and a signed contract, and buying more names on top of a leak only makes the leak more expensive. So the first job is finding which step is yours.

There are five of them and you can count every one off your own paperwork in an afternoon. Nobody has to sell you anything for this part.

Five lanes, and almost every shop runs on two or three of them without having written them down.

Repeat and referral is the first and the cheapest in the trade: past customers, their family, and the people they told. Second is the street itself, because the houses either side of a job you just finished sit on the same soil, went up the same year, and are quietly doing the same thing. Third is the people who find the problem before the homeowner does, which means structural engineers, home inspectors, realtors, plumbers and the HVAC techs who crawl under houses all day.

Fourth is organic search and your map listing, which catches the small slice of homeowners who have already decided they need a foundation contractor. Fifth is ads to homeowners, which reaches the much larger group who know something is wrong and have not put a name to it yet.

The first three cost you time and attention. The last two cost money. That order matters, because a shop that has never worked lanes one through three is buying lane five to cover for it.

Pull last month off whatever you keep it in, even if that is a notebook and a phone log, and write five numbers down the page.

How many homeowners reached you. How many of those ended up with a time on the calendar. How many of those were home when your estimator got there. How many got a written number. How many signed. Divide each one by the one above it and you have four percentages that tell you more than any report somebody could sell you.

What usually shows up is a weak second number. Homeowners reached you and never got onto the calendar, because the call came in while your guys were under a house and the office rang back the next afternoon. No amount of new names fixes that.

When a crew is on a street for three days, every house in sight sits on the same soil and came from the same builder. Most shops put a sign in the yard and stop there.

The version that pays costs you a walk. Before the crew packs up, knock the four nearest doors and offer to look at their cracks while the equipment is already on the street. Leave something with a photo of the work you just did two doors down, because a homeowner who has watched trucks all week already wants to know what was wrong over there.

The way I see it, this is the most underworked lane in the trade, and it needs no budget at all.

A structural engineer writes a report and the homeowner then has to find somebody to do the work. A home inspector flags movement during a sale and the buyer has two weeks to sort it. A realtor needs the deal to close. A plumber under a house sees a cracked pier on his way to a leak.

Those people send work to whoever they remember, and they remember whoever makes them look good. Show up fast, send the paperwork back clean, never talk down the engineer in front of his own client, and tell them afterwards what happened. Five of those relationships, kept warm with a phone call a quarter, will outproduce a lot of paid work.

Whichever drop is worst measured in dollars rather than in percent. Ten points on a step that handles four homeowners a month is worth less than two points on the step that handles sixty.

When you do get to buying work, judge it on what it costs you to sign one job, all in, and never on what it costs per name. Run that through the calculator with your own close rate and put every source you already use on the same basis. A source that looks expensive per inquiry is often the cheapest per signed job, and the reverse happens just as often.