Sunday night, 8:45pm. The van is parked, the invoices are sent, and you have a vague feeling that a few people who asked for quotes this week never heard back. You cannot name them. That feeling is the whole problem. Fifteen minutes with a coffee and your phone turns it into four numbers and a short list of names, and you start Monday knowing exactly who to call.
Why a weekly review beats checking constantly
Most owners check leads the way they check the weather: constantly, anxiously, and without ever writing anything down. You glance at the inbox between jobs, feel a flicker of guilt about the roofing estimate you have not sent, and go back to work. Nothing changes because nothing gets decided.
A weekly review is different. It is a fixed appointment with yourself where you look at every open lead once, decide what happens to it, and record four numbers. It does not replace responding fast during the week. It catches what fast responding missed.
Fifteen minutes is enough for an owner-operator with up to forty or fifty requests a week. Any longer and you will skip it. The agenda below is timed to the minute so you can run it on a phone.
The 15-minute agenda
- Minute 0 to 2: Clear the untouched requests. Open your Requests list, the quote requests nobody has acted on yet. Every one of them gets a decision right now: respond, call, park for later, or dismiss. Do not read them carefully. Just triage. Anything you were going to ignore, ignore now so it stops nagging you.
- Minute 2 to 5: Answer anything you can answer in under a minute. A quote you already know the price for. A “yes, I do that, here are two slots.” Send them. Two or three fast replies here often become Monday bookings, and they were about to go cold.
- Minute 5 to 8: Walk the Follow-up column. These are people you spoke to who did not book yet. For each one, ask: did I promise something? Did they go quiet after a price? Is it dead? Anyone silent for more than a week gets one last friendly message on Monday. Anyone silent for three weeks gets closed out. A follow-up list with sixty names on it is a list you have stopped believing.
- Minute 8 to 10: Check the Scheduled column against the calendar. Every lead marked Scheduled should have a real appointment with a date. If one does not, the booking was a verbal yes that never got written down. Fix it now, before it becomes a no-show.
- Minute 10 to 13: Write down the four numbers. Details below. This is the only part that involves writing anything, and it is four digits.
- Minute 13 to 15: Pick Monday’s three calls. Look at the leads you touched tonight and pick the three most likely to book. Write the names on a sticky note or in your phone. Those are your first three calls tomorrow, before the first job.
The review is not about catching up on work. It is about deciding what happens to every open lead so none of them float.
The four numbers to write down
Keep a single note on your phone with one line per week. Four numbers, a date, done. After six weeks you will see patterns you cannot see day to day.
| Number | Where you find it | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| New requests this week | Count of requests that came in since last Sunday | Whether your marketing is working. A drop here means a link broke, a listing changed, or the season turned. |
| Answered within an hour | Requests you responded to or called back within 60 minutes | Your speed. If this is under half of new requests, response time is your biggest leak, not lead volume. |
| Booked this week | Leads that moved to Scheduled | Your close rate. Divide by new requests for a rough percentage. Twenty to forty percent is common for service trades. |
| Still waiting on you | Follow-up leads where the next move is yours | Your debt. If this number grows three weeks in a row, you are winning leads faster than you can work them. |
If you use Book My Leads, the status cards at the top of the dashboard give you most of this at a glance: New, Follow-up, Contacted, and Scheduled counts, updated automatically from what you did during the week. Nobody has to maintain a status by hand, which is exactly why the numbers are trustworthy on a Sunday night. If you are still tracking leads without a spreadsheet and without an app, you can still get the numbers. It just takes counting instead of reading.
What each number is really for
The temptation is to skip the writing. Do not. The numbers are how you stop guessing where the money is leaking.
Volume tells you where leads come from
A landscaper noticed new requests dropped from twelve a week to four in the same month he redesigned his website. The form on the new site pointed to an email address he no longer checked. Without the weekly count he would not have caught it for a quarter. It took ninety seconds to fix.
Speed tells you whether you are losing them at the door
A mobile dog groomer wrote down “answered within an hour” for a month and saw it was around three out of ten. She was not slow. She was unreachable, because requests went to an inbox she opened at night. Push notifications on her phone moved the number to eight out of ten, and bookings followed within two weeks.
Bookings tell you if the conversation works
If plenty of people ask and few book, the problem is in the reply, not the marketing. Maybe you quote without offering a time. Maybe your first call is a screening interview instead of a scheduling call. This number points you at the fix.
Debt tells you when to stop chasing
A growing “waiting on you” number is the early sign of leads going cold on your side. There are six habits that stop leads from going cold, and the weekly review is the one that makes the other five stick.
A worked example: one Sunday for an electrician
Sam runs a two-person electrical business. Here is his review from a slow week in February.
Requests list: seven untouched. Two are panel upgrades he wants, so he taps Respond Now on each with a range and two site-visit slots. Three are small jobs he can price on the spot, so he replies with the price and a Tuesday slot. One is outside his area, dismissed. One is a fixture swap he might get to, parked for later.
Follow-up column: eleven names. Four have been silent for over three weeks. He closes them. Two owe him a decision after a quote. He notes them for a Monday nudge. The remaining five are waiting on permits or a landlord and are fine to leave.
Scheduled column: six. Five are on his calendar. One is not. He remembers the customer said “next Thursday is fine” on the phone and nobody wrote it down. He adds it and sends a confirmation.
His four numbers: 14 new, 6 answered within an hour, 4 booked, 9 waiting on him. His note for Monday: call the two who owe a decision, and figure out why only six of fourteen got a fast reply. He suspects Wednesday, when he was under a floor with no signal all day.
Total time: fourteen minutes. He starts Monday with three calls and one known problem.
Make it stick
Put it on your calendar as a repeating event and treat it like a job. Same night, same chair, same coffee. Do it even on a week with two leads, because the habit is the point. Keep the note with the four numbers where you can see the whole list at once, and once a month read it top to bottom. If the stages themselves feel fuzzy, a plain explanation of the four lead stages is a good companion to this routine, and it matches the Leads section in Book My Leads exactly.
Try it on your next quote request
Run this Sunday’s review from the dashboard instead of from memory. Requests, Follow-up, and Scheduled are already sorted for you, and the counts update from what you actually did during the week.