A lead lands at ten past eight in the evening. Kitchen rewire, four miles away, sounds like a proper job. You pay to unlock it, ring straight away and get voicemail. You try again at seven the next morning, and she tells you she’s already had three calls and one bloke gave her a number over the phone without seeing the house. You’ve paid for the privilege of being fourth in a queue you didn’t know you’d joined.

Pay-per-lead sites aren’t a scam, and they’re not useless. If you’re new, or you’ve just moved area, or your diary has a hole in it next month, they put a stranger on the phone tonight — and nothing else does that as quickly. The problem is when they become the only way work arrives, because the model quietly decides what kind of customer you get. This is about the other channels: the ones that cost you time rather than a fee per enquiry, and tend to bring better work with them.

Work out what a paid lead actually costs you

Before writing off the lead sites or defending them, get the real number. Add up everything you spent on lead fees, credits and subscriptions over the last three months, then count the jobs you actually won from them. Divide one by the other. That figure — cost per won job, not cost per lead — is the only one that matters, and it’s usually a lot higher than people assume, because the leads you paid for and lost are in the top half of that sum.

Do the same for value. Were those jobs your average size, or the small, awkward, price-shopped ones? Did any of them come back for a second job, or leave a review? Now you can make a decision instead of a guess.

Three things are worth understanding about the model itself:

The same enquiry usually goes to several trades. You’re quoting against people who all paid to be there, which pushes the conversation towards price before anyone’s seen the job.
You pay whether or not you win. Wrong postcode, job already done, number that never answers — that’s your cost, not theirs.
The platform owns the relationship. When that customer needs you again in two years, plenty of them go back to the site and start a fresh enquiry rather than scrolling back to find your number.

Google Business Profile: the free one most trades set up badly

It’s Google’s own tool, it’s free, and it’s what decides whether you appear when someone in your town searches “electrician near me” or looks at the map. If you do one thing this week, do this one properly.

Properly means:

Claim and verify it. An unverified or unclaimed listing does very little.
Get the categories right. Your primary category carries real weight — “Electrician” or “Plumber”, not “Contractor”. Add the secondary ones that genuinely apply.
Set your service area honestly. The towns you’ll actually drive to, not the whole county.
List your services individually. Fuse board upgrades, EICRs, outside taps, bathroom fits — the words people type.
Put up real job photos. Your work, your van, before and after. Not stock images of someone else’s kitchen.
Keep it alive. Update your hours around Christmas, answer the questions people post, and add the odd photo of a finished job.

Reviews are the engine underneath it, and they’re free too. Asking at the handover, on the day, while the customer is standing in the finished work is the difference between a profile with three reviews and one with forty. Reply to every one, including the awkward ones — future customers read the replies.

The customers you’ve already got

The warmest leads you’ll ever have are people who’ve already paid you and were pleased. They cost nothing, they’ve stopped assessing whether to trust you, and a referral from one of them arrives half-sold.

Most trades let these go cold by accident: the job finishes, the invoice gets paid, and the customer drifts off until somebody else’s van turns up next door. A short check-in a fortnight after handover, a note of the jobs you flagged but didn’t do, and a specific ask — “if anyone at work needs a sparky, I’d appreciate you passing my number on” — turn one job into the next two. The full method is here, and it’s the single highest-return hour you’ll spend on marketing.

The other trades on the job

Every site you work on has people meeting customers you’ll never meet. The kitchen fitter with nobody reliable for the electrics. The plumber who’s just been asked about tiling. The letting agent’s handyman who’s out of his depth on a boiler.

Two or three genuine relationships here can be worth more than any directory. Make it easy for them:

Swap numbers properly and say what you do and where you cover.
Send work back when you can. One-way arrangements die quietly.
Turn up when they refer you. Their name is on the line, and they’ll only find that out once.

Landlords, letting agents and small businesses work the same way, with the added bonus that their work recurs by default.

Local groups, without being the bloke who spams

Village, estate and town Facebook groups are where “can anyone recommend a roofer?” gets asked several times a week. Being tagged in those threads by someone you’ve worked for is about as good as a lead gets, and it costs nothing.

Read the group’s rules first — most allow recommendations but restrict outright advertising, and ignoring that gets you removed. What works: answering an occasional question genuinely and briefly, being visibly local, and doing good work for the people in the group so your name comes up without you posting at all. What doesn’t: dropping your number under every thread.

Your van does the same job on the street. Clean livery with the trade, the area and a phone number, and a board outside a job you’re proud of — with the customer’s permission — puts you in front of the neighbours who are already thinking about their own extension.

Being quick is a free channel

The trade that replies first wins a lot of work that was never really a price decision. Plenty of enquiries go unanswered for days, and plenty of quotes take a fortnight to arrive, by which point the customer has booked someone else out of sheer relief.

Three habits, and none of them cost anything:

Answer or ring back the same day. Even “I’m on a job, can I call you at five?” puts you ahead of most.
Book the visit on that call. A date beats a promise.
Get the quote out fast — ideally before you leave. Pricing it on site while the detail is fresh beats an evening of paperwork you’re too knackered to do. That’s most of what Queezy is built to do: itemise the job room by room in the customer’s house and send a branded PDF before you’ve packed the van.

Speed reads as reliability, which is exactly what someone letting a stranger into their home is buying. It’s also a big part of how you win work without being the cheapest.

Where paid leads still earn their place

Don’t be dogmatic about it. Paid leads make sense when you’re starting out with no reviews and no reputation, when you’ve moved into a new area, when winter’s gone quiet and you’d rather work at a slim margin than not at all, or when you want a particular kind of job you don’t currently see.

Just treat them as advertising with a measurable cost per won job, sitting alongside the free channels — not as the water supply. And mine every one you win: a paid lead that produces a review, a referral and a repeat customer has paid for itself several times over, which is entirely within your control.

The takeaway

Work out what a won job from a lead site actually costs you, then spend the next month building the channels that don’t charge per enquiry. Set up your Google Business Profile properly and feed it reviews. Go back through the customers you’ve already had. Look after two or three trades who meet your customers before you do. Be local, be visible, and be the one who answers the phone and gets the quote out first.

None of it fills your diary by Friday, which is exactly why most trades never start. Six months in, though, the work arrives without a fee attached — and it’s usually the better work.

Queezy is a quoting app built for UK trades: price the job on site, send a professional itemised quote before you leave, and see when the customer opens it. Download it free on iPhone.

How to Get Work Without Paying for Leads