Door hangers on the street or a text to past customers, two ways to fill a slow week
Two cheap ways a handyman can fill an empty week, what each one costs in time and money, and the situations where one clearly beats the other.
You have a gap next Tuesday through Thursday and nothing in the pipeline to fill it. You can walk the street around Monday's job with door hangers, or you can sit down for twenty minutes and text everyone you have worked for. Both work. They work for different reasons, and picking the wrong one wastes a day you cannot get back.
Option one: door hangers around a job you are already on
The idea is simple. You are on a street anyway. The neighbors have seen your truck. Their houses were built the same year by the same builder, so the same things are breaking: the same storm door closers, the same bathroom fan, the same rotted trim at the bottom of the garage jamb.
What it costs:
- Printing: a few hundred hangers runs roughly $80 to $200 depending on size and stock.
- Time: 40 to 60 houses takes about an hour on foot.
- Return: slow and uneven. Most hangers go straight in the recycling. The ones that work tend to come back as calls one to three weeks later, not the next morning.
What makes a hanger work is specificity. "Handyman services, no job too small" is wallpaper. "I am fixing the storm door at 412 this week. If yours sticks too, I can do it Thursday for $149" is a reason to call. The neighbor can see the job, knows the price and knows the day.
Door hangers win when:
- You are new to an area and nobody there has your number yet.
- The street has an obvious shared problem you can name.
- You have a few weeks of runway, because the calls trickle in.
Option two: a text to everyone you have already worked for
Your past customers already trust you, already have your number saved, and almost all of them have a second job they have been putting off. Most handyman businesses never ask. They wait for the customer to remember, and most customers do not.
What it costs:
- Money: close to nothing if you send from your own phone, or the price of a basic texting tool, usually $20 to $60 a month.
- Time: twenty minutes to pull the list and send.
- Return: fast. Replies come in within hours, and the ones that book usually book for the same week.
The message that works is short, personal and gives a date:
Hi Karen, it is Mike, I fixed your deck railing in May. I have Wednesday and Thursday open next week. If anything else is on your list, text me back and I will get you in.
No coupon, no newsletter, no logo. It reads like a person because it is one.
Texting past customers wins when:
- You have at least 50 past jobs with mobile numbers saved.
- The gap is this week or next, not next month.
- You want the work without spending on anything.
If your list is short because you never saved the numbers, that is the real fix. Every job from here on should end with the number in a spreadsheet and a review request, which the reviews guide walks through.
Side by side
| Door hangers | Text to past customers | |
|---|---|---|
| Cash cost | $80 to $200 per batch | $0 to $60 a month |
| Time | About an hour per street | About twenty minutes |
| Speed | One to three weeks | Same day to a few days |
| Best for | New areas, new customers | Filling this week |
| What you build | Name recognition on one street | Repeat work from people who already trust you |
The case for doing both, in order
Text first, every time a gap opens. It is faster and cheaper, and the people answering are the easiest customers you will ever have. Then use door hangers to grow the list you will be texting next year. Every new customer a hanger brings in becomes a name on that list.
One small thing ties the two together. Put a line on every hanger that sends people to your Google profile, not just your phone number. A neighbor who is not ready to call today will often look you up. If they find a profile with 3 reviews, which is the median for a handyman listing in our benchmark report, they will keep looking. If they find thirty recent reviews from people on their side of town, you are the one they save.
And check your hours while you are in there. 64.1% of handyman listings show no hours at all, which makes a curious neighbor wonder whether you are still in business.
A hypothetical week
Say you have 120 past customers with saved numbers. You text all of them on a Sunday night. Eight reply, five book, and three of those are small jobs that fit inside your two-hour minimum. That is the gap filled before Monday breakfast, for nothing but your time. The same week, you hang 50 hangers around Tuesday's job. Two of those turn into calls the following week. Neither result is unusual, and the numbers in your market will be different, but the pattern holds: the list fills this week, the street fills next month.
If you are not sure what your minimum should be before you send that text, the pricing guide covers it, and the slow-season plan lays out what to send in the quiet months.
If you would like someone to run any one service for you, the free 14-day trial needs no card. See the free trial page or text or call (801) 214-0250.
Steven has spent the last several years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, handyman businesses among them, and builds the benchmark datasets on this site from public Google listings. About the editor