Mid-pour. The phone still gets answered.

You cannot stop a pour to take a call. Nobody can. But the bloke ringing about a driveway does not know that — he just hears voicemail and rings the next concreter on Google. A text back in under a minute holds the job until smoko. His details are sitting in your list when you wash up, with a booking link already sent.

Concreting has a physical constraint most trades do not. Once the truck is turning you are committed for hours, and there is no version of the day where you step away to take a call. Everyone in the industry knows this. No customer does.

So the enquiries arrive precisely when you are least able to answer them, and they arrive from people who are ringing several concreters in a row because they have no way to tell you apart.

A driveway or a shed slab is a considered purchase with an uncomfortably short shortlist. The homeowner rings until someone answers, gets a rough number, and uses it as the benchmark. The second and third quotes are judged against the first.

Being unreachable during a pour does not just cost that one enquiry. It costs you the chance to set the number everyone else has to beat.

Concreting is scheduled around forecasts more than any other trade. When the week gets rearranged by rain, the customers who feel looked after are the ones who were told something, and the ones who go elsewhere are the ones who heard nothing.

Most customer frustration in this trade is not about delays. It is about silence during delays.

Finished work, in volume. Driveways, patios, shed slabs, exposed aggregate — photographed properly, from jobs that are obviously yours. Homeowners cannot assess a slab, so they judge on the surface finish they can see and the number of jobs you can show.

And your service area in plain suburb names, because nobody searches for a concreter without a place attached.