Free marketing worksheets for trades businesses

The four tools, and the question each one answers

Each tool answers one question an owner asks before spending money on marketing. Pick the question that is bothering you this month.

The order matters. Job value comes first because every other number leans on it. If you do not know what a job is worth, you cannot say whether $150 a lead is cheap or ruinous. The guides page explains how the four fit together.

A two-minute example of the maths

Here is the kind of arithmetic the worksheets walk you through, using invented numbers for a small electrical contractor.

• Ad spend last quarter: $6,000
• Calls and messages from those ads: 60
• Jobs actually booked from those calls: 15
• Average gross profit per job (revenue minus materials and direct labour): $700

Cost per lead is $6,000 ÷ 60 = $100. That sounds fine. Cost per booked job is $6,000 ÷ 15 = $400. Gross profit from those jobs is 15 × $700 = $10,500. Return on the ad spend is ($10,500 − $6,000) ÷ $6,000 = 0.75, or 75%.

So the ads paid for themselves and left $4,500. But the same sheet also shows the weak point: only one call in four became a job. Raising that to one in three, by answering faster or returning missed calls, would mean 20 jobs from the same $6,000. That single change moves the return from 75% to 133% without spending another dollar.

That is the whole point of the tools. The numbers usually tell you which lever to pull, and it is often not "spend more."

Why paper and not a calculator

A calculator gives you an answer. A worksheet gives you the answer and shows you which input drove it. When owners fill in a sheet by hand, they tend to notice things a tool would bury:

1. Revenue is not profit. Many owners measure marketing against invoice totals. The worksheets use gross profit, because a $12,000 job with $9,000 of materials is not worth twelve thousand dollars of marketing.
2. Leads are not jobs. Dashboards count clicks and calls. Your bank account counts booked, completed, paid work. The sheets track both and show the gap.
3. Seasons are not averages. A roofer in Saskatoon and a plumber in Halifax have very different years. The budget worksheet makes you plan month by month.
4. Some numbers are guesses. Writing "about 30%?" in pencil is honest. It also tells you which number to start measuring properly.

If you have no idea where your jobs came from, start with call and lead tracking. Without that, every worksheet runs on estimates.

Results from our HVAC work

Trades.Tools is new, but the method behind it is not. The worksheets are the same arithmetic we use on our own client work, most of which has been in heating and cooling. These are results from our HVAC work, not from other trades:

• HVACDeal.ca generated 500+ leads at a 12:1 ROI.
• CombiBoiler.ca reached 300% ROI and 300+ monthly leads.
• BCWide.ca tripled its leads in 90 days.

What transfers to other trades is not the number but the discipline: measure booked jobs, price leads against job value, and cut what does not pay. See the results page for what each project shows.

Who we are, and what we are not

Trades.Tools is a Canadian marketing and business consulting service for trades and home-service businesses. We belong to the Sedighi.ca and SAZ.ca group, run from our Vancouver, BC headquarters by Ali Sedighi, MBA. Our paid marketing work runs through Trades.Agency.

We are not a contractor. We do not install, repair or service anything, and nothing on this site is technical, safety or code advice for your trade. We help you market the work you already do well, and we help you check whether that marketing is earning its keep.

We cover the whole country. Each province and territory page explains how the worksheets change there: longer heating seasons on the Prairies, French-language ads in Quebec, short building seasons in the North.

When to call instead of print

The worksheets are complete on their own. Plenty of owners will use them, fix one or two things and never call us, and that is fine. Call, text or email when:

• the ROI sheet says a channel is losing money and you want a second opinion before you cut it
• you cannot fill in the "source" column because nothing is tracked
• you are about to sign a marketing contract and want to check the maths first
• you want someone to fill in all four sheets with your real data

A free consultation is the starting point, with no lock-in afterwards. You can see plan prices on the pricing page, or read how our paid services map to each worksheet.