Working Smarter Not Harder

By Jaycub's Jammin MediaBusiness Entrepreneurship Technology

Working Smarter Not Harder episodes

July 30How Reilly Overhead Door Stopped Losing After-Hours Garage Door Leads
Marcus of Reilly Overhead Door in Wichita walks through how a single missed after-hours call at his kid's baseball game cost him an $800 spring job — and the simple ops playbook that plugged the leak. A candid conversation about why speed beats quality in home services and how a notebook-in-the-truck system finally hit its ceiling.
In this episode:
Marcus's origin story: nine years from a pickup bed to three techs and two vans at Reilly Overhead Door in Wichita

The 7:15pm broken-spring call that rolled to voicemail — and the 9am competitor who booked the job

Why homeowners with broken springs call three companies minimum, and the fastest text-back wins

Step 1: A 10-second missed-call auto text that sounds human, not "your call is important to us"

Step 2: Turning every missed call into a tracked lead so you can finally see after-hours volume

Step 3: A five-column Kanban pipeline — New Lead, Contacted, Quoted, Booked, Done

Why the customer-facing FAQ, pricing sheet, and SOPs live in Notion while calls and calendar live in the ops platform

Step 4: The follow-up nobody does — the "let me talk to my wife" leads that quietly disappear
Subscribe: workingsmarter.jgiebz.com
Full transcript
Eric: So it's like seven fifteen at night, phone rings...
Marcus Reilly: Phone rings. Broken spring, garage door won't open, guy's car is stuck INSIDE the garage.
Eric: Oof.
Marcus Reilly: Yeah. And I'm at my kid's baseball game. Third inning. I don't even hear it.
Eric: You don't hear it.
Marcus Reilly: I don't hear it. Phone's in the truck. So it rolls to voicemail, and my voicemail says, you know, "leave a message, we'll get back to you first thing." Real friendly.
Eric: Sure.
Marcus Reilly: I call the guy back at seven thirty the next morning. Seven thirty ON THE DOT. And he goes, "oh, hey, yeah, thanks, but I already got somebody coming at nine."
Eric: Someone else got him.
Marcus Reilly: Someone else got him. And that's a spring job, that's an install, that's probably eight, nine hundred bucks out the door. Gone. Because I was watching Little League.
Eric: And how often was that happening?
Marcus Reilly: That's the thing. I didn't KNOW how often. That's what killed me. I'd see the missed call in the morning and half the time I wouldn't even bother, because I figured, well, they already found somebody.
Eric: Right.
Marcus Reilly: So for anyone who's, you know, just picking this up, I'm Marcus, I run Reilly Overhead Door out in Wichita. Garage doors, springs, openers, the whole deal. Started nine years ago out of the bed of my pickup, and now we're three techs, two vans.
Eric: That's a real business.
Marcus Reilly: It's a real business. And the leaks were killing me.
Eric: Okay so let me play back what I'm hearing, because I've seen this exact pattern probably a hundred times with home service guys. It's not that your marketing is broken.
Marcus Reilly: No, the phone rings.
Eric: The phone rings. That's the hard part. You already did the hard part. The problem is what happens in the sixty seconds AFTER the phone rings when nobody picks up.
Marcus Reilly: Yeah.
Eric: Because a homeowner with a broken spring at seven pm is not gonna sit and wait. They're gonna call the next three names on the Google list.
Marcus Reilly: They're calling three. Minimum.
Eric: Minimum. And whoever answers first, or whoever gets a text back first, wins. It's not the best company. It's the fastest company.
Marcus Reilly: That's hard to hear but yeah.
Eric: It's hard to hear but it's freeing too, right? Because you don't have to be better. You just have to be there.
Marcus Reilly: Huh.
Eric: So how were you tracking any of this? Like, missed calls, callbacks, none of it?
Marcus Reilly: Uh. Notebook. In the truck.
Eric: Okay.
