The first 90 days of a new service business, month by month

What should the first 90 days accomplish?

The paperwork is done. You have an LLC or a sole proprietorship, an EIN, a bank account, insurance and a truck. If you're not there yet, start with how to start a service business and the startup checklist. This guide picks up on opening day and covers the part most new owners improvise: how customers find you, how you answer them, and how you figure out what's working before your savings run low.

By day 90 you want three things. A steady trickle of leads that doesn't depend on one source. A handful of real reviews and real job photos that make strangers comfortable calling. And enough tracked data to make your first real marketing decision with numbers instead of hope. The plan below runs in three 30-day blocks, with tasks for your site, Google listing, phone, CRM, email and texting, and the crew (which, for many new companies, is you).

The 90-day plan at a glance

Days 1 to 30: be findable and reachable

Google Business Profile

• Create the profile on day one and start verification immediately, because it can take time. Pick the primary category that matches your main service, list your service area, and hide your home address if customers don't come to you. Our Business Profile guide covers the settings.
• Add a few photos of you, the truck and the equipment. Real ones, not stock.

Website

• Launch something simple that works: a home page that says what you do and where, one page per main service, a quote form, your phone number at the top of every page on mobile. It can grow later. See what a contractor website needs.
• Register the domain to the business, using a login only you control. If a friend or freelancer builds the site, you're the account owner.

Phone

• Get one business number and put it on everything: truck, website, profile, invoices. It's the number customers will save for years.
• Set a missed-call text so the call you can't take mid-job gets a reply within seconds. A new company that answers fast competes with companies ten times its size.

CRM

• Put every lead in from the first one, with name, address, service, how they found you and status. A notebook works for a week; it doesn't work for ninety days.
• Create a short list of sources to choose from: Google search, Business Profile, referral (with who), door hanger, neighbor saw truck, Facebook group, other.

First customers

• Tell everyone you know what you do, with a specific offer and a date you can start. Specific sells: "I'm booking driveway cleaning next week in these three towns."
• After every job, leave a door hanger or knock on the five closest houses. The neighbors just watched you work.
• Share one post in neighborhood groups, with a real job photo and the phone number. Read each group's rules first.

Days 31 to 60: turn every job into the next one

By now the first jobs are done. The job of month two is making each one produce more than one invoice.

• Reviews: ask every customer the day the job ends, with a direct link. Ask everyone the same way and offer nothing in return. Our review guide has the wording.
• Photos: before and after on every job. Put the best on the Business Profile weekly and on the service pages each month, with the town name.
• Referrals: when a customer says thanks, ask who else on the street might need the same work. Write it down in the CRM against the referrer, so you can thank them.
• Quotes: follow up on every quote that hasn't been answered in two or three days, then again a week later. New owners lose more work to silence than to price.
• Repeat work: if the service repeats (weekly, monthly, seasonal), ask every first-time customer whether they want to be on the schedule. A route of repeat customers is the steadiest income a new company can build.
• Pricing: compare what you quoted with the hours each job took. If you're working for less than you thought, fix it now with the hourly rate calculator and the job price calculator.
• Email: collect email addresses on every job. Send customers a short thank-you that includes how to rebook. Hold marketing texts for people who have agreed to receive them.

Days 61 to 90: measure, then double down

Now you have enough history to look at. Pull these numbers from the CRM, by source:

1. Leads: how many came from each source.
2. Close rate: what share of quotes became jobs.
3. Average ticket: what each source's jobs were worth.
4. Cost per booked job: what you spent on each source divided by jobs booked from it. Door hangers and ads count; so does your time.
5. Response time: how long leads waited for an answer. Slow answers are the most common silent leak.

A made-up example shows why time counts. Say door hangers cost $150 to print and took six hours to place, and you value your time at $25 an hour. That source cost $300. If it booked four jobs, it cost $75 per booked job. If a Facebook group post took twenty minutes and booked two jobs, it was far cheaper, even though it felt like less effort. Run the same math on every source and the answer to "where should my next hour go" usually becomes obvious. Setting up the source field is covered in how to track lead sources, and the lead cost calculator handles the arithmetic. Then decide: which source gets more of your time next month, and which one you stop.

This is also the right point to consider a paid channel, now that you have reviews for strangers to read and a close rate to judge results against. Know what you're buying. Angi's 2025 Form 10-K describes match fees that are owed even when the pro never gets the job (Angi Form 10-K). Paid leads can fill a thin calendar, but they stop when the spending stops. Your own website, profile and reviews keep working.

Finally, look ahead. Which season is coming next, and what does it need? Our seasonal checklists for spring, summer, fall and winter cover what to prepare.

What should you skip in the first 90 days?

• Big ad budgets before you have reviews. Strangers who click an ad check your reviews next. With none, much of the spend is wasted.
• One lead source for everything. If one platform supplies all your work, it sets your costs. Build at least one channel you own alongside it.
• Daily social posting. One good photo post a week on the Business Profile does more for a local service company than daily posts nobody in your service area sees.
• A logo redesign. A clean name, a readable truck and a working phone beat a perfect brand in year one.
• Saying yes to every job in every town. Long drives and work outside your skill eat the margin that pays for growth. The common mistakes list has more on this.

If you'd rather start with the website, phone line and CRM built for you, so the first 90 days go into jobs instead of setup, that's what we do. Our own service companies ran on this setup before any client did. The place to begin is a free system quote. Shopping for an agency instead? Several say in writing that a new company is too small, so check marketing agencies that take new and small contractors first.

Frequently asked questions