GarageDoorBossPro Blog — Running a Garage Door Business

Hiring an Office Person for a Garage Door Company: What They Run and How to Hand It Over

There is a moment in most garage door companies when the owner realizes the phone is the bottleneck. Calls go to voicemail while the owner is under a door. Estimates go out late because they are written at night. Invoices pile up. The fix is often a person in the office, part time or full time. The hire only works if they can actually run things without asking the owner every five minutes.

When It Is Time

Adding a tech, covered in Hiring Your First Garage Door Tech: What to Have Ready Before Day One, adds capacity in the field. An office person adds capacity everywhere else. Signs it is time:

• You return missed calls at night and some of those callers already booked someone else.
• Estimates sit for days before they go out, and nobody follows up.
• Invoicing happens on the weekend.
• Tune-up customers are due and nobody has reached out.
• You cannot take a day off because nobody else can book a call.

Plenty of companies start with a family member or a part-time person working from home. That works fine as long as the information they need is somewhere they can reach it.

What the Office Person Should Own

Be clear about the job. In a small garage door company the office person usually owns:

• Answering and booking. Taking the call, finding or creating the client, and putting the job on the schedule.
• Dispatch. Putting jobs on the right van and day, and slotting in emergency calls.
• Estimates and follow-up. Sending quotes, watching for approvals, and chasing the ones that go quiet.
• Customer texts. Answering replies and confirming times.
• Billing. Watching unpaid invoices, sending monthly statements to accounts, following up on past-due.
• Tune-ups coming due. Booking the yearly visits as they show up.

What they should not own, at least at first, is pricing decisions and diagnosing door problems over the phone. Those stay with you and your techs.

Give Them One Screen, Not Five

The fastest way to make a new office person fail is to scatter information across a calendar, a notebook, a spreadsheet and the owner's phone. Everything they need to answer “when is my tech coming?” or “what did you replace last year?” should be in one place.

In GarageDoorBossPro the client record holds every address, and each address holds its doors and hardware and past jobs. The dispatch board shows every van by day. Estimates, Form Responses from the website and unpaid invoices all have their own lists. Office user roles let you decide what the office person can see and change.

Booking a Call the Right Way

Teach a short script for new calls. Get the name, phone, address and what is wrong. Ask which door if there is more than one. Ask about access: gate, dog, whether anyone will be home. Check whether the customer is already in the system so you do not create a duplicate, since a returning customer's house already has its door and opener saved.

Then book the job on a day and van, using the service list so the service call fee and likely repair are on the job. If the customer has a plan or a card on file, it is already there. The customer gets the night-before reminder, on-the-way and arrived texts on their own based on their alert preferences.

Two-Way Texting Instead of Phone Tag

A lot of office work is texting. “Can the tech come after 2?” “What is the gate code again?” Two-way texting from the office keeps those conversations on the company number and visible to anyone in the office, not on someone's personal phone. Plans include a monthly text allowance of 500, 1,000 or 2,000 texts sent and received on Start, Pro and Crew.

The Handover

Hand things over in pieces. Week one, the office person answers and books while you watch dispatch. Week two, they take dispatch for the planned van while you handle emergencies. Week three, they take estimates follow-up and billing. A simple weekly routine, laid out in A Weekly Office Routine for a Garage Door Company, gives them a checklist to work from.

Resist answering questions they could answer from the system. Point them to where it lives instead. After a few weeks they will stop asking.

Give Them the Right Access

Office user roles let you decide what the office person can see and change. Start with what they need to book, dispatch, text and bill, and widen it as they settle in. That keeps things tidy and makes it clear who did what.

Where the Owner Ends Up

A good office person gives the owner time back: time to quote bigger jobs, meet builders and property managers, and occasionally not answer the phone at night. The software that holds it together is shown on the GarageDoorBossPro garage door business software page.