Hand it over on the doorstep.

You do not lose customers. You lose your phone number.

A mobile business rarely loses a regular to a competitor. It loses them to a moment six weeks later when somebody wants to book again, cannot find the number, and rings whoever comes up first instead. The work was already yours; it just needed to be findable on a Tuesday evening.

That is what the card is for, and it is why the rebooking case matters more here than the first-impression one. You leave something behind that opens your booking link, your WhatsApp and your service area in a second — on the phone they will actually have in their hand when they think of it.

The van is a card too

Most people in this trade already have signwriting, and most signwriting carries a phone number that was correct when it was applied. A QR on the vehicle pointing at the same code as your cards does something signwriting cannot: it survives you changing your number, adding a second mobile, or moving to a booking system.

You change where the code goes from a browser, and the van, the cards you handed out last summer and anything else carrying the code all follow. Nothing gets re-lettered. The same is true of a code you print yourself from the free Toolkit or a card left on a kitchen worktop — they are all the same code doing the same job in different places.

Saying where you cover, so the wrong calls stop

The cost most mobile businesses forget to count is the enquiry from forty minutes away that was never going to work. Each one is a phone call, a polite no, and sometimes a bad review from somebody who feels messed about.

Putting your service area on the profile lets people rule themselves out before they ring. It is a small thing that quietly gives you back evenings, and it is the sort of detail that changes often enough — you take on a new area, you drop one — that printing it on a card would be a mistake.

Reviews, and asking at the right moment

You are standing in front of the customer at the exact moment they are happiest with the work, which is the moment a review gets written honestly and quickly. Pointing a card at your reviews builds trust before you quote; pointing a separate card at your Google review page collects them after. Review cards are the second job, and they send everybody to the same page rather than filtering out the unhappy ones.

What it costs

£24 plastic, £35 bamboo, £59 metal, paid once and posted free in the UK. The profile, the QR, the tap counting and the form that lets a customer send their details back are free whether you buy a card or not, and there is no subscription — which matters in a trade where January is quiet. Full pricing, or how the cards work.