If you want to start a trades business and get more customers in 2026 - don't listen to your mates. Listen to this.

Your mate's advice is costing you jobs

Everyone who's ever swung a hammer for a living will tell you the same thing when you go out on your own: get on Checkatrade, post a few jobs on Facebook, and the phone will ring. It can still work, but there's so many better ways to boost your new trades business in 2026.

The problem is those platforms are saturated and customers have higher expectations than ever. They'll check your photos, read your reviews, and judge you in about four seconds before they even think about calling. If you launch the way your mates did, you're already behind the established players, so you need to have a better strategy than them.

Here's some free marketing advice. You're going to need it...

Get smart upfront, before you charge a single customer

Most new trades businesses do this backwards. They scramble for work on day one, then try to bolt on systems. But you're clearly smarter than that, otherwise you wouldn't be reading this.

• Website
  Please for the love of everything holy, get a good quality website. Not a Wix botch job. Not the cheapest freelancer on Fiverr (they lure you in with cheap costs and deliver you pure slop).
  
  In fact- I'll run a special on this blog. If you sign up for a website build and tell me you read this, I'll do it half price.

  

• Booking
  Get Calendly (free tier or £8/mo for professional) linked to your phone. Customers who can book a quote without calling you are more likely to actually book. You're also not losing jobs because you were on a roof when someone rang.

• Payments
  Stripe or similar takes 30 minutes to set up, 1.5% per transaction, and it means you can invoice from your van and get paid the same day. No more chasing cheques or awkward cash conversations.

• Reviews
  Set up a Google Business Profile on day one. Not week six. Day one. Then build a simple automated follow-up: a text the evening after a job that links straight to your Google review page. There are tools like NiceJob (around £75/mo) that do this automatically. I can do it for cheaper than that, but as a one-off fee.

Photos and review frequency is what moves you up Checkatrade

Checkatrade isn't just a listing. It's like all the other algorithm-led platforms. You need to feed the machine! Think of it like Instagram. If you don't post regularly, you drop off people's feeds.

Two ways to move up

• Photo volume and review velocity. Not your star rating in isolation. Photos of actual jobs, uploaded regularly, signal active work and then reviews coming in consistently over time rank better than a burst of ten reviews from when you launched and then nothing for three months.

I had a roofer round to my house recently who'd literally been running for a decade but had 7 reviews. He'd struggle to find jobs and then be over-reliant on ads in order to get by. You can fix this with a few small steps.

Compete on speed, not price

The trades threads online are full of people undercutting themselves rather than understanding the customer.

When you want something done in your home, you want basically 3 things:

• Reviews to show the person is competent.
• A fair price, or a very quick way to find it out
• The problem solved ASAP.

Those 3 things win you jobs, not being the cheapest or the best. If you don't believe me, fill in a form with a national-level player and see what they focus on.

The old playbook isn't going to work anymore

The old playbook works for the last generation of tradespeople still coasting on referrals. If you're starting a new trades business in 2026 and want more customers, you need to focus on getting your systems for website, booking, reviews and more set up.

Don't lose sight of the customer either. Build it around their experience and focus on speed, reviews and reliability to grow your trades business.

If you want help, I build plans for exactly this. All at affordable rates for small business. Get in touch.