In fact, it’s something I’m going to start sharing with you regularly (I’m too good to you, I know!), so every so often I’ll be sharing some screen shots or videos with you to give you a taste for what’s coming soon…

Manage your jobs with (more) ease…

At the moment, YourTradeBase is mostly used for creating great looking quotes and invoices. We have a ‘jobs’ section, but we were never really happy that it helped our trade customers enough. That didn’t sit well with us. We want YourTradeBase to make life easier for tradesman, so we knew something had to change.

The next major update to YourTradeBase puts a lot more focus on managing your jobs. Jobs are the life blood for every Tradesman’s business: we wanted to help tradesmen track what they needed to do with the jobs they have, know which jobs they have a chance of winning, and keep a tab on the paperwork they need to create.

Here are a few teasers for what you can expect from the new jobs function in YourTradeBase:

Easy Job Overviews

Quickly see what paperwork you’ve created for a Job (along with it’s status)

Get to grips with your job tasks and to-do’s

We’re putting the finishing touches to the new jobs section, and hope to share many more details with you soon. Remember, new features and updates will always be available to you for free – all you need to do is log in to YourTradeBase account and they’ll be there waiting for you to try. Of course, if you haven’t yet got a YourTradeBase account, you can create a free trial in just a few minutes.

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We’ll be sharing our new features here on our blog and in our newsletter as we release them, if you want us to let you know about these new features (as well as help and tips to help you grow your trade business), you can sign up for our monthly newsletter updates at the very bottom of this page. We also love hearing your suggestions for making YourTradeBase as useful as it can be – so let us know if you feel something’s missing?

“I received a call from a homeowner asking for someone to come estimate some repairs. When I
asked the sort of repairs, he said it would be too many to enumerate, but much easier if I just came
out to the house and looked. I went”.

It began like this…………
Old Joe wanted to change his toilet seat, but couldn’t get the old one off. So he tried wrenches
until he rounded off the nuts (he was turning them the wrong way because they were upside
down) and then decided to get his trusty cold chisel and hammer out. Well, he tapped a bit on it with
no success, so he drew back the hammer to smite a mighty blow against the stubborn bolt. In so
doing he broke the toilet tank and flooded the area with cold water. This cold water gave him a start
and he drew back in a hurry dropping the hammer into the bathtub causing a big chunk of the
porcelain to pop off the tub floor. Regrouping his thoughts, he ran down to the basement two floors
below to shut off the water to the house, the house had no other valves installed when it was built in
the 1890′s. Meanwhile water was flooding through the floors and had saturated the plaster of the
ceiling below to the point it collapsed into the living room.

Old Joe then removed what was left of the toilet tank, and tried to remove the bowl from the floor
flange. It wouldn’t budge either, so out comes the trusty chisel and hammer again, and “WHACK” no
more toilet bowl. In the process however, he managed to tear the closet flange from the floor as well,
and since it was attached to a lead closet bend, it torn and now needed replaced too. He
determined that it would be necessary to cut out the tee in the stack where the closet bent was
attached since he had no idea how to repair old lead piping. He thought using that nifty PVC from
Home Depot would do the trick. He tried to cut the cast iron stack with a hacksaw to no avail, then
tried a sawzall, also fruitless, so…. yep, out comes the good old chisel and hammer, but a bigger
hammer this time.

He whacks on the stack a few mighty blows and Viola’ it splits into several pieces with one tiny
segment still holding it all together. He pried the last vestige of solid pipe out of the wall with a
crowbar and suddenly the remaining section of pipe (the vent going through the roof) lets go and
with a mighty crash comes down and out of the wall through the sub floor into the now plaster less
ceiling of the living room, continues its downward decent until it hits the TV set, ricocheting off that
and through the floor of the living room until it hit the electrical panel plunging the house into total
darkness and finally comes to rest after shearing off the main water shut off valve flooding the
basement. This was a $27,000 toilet seat replacement.

Couple of Pics to Make you Laugh!

And to finish with a joke!

