Four marketing problems hold most trades businesses back. Which one is yours?

The four problems, and what usually causes each

Each symptom has a short list of likely causes. Guessing wrong is expensive, because the cure for one problem can make another one worse.

Notice that two rows point at the same place. A business that misses a third of its calls looks like it has a lead shortage. Buying more ads for that business just means paying to ring a phone nobody answers. That is why we diagnose before we sell anything.

A two-minute check you can run today

You can find your own biggest leak with four numbers from last month. Write down how many calls and quote requests came in, how many you actually spoke to, how many turned into quotes, and how many quotes you won.

Say 60 enquiries came in. You spoke to 42, quoted 30 and won 12. Your weakest step is obvious: 18 enquiries (30%) never reached a human. If those 18 had behaved like the 42 you did reach, about 13 would have become quotes (you quote 30 of every 42) and about 5 would have become jobs (you win 12 of every 30). At an average job of $1,800, that is roughly $9,000 a month in sales lost before anyone picked up. No new ad campaign recovers money that cheaply. The fix there is call handling, not lead generation.

Run the same arithmetic with your own numbers. The step with the biggest drop is where your marketing money should go first. Our self-diagnosis guide walks through all four problems this way, with the warning signs for each.

What we fix, and what we never touch

We are a marketing and business consulting service. We find what is broken in the way your business attracts, filters and converts customers, and we fix it: Google Business Profile, local search, ads, website pages, review requests, call handling and the routines behind them.

We are not a contractor. We never install, repair or service equipment, never quote on jobs, and never compete with you for work. The services overview explains how each fix works, and which one to start with if you recognise more than one symptom.

Proof from our HVAC work

Our published results come from HVAC and heating companies, where our method was built and tested. We present them as results from our HVAC work, not as plumbing, roofing or electrical results. BCWide.ca reached 3× leads in 90 days. HVACDeal.ca produced 500+ leads at a 12:1 ROI. GasBoilers.ca, a gas-boiler division built for CANRO Heat, holds 5.0★ from 76+ Google reviews.

Each of those maps to one of the four problems: volume, quality and reputation. The results page explains what each case shows and which parts carry over to other trades.

Who runs Trades.Solutions

Trades.Solutions is part of the Sedighi.ca and SAZ.ca group of companies. It is Canadian, headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, and led by Ali Sedighi, MBA in Technology Management, who has worked in digital marketing for 17+ years, since 2007, and has built 150+ live HVAC websites. It is the problem-first door into Trades.Agency, the group's agency for trades businesses.

We work across all of Canada; the areas page shows how each problem changes by region. Read about how we work, check plans and pricing, or skip ahead to contact. When you call, text or email, a senior strategist answers, and the first question will always be the same one: what is the symptom, and what has it cost you this month?