Marcus Reilly: Don't laugh, man. I had a system.
Eric: I'm not laughing, I'm... I'm laughing a little.
Marcus Reilly: Fair.
Eric: But look, that's most guys. That's most guys at your stage. The notebook works until it doesn't, and then you hit a ceiling and you can't figure out why the business feels stuck even though you're busier than ever.
Marcus Reilly: That was me exactly. Busier, more stressed, not really making more.
Eric: Right. So here's what we did, and I'll walk you through it the way we did it at my agency, because we run this same playbook for a lot of trades clients. We use an all-in-one ops platform, it's the thing we run the agency on, and the first thing, the very first thing, is you have to close the after-hours gap. Nothing else matters until that's closed.
Marcus Reilly: Okay.
Eric: So step one. Missed call, auto text back. Within about ten seconds.
Marcus Reilly: Ten seconds.
Eric: Ten seconds. Homeowner calls, you don't pick up, they get a text on their phone that says something like, "Hey, this is Marcus at Reilly Overhead Door, sorry I missed you, what's going on with your door?"
Marcus Reilly: Just like that.
Eric: Just like that. Human. Sounds like you. Not "your call is important to us."
Marcus Reilly: Yeah nobody believes that one.
Eric: Nobody has EVER believed that one.
Eric: And here's what happens. Most of the time, they text back. Because texting is easier than making another call, and they've already got their phone in their hand.
Marcus Reilly: Huh.
Eric: Now you're in a conversation. And the conversation can happen while you're still at the baseball game. You just tap out, "broken spring? I can have somebody there tomorrow at eight, does that work?" Boom. Booked.
Marcus Reilly: From the bleachers.
Eric: From the bleachers.
Marcus Reilly: Okay that alone would've saved me that job.
Eric: That alone. And we haven't even gotten to the good part yet.
Marcus Reilly: Alright.
Eric: So step two. The platform, when that missed call comes in, it doesn't just fire the text. It creates a lead. A record. So now for the first time you can actually SEE how many after-hours calls you're getting, what they're about, which ones convert, which ones ghost you.
Marcus Reilly: I've never had that number.
Eric: Nobody has that number until they have it. And usually when guys see it for the first time they're...
Marcus Reilly: Mad.
Eric: Mad. Because it's more than they thought.
Marcus Reilly: Yeah.
Eric: Way more.
Marcus Reilly: Yeah.
Eric: Step three, and this is where it starts to actually feel like a business instead of a hustle. That lead goes into a pipeline. Just a simple pipeline. New lead, contacted, quoted, booked, done. Five columns.
Marcus Reilly: Like a Kanban thing.
Eric: Exactly like a Kanban thing. And we actually k...
12 min
July 30 Working Smarter - July 30, 2026
Practical business automation, AI tools, and productivity strategies for entrepreneurs and small business owners. Cut through the noise and work smarter — not harder. New episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.
7 min
July 28Client Retention for Salon Owners: Spot Drifting Regulars Before They Ghost You
Marcy runs a three-chair salon in Green Bay and tracked 240 active clients out of a paper appointment book and her own memory — until a standing color client quietly disappeared for six months. We rebuild her system from scratch.
In this episode:
The grocery-store balayage moment that exposed a six-month-gone regular

Why client loss isn't a cliff — it's a drift from 5 weeks to 7 to 10 to gone

Auditing the cracks: paper book, personal texts, Instagram DMs, and Square all holding pieces of the same client

Step 1: get every active client (last 9 months) into one platform with just two fields — last visit date and typical rebook cadence

Step 2: build one "overdue regular" automation that texts in your voice at week 7 — "hey Jen, want me to hold your usual Thursday spot?"

