Starting a roofing business in Ireland: getting the work in

Before anything else: the Google Business Profile

A verified Google Business Profile is free, takes about a week to get verified by post, and is the single largest source of enquiries for most small roofing firms in Ireland. It is what puts you in the map results when somebody searches for a roofer in your town.

Do it on day one, because verification takes time and because the profile needs to accumulate reviews and photographs before it performs. A profile created the week you need work is a profile that will not help you for months.

The first ten reviews matter more than the next fifty

Going from no reviews to ten changes everything about how you appear. Going from forty to fifty changes almost nothing. In your first year the reviews are the highest-value asset you can build, and they are free.

Ask every single customer, on the day, in person, while they are standing there looking at the finished work and feeling good about it. Not by text a week later. The conversion rate on asking face to face at the moment of handover is several times higher than any other method.

Get the link on your phone so you can hand them the phone with the page already open. Most people will not go looking.

A website that answers three questions

You do not need a large website. You need one that answers what you do, where you do it, and what it looks like when you have done it.

Where you do it is the one new roofers skip and it is the one that decides whether you appear in searches. List the actual towns. Not 'the Leinster area' — Naas, Newbridge, Kilcullen, Sallins, by name.

What it looks like means photographs of your own work. Nothing else on a roofing website does as much, and nothing else is as easy to gather while you are already up there.

Photograph everything from the first job

Before, during and after, on every job, from the very first one. It costs nothing and thirty seconds, and in eighteen months it is the asset your competitors cannot buy.

New roofers almost universally regret not doing this. Six months in you have twenty jobs done and four usable photographs, all of them taken after the scaffold came down when the light was wrong.

Where the first jobs actually come from

Honestly, in roughly this order: people who already know you, the Google Business Profile, van signage, and then paid advertising once there is cash flow to fund it.

The people who already know you part is not a small thing. Every builder, plumber, electrician and estate agent you have worked alongside is a potential source of referrals, and they refer to whoever they remember. Telling fifty of them that you have gone out on your own is a morning's work with a better return than any first-year ad campaign.

• —Tell every trade contact you have started, individually, not in a group message
• —Verify the Google Business Profile and add photographs weekly
• —Get the van signed with the trade, the number and the county
• —Ask every customer for a review, face to face, on the day
• —Start paid advertising when you can fund three months of it, not one

When to start advertising

Not immediately. Advertising into a business with no reviews, no photographs and no website converts badly, and you will spend money learning that the hard way.

Get the profile verified, gather the first eight or ten reviews, build up a photograph library from the first months of work, and then advertise. The same budget will produce noticeably more at that point, because the person who clicks now finds something that reassures them.

Fund it for three months minimum when you do start. One month of advertising tells you nothing — the platforms need the data and you need enough enquiries to judge the pattern.

The mistake that costs the most

Buying leads from a national portal to get going. It feels like a shortcut and it teaches you nothing, because the customer never learns your name. Three years in you have the same problem, except now you are dependent on a supplier who can raise the price whenever they like.

Everything above builds an asset you own. The lead portal builds theirs.