A BLONDE, wanting to earn some money, decided to hire herself out as a handyman-type and started canvassing a wealthy neighborhood. She went to the front door of the first house and asked the owner if he had any jobs for her to do.
“Well, you can paint my porch. How much will you charge?”
The blonde said “How about 50 dollars?”
The man agreed and told her that the paint and ladders that she might need were in the garage.
The man’s wife, inside the house, heard the conversation and said to her husband, “Does she realize that the porch goes all the way around the house?”
The man replied, “She should. She was standing on the porch.”
A short time later, the blonde came to the door to collect her money.
“You’re finished already?” he asked.
“Yes,” the blonde answered, “and I had paint left over, so I gave it two coats.”
Impressed, the man reached in his pocket for the $50.
“And by the way,” the blonde added, “that’s not a Porch, it’s a Ferrari.”

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Make sure to check back so you don’t miss out on next Friday’s humour, better still, you can keep up-to-date with our blog posts by following our RSS feed, or subscribing to our newsletter at the very bottom of this page.

A Do-it-Yourself [DIY] enthusiast, from the UK, has been banned by his wife from taking on any more tasks after causing thousands of pounds worth of damage reports the Daily Telegraph newspaper.

Christopher Andrews, 21, a pensions administrator, has left a trail of destruction in their two-bedroom terrace house in Wiltshire, south-west England. While trying to change a washer on a tap, he went up into the loft to look for the stop-crock and disconnected two pipes, flooding the house. He later returned to the loft to look for the television aerial and crashed through the room’s ceiling, showering plaster on his wife who was ironing.

When he wanted to lay a carpet in the bedroom, he knocked out the light bringing the roll of material into the house. He cut a large hole in the carpet rather than move the bed. Andrews once blacked both his eyes when a wheel brace slipped as he tried to change a punctured tyre on the couple’s car.

Mr Andrews ruined a kitchen work surface by trimming off so much of it to make it fit that it ended up far too small.

In his hands the electric drill becomes a dangerous weapon. He cut his leg badly when he dropped the drill as he tried to re-hang a broken garden gate. Then, while trying to put up a coat rack in the hall, he drilled through an electric cable sending out sparks that set fire to the curtains.

This made him more safety conscious; so when he decided to put some speakers on the walls he turned off the electricity. Then, unable to understand why his electric drill had stopped working, he took it apart to see if he could fix the fault. Having failed to find anything wrong with it, he tried to put it back together again but by then he had forgotten where all the pieces went. He went out and bought another drill and was about to take it back because it didn’t work when his wife arrived home and reminded him that he had turned off the electricity.

Mrs Andrews, a job training manager, said she had had enough, ‘Chris will have a go at absolutely anything,’ she commented. ‘But in his case DIY stands for Dangerously Incompetent Yob’.

It is entirely possible, think Will and Guy, that Mr Andrews may have been responsible for fitting this television in his home.

Photo Fun

If you were busting you know you would!

I guess they had a tight deadline!

Do you think the monitor displays what the cam sees?

Don’t try this at home folks!

Lets take a look at why this method proves a winner for many of our fellow tradesmen.

Leaflets are:

• inexpensive, with print costs allowing you to purchase larger quantities with only little further outlay.
• a great way to target your market and gain exposure.
• able to be distributed via various channels.
• inexpensive to be distributed.
• can gain reasonable response rates and ROI.
• a great way to monitor and track different sales messages or promotions.

Print

There are hundreds of decent printers about, all fighting for your business and this is obviously reflected within the costs you are now able to achieve for your print requirements.  Another great thing with print cost is that the more you purchase the more you save.  For example: Should you wish to purchase 10000 full colour single sided A5 leaflets you would pay around £200.  But, should you double up the quantity to 20000 you will find yourself only paying an additional £80, giving you quite a tasty saving.

Many of these printers are also able to cater for your design requirements and if they don’t directly deal with this they should be able to point you in the right direction.

Distribution

Now you have got your design sorted and your printers to knock out the 20000 leaflets you need to decide what route you want to take to get them into your potential customers hands.  There are various paths you could take and below I have listed, what I feel to be, your  3 most practical choices.