Why the save window for a drifting regular is roughly two weeks — and no solo operator can watch it for 240 calendars

Step 3: keep a Notion page per client for the human stuff data fields can't hold (divorces, impulse-bang warnings, small-talk preferences)

Reframing "I'm bad with memory" as a math problem you outgrew, not a personal failure
Sources:
Conversation-only episode — no external sources cited.
Subscribe: workingsmarter.jgiebz.com
Full transcript
Eric: ...six months. SIX months you didn't know she was gone.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Six months. And she was a standing every-five-weeks color client, Eric. Every five weeks for like four years.
Eric: And what tipped you off finally?
Marcy Hollenbeck: I ran into her at the grocery store. She had a fresh balayage that I did not do. And she got all weird and said "oh hi Marcy" and kind of speed-walked past the yogurt.
Eric: Oof.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Yeah. Oof is right.
Eric: Okay so back up for people listening. Tell me about the salon. What are we working with.
Marcy Hollenbeck: So I have a three-chair salon in Green Bay. I opened it eleven years ago after cutting hair in my basement for way too long. It's me, two other stylists, we do color, cuts, some extensions. Mostly women, mostly regulars, mostly word of mouth.
Eric: Love it. And how were you tracking clients before all this?
Marcy Hollenbeck: Tracking is a generous word.
Eric: Uh oh.
Marcy Hollenbeck: I had a paper appointment book. Like a physical, spiral-bound, Barnes and Noble appointment book. And then everything else lived up here. Who's due, who's overdue, who I need to call, who tips weird, who hates small talk...
Eric: All in your head.
Marcy Hollenbeck: All in my head. Which worked fine for like the first eight years honestly.
Eric: Sure.
Marcy Hollenbeck: But then we got busier and I got a second kid and my head just... stopped being a reliable filing cabinet.
Eric: Okay so let me play back what I'm hearing, because I think the grocery store lady is actually not the real problem.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Okay.
Eric: You didn't lose her at the grocery store. You lost her the first time she pushed her appointment from five weeks to seven weeks and nobody noticed.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Oh.
Eric: Because a regular doesn't leave in a straight line. They drift. Five weeks becomes seven, seven becomes ten, ten becomes "I'll book when I need to," and then they're just gone. And if the only place you're tracking that drift is your memory, of course you miss it. You've got scissors in your hand.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Yeah. Yeah I literally have scissors in my hand.
Eric: Right. So the problem isn't that you're bad at retention. The problem is you have no early warning system.
Marcy Hollenbeck: That's exactly it. I feel like I've been describing this to my husband for a year and he just says "get a computer, Marce."
Eric: Well, he's not wrong, but "get a computer" is not a plan.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Thank you.
Eric: So can I walk you through what we did with a client of ours who had basically the same problem? Different business, same shape.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Please.
Eric: So at the agency we run everything on this all-in-one ops platform. It's the thing we use for our clients and honestly for ourselves. It's a CRM, but it also does the appointment booking, the text messages, the email, the pipelines, all of it in one place. That's the important part. One place.
Marcy Hollenbeck: One place. Because right now I have the paper book, I have my personal texts with clients, I have Instagram DMs, I have a Square thing for payments...
Eric: Right. And every one of those is a place a client can slip through.
Marcy Hollenbeck: So many cracks.
Eric: So many cracks. Okay so step one for you would just be getting every client into the platform with two pieces of info: last visit date, and typical rebook cadence. That's it. Don't try to migrate eleven years of history.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Oh good because I was already panicking.
Eric: Don't panic. Just active clients. Anyone who's been in in the last, say, nine months. Name, phone, last service, how often they normally come. You can do that in an afternoon with a glass of wine.
Marcy Hollenbeck: I like this plan already.
Eric: Then step two, and this is the actual magic, you set up one automation. ONE. Called something like "overdue regular."
Marcy Hollenbeck: Okay.
Eric: And the rule is basically, if a client's typical cadence is five weeks and they hit week seven with no appointment booked, the platform sends them a text. From you. In your voice. Something like "hey Jen, it's Marcy, realized it's been a bit, want me to hold your usual Thursday spot?"
Marcy Hollenbeck: Oh.
Eric: Yeah.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Oh that's... that's not a marketing text. That's just what I would text her if I remembered.
Eric: EXACTLY. That's the whole game. The platform isn't replacing you, it's just remembering for you.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Huh.
Eric: Because here's the thing. When your grocery store lady drifted from five weeks to seven, if she'd gotten a text from you at week seven that said "hey want your Thursday?" she books. She doesn't have time to Google other salons. She doesn't see the Grogan ad or whatever.
Marcy Hollenbeck: The Groban ad.
Eric: The Groban ad, yeah, Josh Groban's coming for your color clients.
Eric: But seriously. The window to save a drifting regular is small. It's like two weeks. And no human running a three-chair salon can watch that window for every client.
Marcy Hollenbeck: No. No way. I've got like two hundred and forty active clients between the three of us.
Eric: Right. Two hundred and forty overlapping calendars in your head. That's not a memory problem, that's a math problem.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Okay when you put it like that I feel less dumb.
Eric: You should feel zero dumb. You built a business to the point where the manual system broke. That's a good problem.
Marcy Hollenbeck:
13 min
July 28 Working Smarter - July 28, 2026
Practical business automation, AI tools, and productivity strategies for entrepreneurs and small business owners. Cut through the noise and work smarter — not harder. New episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.
6 min
July 28 Working Smarter - July 28, 2026
Practical business automation, AI tools, and productivity strategies for entrepreneurs and small business owners. Cut through the noise and work smarter — not harder. New episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.
6 min
July 23Stop Losing Warm Leads: Automated Follow-Up for Contractors
If you're a contractor who nails the in-home estimate but watches leads go cold in a folder on your passenger seat, this episode is for you. We break down exactly why warm leads die—and the 90-second driveway habit that fixes it.
Why a "dropped ball" is a system problem, not a character flaw

