Stop Paying for Leads: How UK Trades Own Their Jobs and Their Customers

If you only read one block of this, read this one. It is the whole case for a UK trade business owning its own pipeline instead of renting enquiries from a lead platform.

• A bought lead is rented, not owned. You are paying for one introduction to one person, on somebody else's terms, on somebody else's website.
• You pay before you know if you have won. Shortlist fees and credits are charged at the introduction, not at the invoice. A month of fees can be a month of no work.
• The same enquiry usually goes to several trades. Rated People says a lead can be bought by up to three tradespeople. That is a quoting race before you have said a word.
• The review lands on their profile, not yours. Leave the platform and the proof of ten years of good work mostly stays behind.
• They are still worth using early. An empty diary is a worse problem than an expensive lead. Buy leads to fill gaps, on a set budget, with the numbers written down.
• Owning your pipeline is seven jobs, not one big project. Google Business Profile, reviews you own, your own website, a number that always answers, a customer list, follow up, and asking for the next job.
• Owned work compounds. Bought work resets. Every month you buy leads, the meter starts at zero again. Every month you build reviews and repeat customers, you start higher than you did last month.

Not sure where you stand today? The free Tradehand AI report checks your website and your Google Business Profile, names the competitors ranking above you, and tells you what to fix first.

Lead platforms are not one thing. They charge in genuinely different ways, and the way they charge decides how much risk you carry.

Here is how the main UK options describe their own trade products.

Platform	What you pay for	When you pay	Who else gets the same job
Checkatrade	An Approved profile plus fixed plan tiers or pay as you go campaigns in chosen categories and postcodes	Ongoing, whether or not enquiries convert	Other members advertising the same category and area
MyBuilder	A non refundable shortlist fee, shown before you express interest	The moment a customer shortlists you	The other trades that customer shortlists
MyJobQuote	Credits, through a rolling monthly subscription or pay as you go	When you unlock the job details	Other trades who spend credits on the same job
Rated People	Subscription plans and credit based access to posted jobs	When you take the lead	Rated People says up to three tradespeople can buy one lead
Bark	Credits to contact leads you choose, with no commission on work won	When you contact the lead	Other sellers who spend credits on the same buyer
TrustATrader	Annual membership, no lead fee and no commission, with membership limited by trade and area	Yearly, up front	The capped number of members in your trade and area

Read that table again and notice what is missing from every row. None of them charge you when the job is done. They charge at the introduction. That is not a criticism, it is simply the model, and it is the most important thing to understand before you set a budget.

Notice something else. Checkatrade's own guidance says an Approved profile does not appear in standard search results, and that the paid campaigns are what increase access to job opportunities. So the profile you built is not the thing working for you. The spend is.

For the per trade detail, the fee mechanics are compared side by side for electricians and roofers.

The fee is the part you can see. These four are the part that decides whether the year was any good.

1. You pay at the introduction, not at the win.

Under MyBuilder's trade terms the chargeable event is the customer shortlisting you, and the fee is non refundable. MyJobQuote's fees guidance describes credits bought through a subscription or pay as you go. In both cases the money leaves before anyone has agreed a price. A quiet fortnight where four shortlists all go elsewhere is four fees and nothing to show for them.

2. The same enquiry is sold more than once.

Rated People says a lead can be bought by no more than three tradespeople. That cap is there to protect you, and it is a real improvement on an open free for all. It is still three of you turning up for one kitchen. The customer has three numbers and three prices before you have finished reading the job description.

3. Shared leads pull prices down.

This is the honest part that nobody enjoys. When three trades quote the same job from the same short description, the only difference the customer can easily see is the number at the bottom. They cannot see your certification, your tidiness, or the fact you turn up when you say you will. So they compare the thing they can compare, and you end up shaving your price to win work you already paid to be introduced to. That is paying twice for one job.

A customer who found you on Google, read fourteen reviews with your name in them, and rang a number you answered is a different conversation. They have already decided they want you.

4. The review and the customer are theirs, not yours.

Losing the review is the lead-platform cost that hurts the most and is felt the least. A five star review left on a platform profile lives on that platform and builds its rankings, not yours. If you stop paying, most of that proof stops working for you. The customer record sits in their system too, which means the reminder about next year's service is theirs to send, or nobody's.

Compare that with a Google review. Google's own guidance covers reading and replying to reviews on your Business Profile, and that profile is yours. It shows on Search and Maps, and it keeps working in the months you spend nothing.

If you have already decided to step back, we have written the practical version: how to cancel Checkatrade without dropping off the map.

Anyone telling you to cancel everything tomorrow has not run a trade business with an empty week in front of them. Bought leads solve a real problem, and there are four situations where they are the sensible answer.

• You are new and the diary is empty. Owned channels compound, which is another way of saying they are slow at the start. A Google Business Profile with two reviews will not feed you in month one. Bought leads will put work in front of you this week, and that work is what generates the reviews that eventually replace the leads.
• You have moved into a new area. Your reputation does not travel across a county boundary. Buying introductions in the new postcodes for a few months is a reasonable way to seed it.
• You are adding a service you have never sold. An electrician moving into EV chargers has no local track record for it. A short burst of paid enquiries tells you whether there is demand before you invest further.
• You have a seasonal hole. January for a roofer, August for a heating engineer. Filling a known gap with a fixed budget is a fair trade.

What all four have in common is that they are temporary and measured. The failure mode is not using lead platforms. The failure mode is using them for six years, never writing down the cost per won job, and waking up with no reviews of your own, no website worth the name, and a business that stops the moment you stop paying.

So set a budget, run it for a fixed period, and record every fee including the ones that led nowhere. If a platform pays back, keep it and be glad, on your own numbers rather than a dashboard.

