What's really going on

You do about 90 jobs a year. Roughly 72 of those are people who already know you. That's not a lead-flow problem — it's a memory-and-follow-up problem. A CRM would give you 40 empty fields to fill in for customers whose ducts you've already cleaned twice. The real risk in your business is forgetting to call a repeat client when they're due again, and losing the odd new inquiry that comes in while you're on a job.

What to do instead

1. Google Sheet or Notion, free — one row per client: name, address, last service date, next-due date, notes on their system. Sort by next-due. That's your "CRM."
2. Google Calendar, free — when you finish a job, set a reminder for 6 or 12 months out to call them. Do it before you leave the site.
3. Habit — every Friday, 15 minutes, open the sheet and call anyone overdue.

First action, today: open a new Google Sheet, title it "Clients," and type in your last 20 jobs from memory or your invoicing app. Takes 30 minutes.

What you're being oversold

If a rep pitched you Jobber or Housecall Pro, know that those are real tools for real field-service businesses — but they earn their monthly fee when you're juggling crews, dispatch, and 40+ jobs a month. At 7-8 orders, you'd pay for scheduling features you don't need. Doing nothing costs you the repeat you forgot to call — probably one or two a year slipping to a competitor who followed up first.

When to revisit this

When you hire a second tech, or when you cross ~20 jobs a month and start double-booking.

The part worth getting right

The one call to make is whether your bottleneck is remembering repeats, or catching new inquiries fast. If it's repeats, a sheet with due-dates wins — Jobber is overkill. If new leads are hitting your phone and website faster than you can answer them, a sheet won't save you and Jobber's quote-to-invoice flow starts paying for itself. Pick wrong and you either waste $50 a month, or lose the new customer who called while you were up a ladder.