The real reason leads die: the 12 inches between the kitchen table and the truck

Why spreadsheets and CRMs become just another chore for solo operators

The 90-second driveway form: capture name, number, address, quote, and one note before you pull away

How an automated text sequence follows up on estimates without you touching it

Why the sequence stops the moment a customer replies—no accidental four-text nightmares

When the platform hands the conversation back to you so the human relationship stays intact
Sources: No external sources cited in this episode.
Subscribe: workingsmarter.jgiebz.com
Full transcript
Eric: So you're driving home from Fort Wayne, it's what, seven at night?
Marcy Bollinger: Seven, seven thirty. Sometimes later if the last one runs long.
Eric: And you've got a truck full of samples, a notebook with a quote you scribbled at somebody's kitchen table…
Marcy Bollinger: And a coffee that went cold three houses ago. Yeah.
Eric: How many of those a week are you doing right now?
Marcy Bollinger: Five, six a week. Twenty plus a month. Kitchens, backsplashes, some shower remodels.
Eric: And of those twenty, how many turn into an actual job?
Marcy Bollinger: Honest answer? Maybe eight. Maybe nine on a good month.
Eric: Okay. And of the ones that don't, what happens?
Marcy Bollinger: Nothing happens. That's the whole problem. Nothing happens.
Eric: You don't call them back.
Marcy Bollinger: I mean to. I always mean to. I get in the truck, I say, Marcy, tomorrow you text the Hendersons, you text the lady with the herringbone thing…
Eric: And tomorrow you're on a job at seven a.m.
Marcy Bollinger: I'm on my knees on a subfloor by seven fifteen. And by the time I remember, it's Thursday, and the lady with the herringbone already hired somebody else.
Eric: Right.
Marcy Bollinger: And the worst part is, half of them WANTED me. Like, we clicked. They liked the samples. They said, we'll talk it over this weekend. And I just… vanished on them.
Eric: So let me play something back to you, because I want to make sure I heard the real problem.
Marcy Bollinger: Okay.
Eric: You said you lose about half your warm leads. You didn't say you lose them because your price is too high. You didn't say you lose them because a competitor is better. You said you lose them because you don't circle back.
Marcy Bollinger: Correct.
Eric: So the thing that's broken isn't your quoting. It isn't your work. It's the twelve inches between the kitchen table and the truck.
Marcy Bollinger: That's a really nice way of saying I drop the ball.
Eric: No, I'm saying you don't have a system. There's a difference.
Marcy Bollinger: Huh.
Eric: A dropped ball is a character flaw. A missing system is a fixable thing. And you're running a three-person install crew, you're the estimator, you're the boss, you're the bookkeeper probably…
Marcy Bollinger: And the one who buys the doughnuts.
Eric: And the doughnut lady. Of course you're not following up. There's no version of you that has time to follow up manually.
Marcy Bollinger: Okay. So say that's true. What do I do? Because I've tried the sticky notes. I've tried a spreadsheet. My nephew set me up on some CRM thing last year and I logged in twice.
Eric: Yeah, that's the other trap. People throw a tool at it and the tool becomes another chore.
Marcy Bollinger: Another chore. YES.
Eric: So here's how we think about it at the agency. We run everything on one all-in-one ops platform. Quotes, texts, emails, calendar, the whole thing. And the reason that matters is not because it has more features, it's because the follow-up happens without a human touching it.
