TradeSmartAI – AI Receptionist for Fencing Contractors
For as long as fencing has been required, the process has been the same. What has changed is the pace.
Customers reach us faster than they ever have, the cost of running a business has only gone one way, and your average team could well get through three or four jobs a week to compete and stay relevant.
The admin required to consistently deliver a team or individual five or six days a week of fencing work has become a 24/7 responsibility, often causing the very best of us to fall short. Not because of the work, we’re good at what we do.
Quoting alone can be ten hours a week. For the contractors we talk to doing 30 to 40, it can be 15 to 20 hours, entire weekends gone to pricing up work. This current model can hold contractors back. Customers want their quote instantly, and pushing it to Sunday can very easily lose you the job.
Can one owner do all of it at a high level, get every customer in, keep the tools going, keep the diary full of quotes, and still be gracious on the phone at eight o’clock in the evening?
Growing up with close ties to the fencing industry, my family running the Fencing Centre on the south coast, I was in the yard even at four years old obsessed with the forklifts, then working as a gate joiner through my teens before eventually going out on my own for ten years as a fencing and gate automation contractor across Dorset and Hampshire.
Landing five or ten voicemails a day, with the same formulaic conversations over and over, because you cannot answer a phone with a sodden featheredge panel above your head, trepidly covering the eighty metre obstacle course from truck to boundary. It stopped making sense to me.
After developing an interest in AI communication software and where I could see it heading, I wrapped the company up. My partner and I sold everything, which bought me two years full time allowing me to go deep in AI, adamant on changing what it means to be an in-demand fencing contractor. I now have the support of experienced developers around me who share the same vision.
AI is not replacing fencing contractors, but it is replacing the admin work that eats our evenings and weekends.
The quote is built on site. You walk the job, speak the measurements, say what’s what, and the price builds on your rates and materials in ten seconds. Don’t push it to the evening. Don’t push it to Sunday. Don’t even take it home with you. Get it done, get it sent, on to the next.
We’re proud to be teaming up with London’s Fabulous Fencing. Twenty-nine years pricing work across the capital and Essex, 30 to 40 quotes a week, and we’re getting every one of them down to seconds.
That’s the quoting side. The other half is the front line, getting the qualified work booked in before they move on to someone else.
None of us dreamed of scaling our business on repair spurs alone. We want the hundred metre post and rail, the fifty metres of closeboard, the thirty panel boundaries going straight in the diary for a site visit. Smaller projects, a repair spur, a two metre infill, get parked for your discretion, along with anything outside your radius.
Ashley, Founder
Over 30 million homes in the UK and over 2 million commercial premises, every one of them has a boundary to protect. Then there’s everything that isn’t built on, which is most of this country. Fields, forests, footpaths, estates, parks, miles of motorway and roadside. Fencing defines them. Secures them. Separates them. Connects them.
The opportunity in fencing is abundantly clear. It’s about getting organised, responsive and efficient with booking work.
TradeSmartAI is here to help shape the UK fencing industry by streamlining the admin, so we can simply get on with what we love: our craft. Give a contractor their time back and you create the room for something bigger, something better, and an industry a whole new generation wants to walk into.
tradesmartai.com
