Getting Consistent Photos From the Crew

Why the photos matter

The Google listing ranks partly on activity, and photos from real jobs are the activity a shop can produce every week. Town pages need a photo from that town. Homeowners choosing between two listings pick the one with a crew they can see. Stock photos and the logo alone signal a business that is not active, and a homeowner can tell a stock photo from a real one in a glance. The supply of real photos is the field crew, and the crew will not produce them unless it is part of the job.

The habit

• One photo at the end of every job, before the truck leaves. Not the best jobs, every job.
• The same three shots when possible: the finished work, the technician with the finished work, and the truck in front of the house. Any one of the three is enough on a busy day.
• Daylight and a wiped lens. That is the entire technical standard.
• Send it to one place: a shared album or a single text thread to the office, named by date and town. Not the technician’s own camera roll.
• The job is not closed in the scheduling software until the photo is in. That rule is what makes the habit stick.

What not to photograph

• The customer, or the inside of the home beyond the work itself, without asking. A yes at the door is enough; write it in the job notes.
• House numbers and mail. Frame them out.
• Anything the crew would not want the customer to see: the mess mid-job, the wrong tool, the truck blocking a driveway.

What the office does with them

Once a week, someone in the office picks three and puts them to work: one on the Google listing, one on the town page for that town, one on the social feed with the town named and nothing else. The rest stay in the album, tagged by town, for the next town page and next season’s mailer. A shop with three trucks produces sixty photos a month this way and uses twelve, which is the right ratio.

Making it stick

A habit the owner cares about for two weeks and then stops asking about dies in the third. Put the photo count on the one-page monthly report next to the review count, and mention it at the Monday meeting. Some shops pay a small monthly bonus to the technician with the most usable photos, which works until the photos get worse, at which point the standard, not the bonus, has to be the thing that is enforced.