Marcy Bollinger: Without me touching it.
Eric: Without you touching it. You do the part only you can do, which is sit at the kitchen table and be Marcy. The platform does the part you were never gonna do anyway.
Marcy Bollinger: Which is what, specifically?
Eric: Okay, walk me through what happens right now when you finish an estimate. Physically.
Marcy Bollinger: I write the number on a carbon-copy pad. I tear off the top, hand it to them. I keep the yellow one. I put the yellow one in a folder on my passenger seat.
Eric: And that folder goes where?
Marcy Bollinger: Eventually to my kitchen counter. Eventually to a drawer.
Eric: Right. So the lead dies in a drawer.
Marcy Bollinger: The lead dies in a drawer.
Eric: So step one of the fix, before any software, is the yellow slip cannot be the system. The yellow slip is a souvenir.
Marcy Bollinger: A souvenir. Okay.
Eric: What we did for a client who's basically you, but he does gutters, is we set it up so at the end of the estimate he pulls out his phone, opens one form, types the name, the number, the address, the quote amount, and one line of notes. Takes him ninety seconds in the driveway before he pulls away.
Marcy Bollinger: Before he pulls away. Not later.
Eric: Never later. Later doesn't exist. Later is the drawer.
Marcy Bollinger: Yeah.
Eric: The second he hits submit, the platform sends the customer a text. Something like, hey, this is so-and-so, really enjoyed meeting you, here's your quote in writing, no rush, let me know if you have questions.
Marcy Bollinger: And that goes out automatically.
Eric: Automatically. He didn't write it. He wrote it once, six months ago, and now it just goes.
Marcy Bollinger: Okay.
Eric: Then two days later, if they haven't replied, another text. Short one. Hey, just checking if you had a chance to look it over.
Marcy Bollinger: Wait, and that also goes without him doing anything?
Eric: Without him doing anything. And if THEY reply, the sequence stops. It's not gonna keep nagging somebody who already answered.
Marcy Bollinger: Because that would be the nightmare.
Eric: That would be the nightmare, yeah. Nobody wants to be the contractor who texts you four times after you already said yes.
Marcy Bollinger: I've BEEN texted four times after I already said yes. By my own plumber.
Eric: Right. So the platform's watching the conversation. If they reply, it hands the thread back to you on your phone, like a normal text message. You take it from there.
Marcy Bollinger: So it's not pretending to be me.
Eric: It's not pretending to be you. The first message is clearly a follow-up. And then the second something's actually happening, it's you.
Marcy Bollin...
12 min
July 23 Working Smarter - July 23, 2026
4 min
July 21How Salons Win Back Lapsed Clients With Automated Texts
When you're behind the chair all day, the clients who drifted don't disappear from your heart—they disappear from your calendar. Marisol, owner of a three-chair salon in Tucson, shares the moment she realized she had a system problem, not a memory problem, and the simple automation setup that fixed it.
Why even the most relationship-driven salon owners lose clients silently—and don't notice until a chance grocery store run

The "bottleneck" diagnosis: you're holding all the client knowledge in your head while your hands are busy cutting hair

Why spreadsheets and sticky notes fail—and what a single consolidated client list with last-visit dates actually changes