1. Inserted in your local rag. You should be able to get leaflets placed and delivered inside these local papers for approximately £25 – £45 per 1000 leaflets.  This is a good way to be certain that the leaflets will be distributed and land on potential customers doormats, but consider the fight for attention your marketing material will have when being picked up from the floor by these potential customers.
2. Personal distribution. If your working on a budget and any expense could be better done without then you could walk the streets in your spare time and distribute your leaflets in your local areas.  Leaflet distribution is a very time consuming and mundane task.  Should this be your desired option then I suggested you treat your partner like god for a few days and then rope them into helping.  ( When I first started touting for work this was the method I had to take but I did pay off.  After spending my evenings dropping leaflets through doors for a couple of weeks I obtained a healthy workload that keep me going for quite some time)
3. Distribution Companies. If you have a little bit left in your budget after getting your leaflets designed and printed then I would advise you take a look into contracting a leaflet distribution company to handle this exposure campaign.  Do a search online for local distribution companies and you I guarantee you will find one serving the streets where you live.  Most of these distribution companies will offer you two different services both with there own costs,  Solus distribution and shared distribution.  Solus distribution is when your leaflet will be the only material penetrating each household at that time.  This gives you an advantage as you are not in a contest for attention with any other business literature.  The cost of this does come at a premium though, with some companies charging upto £120 per 1000 leaflets.  If you do a bit of shopping about though you should be able to obtain this service for approximately £45 – £60 per 1000 leaflets.  Shared, or mixed distribution is a cheaper option of employing one of these distribution companies to do the leg work for you, with advertised prices stated as little as £20 per 1000, but again with this method your material will be fighting for attention as these shared deals can mean your leaflet being put through the letter box with up to 5-6 other businesses leaflets.  Most companies do state though that they will not distribute two of the same type of businesses together

Tracking your messages.

The same with most marketing, you should be experiment with the approach taken with your sales message and design.  Doing this will enable you to measure which message has the stronger pull.  This easiset way to measure response per message this is produce a reference code and have this printed near to your contact number, getting each and every caller to read out the code they have.  After a number of reference codes have been recorded you will start to see what message is producing the majority of your business.

This is not as complicated – or as expensive – as you may think. Registering a co.uk domain at somewhere like 123-Reg, for instance, costs £2.99 a year. For around £2.50 a month on top of that, you can also have companies like 123-Reg host a small web site and give you more email addresses than you probably know what to do with.

Being memorable is the name of the game

Creating a web site is not strictly necessary but even if you put up a small holding page with your company name, a list of the services you provide, and your contact details, you’ll probably be one step ahead of many of your local competitors in the building, plumbing, electrical, or any other trades.

And having more than one email address is going to impress. Ask customers to send initial enquiries to enquiries@ytbelectrical.co.uk, for instance and then reply with your more personal address (graham@ytbelectrical.co.uk). When it’s time to send an invoice, send it from accounts@ytbelectrical.co.uk. It all helps to make the customer feel they’re dealing with a professional business. All for about £33 per year.

Google is keen to help, too

The great thing about grabbing yourself a domain and creating a small landing page is that you can then start using the power of Google to drive local business your way. Next time, I’ll start showing you how to do just that.

Meaningless but funny!

I shouldn’t laugh but I just do!

Make sure to check back so you don’t miss out on next Friday’s humour, better still, you can keep up-to-date with our blog posts by following our RSS feed, or subscribing to our newsletter at the very bottom of this page.

Only feels like a couple of days ago I was posting fun stuff last Friday for the plasterers out there.  Now its the turn of you plumbers out there to get the laughs and share with mates.

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If you have ever seen an install that could be slightly better, I bet it don’t come to close to this.

You just got to feel for the homeowner!

Who Remembers these Characters? A little bit of Harry & Paul

The Weekly joke! (Or 3)

The jokes below have been sourced from 101funjokes.com.

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A plumber attended to a leaking faucet at the neurosurgeon’s house. After a two-minute job the plumber demanded £150.

The neurosurgeon exclaimed, ‘I don’t charge this amount even though I am a surgeon.”

The plumber replied, “I agree, you are right. I too, didn’t either, when I was a surgeon. That’s why I switched to plumbing!”

—-

A doctor has some trouble with the kitchen sink, on a public holiday. He calls the local plumber, only to be told that it’s his day off.

“But I get called out on my days off, too!” says the doctor, somewhat exasperated.” So, the plumber relents.

The plumber arrives, and glances over the sink, looking preoccupied. He mumbles something about golf, then hands the doctor a couple of aspirin and walks out, saying, “Put these in. If it doesn’t clear up in 24 hours, call me tomorrow.”

—-

A plumber was called to woman’s apartment in New York City to repair a leaking pipe. When he arrived he was pleased to discover that the woman was quite a luscious, well-stacked dish.

