Behind the Bark
Maybe you turned on an automation. A week later it was blasting review requests to customers who never got that type of work done. Your office manager was fielding angry emails. You turned it off and said, 'This doesn't work for us.'
Nobody wrote the process down before trying to automate it. That's where everything went sideways.
According to Gartner's historical data, roughly 50% to 70% of CRM projects fail to deliver business value. That's not a typo. More than half. And the reason isn't usually bad software. The process behind the software was never clearly defined in the first place.
Ask yourself this: could any member of your crew or office staff describe your follow-up process, start to finish, without asking you a single question?
If the answer is no, you don't have a process. You have a habit. And habits don't automate well.
Limb of the Week
The 4-Step Sequence: Standardize Before You Automate
This comes from Sam Carpenter's book Work The System. Carpenter ran a $5M business and went from 100-hour weeks to roughly 2 hours a week. Not by buying more software. By documenting every process individually before automating any of them.
His core rule is simple: if you can't describe the process on paper in plain English, you can't automate it. The automation will just break faster than humans ever did.
The sequence:
Step 1. Document the process in plain English. One page max. No jargon. Any team member should be able to read it and do the work. If it won't fit on one page, it's actually multiple processes pretending to be one. Split them.
Step 2. Run it manually for 2 weeks using only the document. Note every edge case the document didn't cover, every place someone had to guess. Write down every customer interaction that didn't fit the script.
Step 3. Update the document based on what broke. Edge cases get explicit handling rules. No more "use your judgment" on repeatable tasks.
Step 4. Then automate. Only now. You're automating a process that already survived contact with reality.
Real example: Review request automation.
Wrong way: Owner reads a blog post. Logs into Jobber. Turns on "send review request after job completion." Two months later, customers are getting review requests before they've paid the invoice. Requests go out on jobs that were rescheduled and never happened. The office manager has grumpy emails in her inbox. Reviews actually dropped. Toggle gets turned off.
Right way: Owner writes down the actual review request process on one page.
Trigger: invoice marked paid AND job marked complete AND no rescheduling notes in the last 7 days.
Channel: SMS if the customer opted in, otherwise email.
Escalation rule: if the customer mentioned anything negative to the crew, do NOT send a request. Escalate to the owner instead.
Owner runs it manually for 2 weeks. Discovers two more edge cases: commercial customers want reviews going to a specific contact, not the billing email. Recurring customers shouldn't get a request every single visit.
Updates the doc. Then automates. It works because it's a copy of a process that already worked.
When's the last time you wrote down how something actually gets done at your company, step by step, on one page?
Action steps (time-boxed):
This week, 15 min: Pick the one process you tried to automate that broke. Write it down on paper. One page. Plain English.
This week, 30 min: Hand that document to a team member. Have them walk through it. Every spot they ask a question? That's a gap in your process.
Next 2 weeks: Run the process manually using only the doc. Write down every edge case.
Week 3, 30 min: Update the document with what you learned.
Week 4: Now automate it.
Sawdust
Sam Carpenter's book Work The System is free at workthesystem.com. It's not a tree service book, but the framework fits any service business with repeatable work. Worth the read if you're tired of being the bottleneck in your own company.
If you want the data behind why CRM projects fail at such high rates, this LinkedIn article breaks down the Gartner numbers.
Quick gut check for your next software purchase: before you demo anything, ask yourself, "Can I hand someone a sheet of paper that explains exactly how this process works today?" If you can't, the demo is premature.
Kickback
Every CRM company sells you the dream of "set it and forget it." But not one of them asks you to describe the process first. They just want you to flip a toggle and pay the monthly fee. That gets under my skin.
Not entirely their fault. They sell software. But it means the burden falls on you to know what you're automating before you automate it.
And most of you skip that part. Busy, three crews out, a bid due by noon, a homeowner calling about a limb on her roof. Writing down a one-page process feels like busywork.
But that one page is probably worth more than the $200/month CRM subscription. Because without it, you're just paying for a faster way to make the same mistakes.
Are you automating a real process, or a mess?
If you've got an automation that's quietly causing problems, or you've been meaning to set one up but don't know where to start, reply to this email. Tell us what process you're trying to get off your plate. We'll help you think through it before you flip any switches.
If you live anywhere in the Great Plains or the Midwest, be weather-aware this weekend and get your crews ready for some emergency work; severe weather will be passing through!
Talk to you guys next Saturday.
-Jacob Hastings
