Chase everything for sole traders

Plenty of one-person businesses, cleaners, decorators, odd-jobbers, are good at the work and quietly terrible at everything around the work. The quote that never got written. The lead who asked about the kitchen and never heard back. The merchant who promised a price on Monday. The invoice from three jobs ago that hasn’t moved since.

It isn’t laziness. It’s arithmetic. One person can be on the tools or be the office, and when they’re on the tools, everything the office would have done waits. Some of it waits forever.

This plan makes you the office. You don’t need to know their trade. You need to be the person who chases everyone, and the pitch is one line: you do the work, I’ll chase everyone else.

The four lanes you chase

Broadly, every one-person trade business has the same four leaks, and they’re all the same leak: something needed a decision or a kick, and the person qualified to give it was up a ladder.

Leads. Someone rang about a kitchen and never came back. Was it a no? Usually not: they got busy, life happened, and nobody asked twice. You make sure every enquiry gets answered quickly out of the gate and then chased properly, the classic nudge on day 3, day 7, day 14, until there’s a yes or a genuine no. A tradesperson who replies twice instead of once closes a lot more work than a slightly better plasterer.

Quotes, and this is the big lane. Half of lost work never gets a quote at all. The job was measured on the Tuesday, and the quote is still a photo on the phone a fortnight later. So the awkward, brilliant bit of this service: you chase your own customer until the quote goes out, then chase the customer’s customer for the decision. Chasing the tradesperson is odd for about a week, then they love you, because the jobs that were leaking away quietly start coming back.

Suppliers. Smallest lane, but it unblocks everything: material prices that were promised, accounts that were going to be opened, deliveries that were “confirmed”. A chivvy from your side means jobs don’t stall waiting on a phone call nobody made.

Invoices. The money chase. Every invoice logged, then a nudge at 7 days overdue, a firmer one at 14, a final notice at 21, and a phone call conversation at 30.

A weekly one-line email ties the lanes together: two quotes went out, one quiet lead came back, £380 collected, one supplier still dithering. It takes ten minutes and it’s the thing that renews the customer every month, because it turns “what exactly am I paying for” into a receipt for the week.

What you charge

The ordering here matters more than the numbers.

Start everybody on invoices only, and charge a percentage of what you actually collect, 8% to 15%. Nothing lands, nothing gets paid. It’s the fastest yes in the history of small business: the customer carries none of the risk, and you get a recovered invoice inside a week, which sells better than any explanation.

Then offer the full chase-everything service as a flat monthly fee, £30 to £60 depending on how much paperwork they generate. Deliberately, I wouldn’t do the whole service on commission, because half the value in quotes and leads is stuff that never shows up on an invoice, and you can’t collect a percentage of a quote that went out on time instead of three weeks late. Flat monthly is how you pay for that lane.

Your costs are a domain and, if you build on GoHighLevel like I do, one sub-account. One sub-account comfortably holds twenty sole traders’ worth of four pipelines and their automations, so the per-customer running cost is pennies. The whole thing costs nothing but time until money turns up.

The first conversation

You’ll find them in exactly the places they already complain about this: trade Facebook groups, where “customers who won’t pay” threads appear weekly and everyone has a story about the one that got away.

Don’t pitch systems. Ask two questions. “What’s the oldest invoice you haven’t been paid on?” lands well, but the one that really lands is “how many quotes are sitting unwritten right now?” Everyone knows the answer, and it’s usually an odd number between two and six, said with a grimace.

Then the offer, in order:

“You won’t pay me a penny unless invoice money comes in”
“I’ll chase from your email and your number, in your words, so it still sounds like you”
“The first one’s free. If it works, we’ll talk about the percent, and about the quotes and the leads.”

That last line is the whole business. You’ll have a recovered invoice inside the week, and after that you’re not pitching any more, you’re showing a result.

Building it in GoHighLevel

An afternoon, most of it templates. No code anywhere. One sub-account, four pipelines.

The Leads pipeline. New enquiry, Answered, Quote promised, Won, Lost. An automation replies to every new enquiry within minutes, because speed wins trades work before skill gets a look in. A second creates the day 3, 7 and 14 follow-up tasks so the chase happens without anyone remembering.

The Quotes pipeline, which runs in both directions. Quote promised, the stage that means you’re nagging the tradesperson to write it. Then Drafted, Sent, Followed up, Won, Lost. Once Sent, the automation handles the customer’s side: a nudge on day 3, a check-in on day 7, and a task for you or them to ring on day 10. Quotes don’t get to silently die.

The Suppliers pipeline, light on automation: Ordered, Awaiting price, Promised date set, Delivered. Mostly it’s a task list with stages, and mostly that’s all suppliers need: the fact that someone is watching the promise is what gets it moving.

The Invoices pipeline. Invoiced, 7 days overdue, 14 days overdue, Final notice, Paid, Written off. Automations send the two-line nudge, then the firmer one that mentions interest, then the final notice at 21. I’d keep them email or SMS from the customer’s own number and address. A debt-collector voice doubles the chance the money hides; “Hi Dave, just bumping the greenhouse invoice from last month” gets paid. At day 30, a task with the number attached, and you and the customer agree who rings, agreed up front, not improvised.

A weekly report. One email every Friday covering all four lanes: quotes out, leads chased, invoices raised, money collected, things written off. It’s the single most valuable thing you send.

That’s the entire build. Nobody needs funnel pages, nobody needs a website, and the calendars that already exist can stay where they are.

The demo week

One customer, seven days, all four lanes touched:

Pick one sole trader you already know. Ask three questions: what’s the oldest unpaid invoice, which lead went quiet that you meant to chase, and how old is the oldest un-quoted job.
Day one: log the two oldest invoices, chase them, nudge the quiet lead, and start nagging about the oldest quote. That last one is the real demo, you, on their case, within the hour.
End of the week, the money has usually landed and the quote has gone out. Get two things before you spend the win: a screenshot with the name blacked out, and one sentence, “Nick got £640 back that I’d written off, and two jobs quoted that were going stale.”
Ask the next person using that sentence.

From there it’s arithmetic. Ten customers on the full service is £300 to £600 a month for probably half a week of disciplined chasing, and the discipline, logging everything the day it happens, is the actual bottleneck. It’s not sales and it isn’t build time.

What this isn’t

Worth writing down, because people will assume it is all of these:

It’s not debt collection. You never threaten and you never file. A polite nudge from a real person recovers most money that a demand would freeze solid.
It’s not a virtual assistant. You don’t answer their phone or run their diary. You chase things that have a name on them.
It’s not project management. Decisions stay with the tradesperson. You just make sure the decision gets asked for, and that a no arrives faster than a silence.
It’s not a fix for paperwork that doesn’t exist. If a job was never quoted in writing and never invoiced, you can’t chase it. Sorting that out is the different service they’ll ask for once they trust you.

If you’d rather have this done to you than done by somebody, or you want to set it up for someone else’s business, that’s most of what I build. Start here and the chased people do the rest.