Setting a re-engagement trigger: if a client hasn't booked in 10 weeks, an automated text goes out from your own business number

Writing texts that feel personal, not promotional—"Hey stranger, been a minute" vs. "Book now, 20% off"

The two-nudge sequence: a warm first text, a softer follow-up two weeks later, then letting it go gracefully

How replies, booking links, and calendar updates all flow back to you like a normal conversation—no new app to check
Sources: workingsmarter.jgiebz.com
Subscribe: workingsmarter.jgiebz.com
Full transcript
Eric: So you told me before we hit record that you can name every regular client's kid, their dog, the vacation they took in June... but you can't tell me who hasn't been in since March.
Marisol Ortega: Yeah. That's the whole thing, right there. That's the whole embarrassing thing.
Eric: I don't think it's embarrassing. I think it's really common.
Marisol Ortega: It FEELS embarrassing. Because I love these people. Like, I genuinely love my clients. And then one day I'm at the grocery store and I see somebody I haven't done in eight months and she's got a fresh cut and it is NOT from me.
Eric: Oof.
Marisol Ortega: And she's sweet about it. She's like, oh hi Marisol, and I'm smiling, and inside I'm like... when did I lose you. When did that happen.
Eric: Okay so back up for people. Tell me about the salon.
Marisol Ortega: Sure. So I've got a little three-chair spot in Tucson. I opened it eleven years ago after I got tired of renting a booth at somebody else's place. Just me, two other stylists, we do color, cuts, some extensions. Very neighborhood. Very... you know your people.
Eric: How full is your book on a normal week?
Marisol Ortega: Honestly? Depends on the week. My Tuesdays and Wednesdays have holes in them I can't explain. My weekends are packed. But those weekday holes... every one of those holes is somebody I used to see every six weeks who just... drifted.
Eric: And when they drift, what do you actually do about it?
Marisol Ortega: Nothing. That's the answer. Nothing.
Eric: Nothing at all?
Marisol Ortega: I mean, I THINK about them. I'll be folding towels and I'll go, oh man, I haven't seen Denise in forever, I should text her. And then a client walks in and I forget for another three weeks.
Eric: Right.
Marisol Ortega: And I've tried the sticky note thing. I've tried a little notebook. I had a spreadsheet for like two months.
Eric: What happened to the spreadsheet?
Marisol Ortega: What do you think happened to the spreadsheet.
Eric: I know what happened to the spreadsheet.
Marisol Ortega: It's in a folder on my desktop called "salon stuff" and I have not opened it since November.
Eric: So here's what I want to say, and I don't want it to sound harsh. You don't have a memory problem. You have a system problem.
Marisol Ortega: Okay.
Eric: You clearly remember these people. You care about them. The information is IN your head. It's just not anywhere that can act on it while you're cutting hair.
Marisol Ortega: Say that again.
Eric: The information can't act on it while you're cutting hair. You're the bottleneck because you're the only one who knows. And you're also the person whose hands are literally busy all day.
Marisol Ortega: Yeah. Yeah, that's it. I'm holding scissors. I'm not gonna stop mid-foil to text Denise.
