Paglow Automations

Did you catch the Big 7 business roundtable at St. Rita's earlier this month? The Lima News wrote it up, and one number jumped out: 35% of small business owners have a job they can't fill.

We hear it from owners around here all the time. The front desk spot stays open, so you're the one taking calls, writing quotes and trying to remember who wanted a callback before winter.

That's a lot to keep in your head. A customer list that sends its own reminders won't replace a great employee. It does mean fewer things slip through while you're short-handed.

That's what we're building with Lima businesses this month. Happy to show you how it works.

Ohio Big 7 offers advice to local businesses LIMA — Business leaders were invited to the “Ohio Big 7 Business Leaders: Regional Roundtable Luncheon,” which provided each attendee more knowledge about how Ohio is performing and where it’s headed.

We're keeping a scoreboard, and we're going to post it.

Four numbers. Businesses in Allen County running something we built. Owner-hours handed back. After-hours calls the town no longer misses. Dollars that stayed local instead of going out of state to a software company.

We're early, so the numbers are small right now. That's fine. Small and honest beats impressive and vague.

The reason to publish it is simple. Our whole idea is that this only works if it works for the businesses first. A number nobody can see is easy to fudge. A number in public isn't.

Watch it climb with us.

Every business has a folder of quotes that went out and never got answered. Most owners assume those people went with someone cheaper.

Usually they didn't. They got busy, the estimate slid down the inbox, and nobody ever followed up. The job just quietly evaporated.

Follow-up is the least fun work there is. It's also the highest-value hour in the week, which is exactly why it never happens. There's always a customer in front of you who matters more right now.

An outbound caller works that list for you. Calls the people who already raised their hand, opens with the actual thing they asked about, and books the ones who are ready.

No new leads required. You already paid for these.

https://paglow.com/blog/your-quote-went-out-tuesday-nobody-called-back

Everybody who's been to a Chamber breakfast has the drawer. Eleven business cards, a couple with notes on the back you can't read anymore, and one from a guy you genuinely liked and meant to email.

That's where most networking dies. Not in the room. In the drawer, about four days later.

The fix is boring. Take a picture of the cards before you pull out of the parking lot. They land in your CRM, a short nice-to-meet-you email goes out that afternoon while the person still remembers your face, and a follow-up gets put on the calendar a week out so it actually happens.

You already did the hard part. You showed up, shook hands, had the conversation. The typing is the part worth handing off.

Nearly every small business has one. The book. The spreadsheet. The clipboard by the register that only one person can read.

It works, right up until the owner takes a Friday off and nobody can tell a customer when the sectional is coming in.

The fix isn't buying a generic CRM built for software salespeople. Those things want leads and deals and stages. A furniture store doesn't have deals. It has orders, dates, and two questions every caller asks.

Build it around the way the business actually works and the whole staff can answer in ten seconds. That's the owner getting their Friday back.

We wrote about this one for furniture stores on our blog.

https://paglow.com/blog/your-special-orders-live-on-a-clipboard-build-a-crm-instead

People assume building a phone agent starts with the technology. It doesn't. It starts with sitting down and listening to how the business already answers the phone.

What do callers actually ask, in what order? What does the owner say when someone wants a price over the phone? Which questions mean this is a real job, and which mean it's a tire kicker? What's the one thing that, if the agent got it wrong, would embarrass the business?

That's a conversation, not a config screen. The tech part is honestly the easy half.

The agents that sound like the business are the ones where somebody bothered to learn the business first.

Most business giving looks the same. A check, a banner at the ballfield, a sponsor line in a program. All good things. None of them use what the business is actually good at.

The National Christian Foundation had a piece on this that stuck with us. The strongest generosity is the kind tied to what you already do well. A roofer patching the church roof beats a roofer writing a check for a new one.

We're taking that seriously. Every quarter we're building something free for one local organization in our wheelhouse. Not a donation. An actual build, the same thing we'd charge for.

If your nonprofit is drowning in intake calls or scheduling, that's the kind of thing we mean.

There's a customer your business is probably losing quietly, and it has nothing to do with price.

Some people will not make a phone call. Not won't as in lazy. Won't as in the phone is genuinely hard for them. Plenty of autistic and ADHD adults will drive past three shops to find the one where they can book without talking to anybody. Parents with a toddler on their hip are in the same boat. So is anybody calling from a factory floor.

Those people still need a roof, a repair, a haircut, a quote. They're just going to find the business that lets them type it.

That's most of why a good website chatbot matters. Not the novelty. A real one knows your pricing, your hours, your service area, and can actually put someone on the calendar at 10:40 at night without waking you up.

Making your business easier to reach isn't a tech upgrade. It's a door.

Allen County ought to be an easy place to do business with. That's a thing we can just decide to build. 💬

Add up the software a small business pays for. Scheduling, the CRM, the review tool, the answering service, the website host. Every one of those is a monthly charge to a company in another state that has never driven down Elm.

That money leaves and doesn't come back. It doesn't sponsor the fair. It doesn't hire a kid out of Ohio State Lima. It doesn't show up at the Chamber.

We think a lot of that work can be built here instead, tailored to how the business actually runs, by people you can call. Same job, and the dollars stay in Allen County.

That's not charity. It's just arithmetic that finally works in our favor.

Here's a Tuesday, start to finish.

2:14pm. A call comes in while the crew is under a sink. The AI agent answers on the first ring, gets the address, the problem, and puts the job on Thursday morning.

2:51pm. A second call rings out because the first one was still going. A text goes out within a minute: "Sorry we missed you, what do you need?" They text back. That one books too.

Friday. The Thursday customer gets a short message asking how it went. She leaves a review without being nagged about it.

The owner touched none of it. He was working. That's the whole idea.