It's 7:12 and your two-man crew is sitting in the truck outside a locked gate. There's a dog in the yard, and it is not happy to see them. The customer swore they'd be around, but the call's going straight to voicemail.
So the guys wait. One of them calls you, you try the customer, and twenty minutes later the code comes back from somebody who stepped out of a meeting. The first half hour of a billable day is gone, spent staring at a padlock, and every job stacked behind this one just slid right.
Almost every morning like that comes down to three things you could have had in your pocket the night before. How do we get in. Where do we park. Anything we should know before we pull up. Ask those in a text the day before, and the start takes care of itself.
The three questions that stall a start
These aren't deep questions. They're the stuff that's obvious to the homeowner and invisible to you until your crew is standing there locked out. Put them in plain language and send all three at once.
- How do we get in? Gate code, lockbox combo, which door's open, whether someone's home, or whose neighbor is holding the key. For a triple-decker, which floor and which bell.
- Where do we park? Driveway or street, resident-permit block or not, whether they mind you blocking them in for the day, and where a dumpster or a materials drop can sit.
- Anything we should know? The dog, the sleeping baby, the alarm code, the elderly parent who gets rattled by strangers, the back stairs that are the only way to the attic. This is the catch-all, and it's the one that saves you the most grief.
Keep it to those three. A text with eight questions reads like homework and gets ignored. Three feels like a favor, and people answer favors.
Send it the day before, not the morning of
Timing is the whole game. Fire the text off the morning of and you're already in the truck when the answer comes in late, if it comes at all. Send it the afternoon or evening before, and the customer has time to walk out, read the gate code off the keypad, and text it back while they're thinking about it.
The day-before window also hands you a heads-up you can act on. If nobody answers by that night, you know to call first thing instead of rolling a crew blind. A quiet reply is information too.
Set it to go out automatically off your schedule. When a job's booked for tomorrow, the text goes tonight, every time, without you remembering to send it. That's the part worth automating, because the day you forget is the day it's a locked gate and a dog.
Put the answers where the truck can see them
A gate code buried in your text thread does your crew no good at 7 AM. The reply has to land somewhere the guys actually check before they leave the shop or pull up to the curb.
Best case, the answer drops straight onto the job in whatever scheduling or work-order app you run, so it's sitting right there under the address. Second best, a shared note or a job folder the whole crew can open from a phone. The rule is simple: one place, the same place every time, no hunting.
- Attach it to the job, not the person. The code goes with the address, so next year's service call already has it.
- Make it readable on a phone. Your crew's reading it one-handed in a truck, not at a desk.
- Keep the old answers. Repeat customer? Last visit's parking and dog notes are a head start on this one.
Be honest about what it won't do
A text can't force an answer. Some people won't reply, and a few will send a code that's wrong or changed since. So keep a fallback: if there's no useful answer by the night before, somebody calls in the morning. The automation saves you on the eight jobs that reply, not the one that doesn't.
And this is a note collector, not a mind reader. It can send the question and file the reply, but it can't tell you the homeowner typed the code in wrong. For a tricky commercial site or a first-time big job, a real phone call still beats a text. Use the automation for the routine stuff, which is most of your days.
If wiring this into your scheduling software feels like one more thing on the pile, that's the kind of quiet plumbing we set up for Massachusetts shops. The goal is that it runs without you touching it.
Worth doing this week
- Write your three questions once, in plain words. Get in, park, anything to know. Save them as a template you can reuse.
- Pick the one place the answers will live, the job in your app or a shared note, and tell your crew that's where to look.
- Set the text to go out the afternoon before any booked job, automatically off your schedule.
- Add a fallback rule: no answer by that night means a morning phone call before the crew rolls.
- Run it for a week and count the mornings your guys started on time instead of in the driveway.