Eric: Right. So the fix isn't "remember better." The fix is you need something running in the background that watches the calendar for you.
Marisol Ortega: Okay. What does that look like without me becoming a tech person. Because I am NOT a tech person.
Eric: You don't have to be. Can I walk you through what we did at the agency for a client almost exactly like you? Different industry, same shape of problem.
Marisol Ortega: Please.
Eric: Okay. So we run everything on this all-in-one ops platform. It's the one we use for our agency and it's the one we set up for local service businesses. Booking, texts, emails, the client list, all in one place.
Marisol Ortega: One place. Not four apps.
Eric: Not four apps. That's the whole point. Because your problem right now is that your calendar knows one thing, your phone contacts know another thing, and your brain knows the real thing, and none of them talk.
Marisol Ortega: That's exactly what it feels like.
Eric: So step one is really unsexy. It's just getting every client into one list with the last time they came in.
Marisol Ortega: Import.
Eric: Import. From wherever. From your booking app, from a spreadsheet, from a shoebox. I don't care. Just get it in.
Marisol Ortega: Okay.
Eric: Then, and this is the piece that changes your life, you set a rule. You say, if a client hasn't booked in, let's say, ten weeks... the platform sends them a text. Not from a robot address. From YOUR number.
Marisol Ortega: Wait. From my number.
Eric: From your business number. So when Denise gets it, it looks like Marisol texted her.
Marisol Ortega: Oh.
Eric: And the text isn't salesy. This is the part everybody messes up. Don't write "book now, twenty percent off." Write the thing YOU would actually text her.
Marisol Ortega: Like, hey stranger, missing your face.
Eric: Exactly like that. Hey stranger, been a minute, want me to grab you a spot next week?
Marisol Ortega: I mean, that's just what I'd say.
Eric: That IS what you'd say. And that's why it works. Because the second she gets it she doesn't feel marketed to. She feels remembered.
Marisol Ortega: Okay that's making my chest feel weird.
Eric: Good weird?
Marisol Ortega: Good weird. Because that's the whole thing. I want them to feel remembered. I DO remember them. I just can't be the one holding all of it.
Eric: You can't. Nobody can. Not at three chairs, not at thirty.
Marisol Ortega: So the platform sends the text as me. Then what.
Eric: Then when she texts back, it comes to your phone like a normal text. You reply like a normal human. And if she says yes, there's a booking link right there.
Marisol Ortega: One link. Not "call the salon between these hours."
<...
12 min
July 21 Working Smarter: 3 Strategies to Reclaim Your Time
Three practical strategies for busy small business owners.
4 min
July 16Marcy's Duluth Salon Comeback: Fixing the February Slump with a CRM
Marcy, a Duluth salon owner since 2011, walks Eric through the February that broke her books — and the boring, high-leverage fixes that turned it around. If you're an owner-operator flying blind on who your best clients actually are, this one's for you.
In this episode:
Why a slow February in Duluth exposed two different problems: zero client visibility and zero automated follow-up

