Most trades think they have nothing to show
I ask a version of the same question at the start of every job. What have you got that proves you’re any good?
The answer is usually some variation of not much. No case studies. No testimonials page. No professional photography. Nothing that looks like the sort of evidence a marketing person would ask for.
It’s almost never true. I don’t know anyone who has been trading eight years without a single photograph of a finished job or one customer who was pleased with them. What’s actually happened is that the proof exists, it just isn’t in a form that looks like proof, so it never made it onto the website.
You can manufacture credibility without inventing any of it. That distinction is the entire point of this post.
Extracted, not invented
Here’s the rule I work to. Genuine credibility has to be extracted rather than made up, because customers can tell the difference and they can tell quickly.
An invented testimonial reads like an invented testimonial. Stock photography of a smiling man in a hard hat reads like stock photography. Badges you awarded yourself read like badges you awarded yourself. None of it is illegal and all of it makes you look worse than showing nothing, because a visitor who spots one invented thing now doubts the real ones too.
People aren’t after perfect. They’re after real, and real is what reads as trustworthy. Which is lucky, because real is the only kind you’ve got.
Your camera roll is the biggest asset you own
Start here, because it’s the fastest.
Every trade has photographs of work on their phone. Usually taken for practical reasons, to show a supplier or remind themselves of a pipe run, not to look nice. They’re often badly lit and slightly wonky, and that is completely fine. A real photograph of a real bathroom in a real house beats a beautiful stock image of a bathroom that isn’t yours, every single time.
The one thing worth changing is going forward. Take a before shot. It costs four seconds and it doubles the value of the after shot, because the after on its own is just a nice bathroom. The pair is a story about what you did.
If you’ve got nothing at all, you’ve got the next job. Six weeks of deliberately photographing your work gives you a portfolio.
Ask your customers to describe you
Most people skip this because asking feels awkward. It’s the single highest-return hour you’ll spend.
Go back through the last year of jobs and pick the customers who were genuinely pleased. Message them and ask if they’d write a couple of lines about what the job was and how it went. Not a review. Just what happened, in their words.
Ask for specifics rather than adjectives. “He turned up when he said he would and cleared up after himself” is worth more than “excellent service”, because the first one sounds like a person and the second one sounds like a template. If they mention the thing they were worried about beforehand, keep that. That’s the sentence that speaks to the next nervous customer.
And leave their words alone. The small awkwardness in real writing is what makes it read as real.
Take the boring photographs
You, the team, the van. That’s it.
It sounds like nothing and it does more work than almost anything else on a small business website. A visitor wants to know a real person is going to turn up at their house. A face and a van registers as an answer to that question in a way that no amount of copy does.
Half an hour on a decent afternoon with a phone camera is enough. Nobody needs a photographer for this, and the version shot on a phone often reads as more honest than the version that clearly cost money.
Interview yourself
The last source is the one nobody thinks of, and it’s the one I find most in.
Why do you do this. What do you do differently from the other three firms in town. What’s the job you’re proudest of and why was it hard. Who taught you. What do customers always get wrong before they call you. How long has the company existed, and is it a limited company with a number somebody could check.
Write the answers down badly. You are not writing website copy, you are emptying your head. Somewhere in that is the specific, checkable, slightly odd detail that no competitor can copy, and that detail is worth more than every adjective on the page.
What this costs you
An afternoon, roughly. Some messages to old customers, half an hour with a phone camera, and an hour of writing badly about your own business.
That’s the honest limit here. It isn’t free and it isn’t zero effort, and a small number of people won’t do it. If you won’t, the site will still be better than what you’ve got, it just won’t be as good as it could have been, because I’ll be working with less.
The ones who do it end up with a website that no competitor can imitate, because it’s made of things that actually happened.
Common questions
Then you have the next six weeks of jobs. Photograph each one before and after with your phone and you’ll have a portfolio by the time the site is ready. In the meantime, the team and van photographs and a few customer descriptions do most of the work.
No, and you wouldn’t want me to. An invented testimonial reads like one, and a visitor who doubts that will doubt everything else on the page as well.
No. Phone photographs of real work beat professional photographs of somebody else’s. Good light and a straight angle is the whole technique.
Some won’t, which is normal. Ask ten and expect three. Three specific ones is plenty for a small business website.
If you want to see it rather than read about it
Send me what you’ve got and I’ll build you a homepage design for your business, free, within 48 hours. No card details, no meeting, and no obligation. If you like it, sites are £79 a month with nothing to pay upfront. If you don’t, you’ve lost nothing but the two minutes it takes to tell me what you do.