During the course of the afternoon, the two became extremely friendly. About 6:30 p.m. the phone rang, disturbing the bedroom shenanigans.

“That was my husband,” she said, putting down the phone. “He’s on his way home, but is going back to the office around 8 p.m.. Come back then, dear, and we can take up where we left off.”

The union plumber looked at the woman in disbelief. “What? On my own time?”

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Next Fridays humour will be aimed at our friendly Sparky mates, so make sure to check back so you don’t miss out, better still, you can keep up-to-date with our blog posts by following our RSS feed, or subscribing to our newsletter at the very bottom of this page.

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This week is focused on the plasterers of the world and contains a couple of great videos and a Joke.  What you are about to see is placed here for your entertainment purposes only and we do not condone this behaviour whatsoever!  Like hell we don’t!  I want you to go out and stitch you mates right up and let me know ‘How & What’ you done, or even stick links to any other videos you can find up in the comments box and give ‘us’ a laugh.

The Plasterers Initiation

In your Face Son!

These boys (Doncaster Plasterers) have a few vids others on YouTube if you want to get in early and have a peek before we get back to this trade.

Classic Joke This!

I heard this one a few years ago and it is spot on for my sense of humour.  Have a read and let me know if you like it.

The Plasterer

A duck walks into a pub and orders a pint of lager and a ham sandwich.

The landlord looks at him and says, “But you’re a duck”.

“I see your eyes are working”, replies the duck.

“And you talk!” exclaims the landlord.

“I see your ears are working”, says the duck, “Now can I just have my beer and my sandwich please?”. “I’m working on the building site across the road, and I’m on my break. “, explains the duck.

The landlord serves him and he drinks his beer, eats his sandwich and leaves.

This continues for 2 weeks. Then one day the circus comes to town. The ringleader of the circus comes into the pub and the landlord says to him, “You’re with the circus aren’t you?, I know this duck that would be just brilliant in your circus, he talks, drinks beer and everything!”.

“Sounds marvellous”, says the ringleader, “get him to give me a call”.

So the next day when the duck comes into the pub the landlord says, “Hey Mr. Duck, I reckon I can line you up with a top job, paying really good money!”.

“Yeah?”, says the duck, “Sounds great, where is it?”.

“At the circus”, says the landlord.

“The circus?”, the duck enquires.

“That’s right”, replies the landlord.

“The circus? That place with the big tent? With all the animals? With the big canvas roof with the hole in the middle?”, asks the duck.

“That’s right!”, says the landlord.

The duck looks confused, “What the hell would they want with a plasterer?”

———–

Next Fridays humour will be aimed at our friendly Plumber mates, so make sure to check back so you don’t miss out, better still, you can keep up-to-date with our blog posts by following our RSS feed, or subscribing to our newsletter at the very bottom of this page.

“I meet and talk with tradesmen in my day to day role of running my business and one of the key issues they have is the time and effort spent on producing quotations and invoices. Some admit that they lose job opportunities because they just can’t find the time to follow up a lead with a quotation.

When I discovered YourTradeBase, I knew immediately that this would save tradesmen, streamline the process, and make them more efficient with their paperwork.  I’m happy to promote YourTradeBase to all tradesmen I come in contact with. Finally, there is a fantastic app that will make their lives easier.”

Eileen Le Voi, SafeLocalTrades,com

We’re always stoked when we hear kind words, and we’re extra pleased to hear from someone with an inside view on the paperwork pains of tradesmen: Eileen runs the safelocaltrades.com website for Peterborough and the surrounding areas. Safe Local Trades do a fantastic job of helping to promote reliable, professional tradesmen in their local area, helping these tradesmen grow their business, and providing consumers with a group of vetted, rated tradesmen. So Eileen is perfectly placed to know what eats up tradesmen’s time.

Thanks for the kind words, Eileen, a shameless plug is heading your way: If you’re a tradesman in a PE postcode, we strongly recommend you check out safelocaltrades.com and see what they have to offer.

If you’ve got any feedback for us, we’d love to hear it. You can send us your feedback, questions, or suggestions from our Helpdesk, by email (feedback [AT] yourtradebase.com), or from the ‘Give us your feedback’ link at the bottom of every page in your YourTradeBase account.