Marcy's setup: three chairs, two renters, color/cuts/extensions in a neighborhood downtown spot

The "brain integration" trap — booking app, dormant Mailchimp, and memory as three disconnected tools

The three things every owner-operator needs wired together: booking, client history, and outreach

Consolidating messy client data into one all-in-one ops platform (including the three "Jennifer S." problem)

Discovering the "quiet whales" — every-8-to-9-week color clients who out-earned the chatty weekly regulars

Finding that over a third of top spenders were past their normal rebook window with zero outreach

The one short, personal-sounding win-back text — sent from Marcy's number, triggered automatically to past-due clients
Subscribe: workingsmarter.jgiebz.com
Full transcript
Eric: So you called it the February that broke you. What actually happened that month?
Marcy Halvorsen: Okay so, picture it. Duluth, February, it's like negative twelve outside, nobody wants to leave the house, and my books just... evaporated.
Eric: Evaporated how? Cancellations, or just nobody rebooking?
Marcy Halvorsen: Both. But mostly the second one. I looked at the schedule on a Tuesday morning and I had, I think, four appointments? For the whole day. Across three chairs.
Eric: Oof.
Marcy Halvorsen: Yeah. And the thing that really got me, Eric, was I sat down that afternoon and I tried to figure out who I should even call. Like, who are my people? Who are the ones that come in every six weeks and drop two hundred bucks and tip well?
Eric: And you didn't know.
Marcy Halvorsen: I did NOT know. I've been cutting hair since 2011. I know their kids' names. I know their dogs' names. I could not tell you who my top ten clients were by revenue if you put a gun to my head.
Eric: That's actually really common, and I want to come back to that. But first — tell folks what the salon is.
Marcy Halvorsen: Yeah, so, three chairs, downtown-ish Duluth. Been open almost eight years under my name. It's me and two other stylists who rent from me. We do color, cuts, some extensions. Very much a neighborhood spot.
Eric: And when February hit, what was your system? Like, if you wanted to text your regulars, what did that look like?
Marcy Halvorsen: It looked like me, on my phone, scrolling through my contacts, trying to remember faces.
Eric: So no list.
Marcy Halvorsen: No list. I had a booking app, right, so names were in there. But it didn't tell me anything USEFUL. It didn't say "hey, Marcy, this person hasn't been in for ten weeks and they usually come every six." It just... held appointments.
Eric: Right. And that's the gap. Can I diagnose for a second?
Marcy Halvorsen: Please. Diagnose me.
Eric: Okay. So what was actually going wrong isn't that you had a slow February. Slow Februarys happen. What was going wrong is you had no visibility and no follow-up. Those are two different problems that feel like one problem.
Marcy Halvorsen: Say more.
Eric: Visibility is, at any moment, can you answer "who are my top twenty clients and when did I last see them." Follow-up is, when someone slips past their normal rebook window, does anything happen automatically, or does it require you to remember?
Marcy Halvorsen: Nothing happened automatically. Ever.
Eric: Right. And you're a stylist, not a database.
Marcy Halvorsen: Put that on a shirt.
Eric: So the way I think about this, for any owner-operator business — salon, gym, dog groomer, whatever — you need three things wired together. You need the booking, the client history, and the outreach all talking to each other. Most people have three separate tools and none of them know about the other two.
Marcy Halvorsen: That was me exactly. I had the booking thing, I had a Mailchimp I hadn't logged into in probably a year, and then just, like, my brain.
Eric: The brain integration.
Marcy Halvorsen: The brain integration was failing.
Eric: So okay, walk me through — you called me, what, end of February?
Marcy Halvorsen: Beginning of March. I was desperate. My sister told me to call you.
Eric: And what did we do first? Because I remember this took a minute.
Marcy Halvorsen: What DID we do first? I honestly don't remember the first step.
Eric: First step was boring. First step was just getting everything into one place. All your client records, every appointment history we could pull, every phone number, every email — into the platform we use at the agency.
Marcy Halvorsen: The all-in-one thing.
Eric: Yeah, the all-in-one ops platform we run our agency on. It's what we put every client business on because it holds the CRM, the calendar, the texting, the email, the automations — all of it in one spot. So the booking talks to the follow-up talks to the client record. No copy-paste.
Marcy Halvorsen: And that part took a week?
Eric: Cleanup took about a week, yeah. Because your data was... let's say expressive.
Marcy Halvorsen: Expressive. That's generous.
Eric: There were three "Jennifer S." entries that were all the same Jennifer.
Marcy Halvorsen: They WERE all the same Jennifer! I knew it.
Eric: You knew it. The system did not know it. So we deduped, we merged, we tagged. And then the fun part — we ran the numbers.
Marcy Halvorsen: This was the part that broke my brain in a good way.
Eric: Tell them what we found.
Marcy Halvorsen: Okay so. I would've guessed my top clients were the people I see the most. Right? Like, weekly blowouts, the chatty ones.
Eric: And they weren't.
Marcy Halvorsen: They weren't! My actual top spenders were these color clients who came in every eight or nine weeks, spent a ton each visit, tipped great, and were almost invisible to me week-to-week because they weren't in the chair constantly.
Eric: The quiet whales.
Marcy Halvorsen: The quiet whales. I love that.
Eric: And how many of those quiet whales were overdue when we ran the report?
Marcy Halvorsen: A lot. Like, embarrassingly a lot. I think it was somewhere north of a third of them were past their normal rebook window and I had done nothing.
Eric: Because you didn't know.
Marcy Halvorsen: Because I didn't know!
Eric: Okay so this is the turning point, and I want listeners to hear this clearly. We didn't do anything fancy next. We did the obvious thing that she couldn't do before because the data wasn't there.
Marcy Halvorsen: We wrote a text.
Eric: We wrote a text. O...
12 min

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A daily 10-minute show for service business owners. AI tools, automated workflows, and the boring-on-purpose tactics that save you 5 hours a week. Each episode picks one niche, one workflow, and one…

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