The ownership plan for a UK trade business is seven steps, in the order that gets results fastest. Steps one to three are where almost all the return is. Do them properly before you touch the rest.

Step 1: Claim and finish your Google Business Profile

This is free, it is the highest return hour you will spend on marketing, and most trades do a quarter of it. Google says a Business Profile can show your phone number and website on Search and Maps at no charge. When somebody searches "electrician near me", the box of three businesses at the top is built entirely from Business Profiles.

Finish every field. The right primary category for your trade. Every service listed separately, because each one is another search you can appear for. Your service area if you work from a van and do not want your home address public. Real hours. Ten photos minimum of actual jobs, your van, and you. Our full walkthrough is here: Google Business Profile for trade businesses.

Step 2: Build reviews that belong to you

Ask every happy customer, every time, on the day. Not next week. The moment the job is done and they have said they are pleased is the only moment that reliably works.

Say it out loud first, then send the link the same day. Get the direct review link from your Business Profile dashboard so they do not have to search for you, because a customer who has to go looking usually does not bother. Do not offer anything in exchange, do not buy them, and do not ask at quoting stage. The step by step version, with the exact wording to use, is in how to get more 5 star reviews.

Reply to all of them, good and bad. Future customers read your replies as evidence of how you handle people.

Step 3: Get your own website up

Not a brochure nobody visits. A working front door with your services, the areas you cover, your reviews, photos of real jobs, and a way to contact you that you actually answer.

It does three jobs at once. It gives Google another trusted signal linking back to you, which feeds the prominence that decides local rankings. It gives a customer somewhere to check you out before they ring. And it gives you an address that is yours, so a customer who liked you three years ago can find you again without going through anyone else's marketplace.

Getting found once it exists is its own skill. We have covered it properly in getting found on Google as a trade business.

Step 4: Have a number that always answers

Answering every call is the step that quietly loses trade businesses the most money when skipped, because it does not feel like marketing. You are up a ladder with your hands full. The phone rings. It rings out. That customer rings the next name on the list and you never know it happened.

Every step above pushes people towards your phone. If nobody picks it up, you have paid for the traffic and given the job away for free. Whatever you use to fix it, fix it before you spend another pound on being found. There is more on the size of the problem in our guide to stopping missed customer calls.

Step 5: Keep a customer list

Name, number, address, what you did, when you did it, what it cost, and what needs doing next. A spreadsheet counts. What does not count is your phone's call history and your memory.

This list is the asset. It is the one thing in your business that no platform can take back, no algorithm can bury, and no competitor can outbid you for. A trade with four hundred past customers on a list has a pipeline. A trade with four hundred completed jobs and no list has a history.

Keep it lawfully. The ICO's direct marketing guidance sets out what you need before you send marketing messages to people, and the short version is to be clear about what you will send and to make stopping easy.

Step 6: Follow up on purpose

Most repeat work is lost to silence, not to a competitor. The boiler service that was due in March, the second bathroom they mentioned, the landlord certificate that expires next month. They were all yours and nobody said anything.

Pick the follow ups your trade actually has, and put a date on each one. Twelve months after a boiler install. Eleven months after an EICR on a rental. A fortnight after a quote that went quiet. This is not a clever campaign, it is remembering, done on a schedule instead of by luck.

Step 7: Ask every happy customer for the next job

The cheapest work in the trade is the second job for someone who already likes you. It costs nothing, it never gets shared with two other quotes, and it usually gets accepted without a haggle.

So ask. When you hand over, say what else you do and that you are happy to come back. Say you appreciate a recommendation to a neighbour. Both sentences are free, both feel slightly awkward the first ten times, and both work better than any lead you can buy.

Increasingly, this compounding shows up in places that did not exist five years ago. People now ask an assistant for a recommendation rather than typing into a search box, and the businesses those answers name are the ones with a complete profile, real reviews, and a readable website. That is covered in getting found on ChatGPT and AI search.

Numbers make this concrete. The figures below are a worked example, not a quote from any platform, and the point is the shape rather than the exact pounds. Put your own numbers in the same columns and it still works.

The example is a sole trader wanting roughly sixty jobs in a year at an average job value of £900, so around £54,000 of work.

	Year of bought leads	Year of owning the pipeline
How work arrives	Fees, credits and shortlists on one or more platforms	Google Business Profile, reviews, your website, repeat and referral
Up front cost	Membership or subscription, paid whether or not work lands	Time. A weekend on the profile, an hour a week on reviews and follow up
Cost per introduction	Paid per shortlist or per credit, win or lose	£0. The profile and the reviews keep working after they are built
Typical spend to land 60 jobs	Roughly £4,000 to £7,000 across fees, credits and plans, depending on trade, area and conversion	Around £0 to £600 of direct cost, mostly time
What you pay Tradehand	Not applicable	5% of what your office team actually chases and collects, so about £2,700 on £54,000. No monthly fee, no setup fee, no card fees, no contract
Total cost of getting and collecting the work	£4,000 to £7,000 in lead spend, plus your own evenings chasing quotes and invoices	About £2,700 to £3,300, with the chasing done for you
Who owns the review	The platform	You, on your own Google profile
Who owns the customer	The platform's records	Your list
What happens if you stop paying	Enquiries stop within days, and most of the proof stays behind	The profile, the reviews, the website and the list keep working
Where you are in year two	Back at zero. The same spend buys the same sixty introductions	Further ahead. More reviews, better ranking, and a list of past customers to work

The last row is the whole argument. Bought leads are a cost that repeats identically every year. Owned pipeline is work you do once that keeps paying, so the same effort buys you more each year than it did the last.

Two honest notes on the ownership column. It is slower to start, and the 5% only applies to money that actually lands, because if your office team does not collect, it does not earn. Compare that with an office admin on £25,000 a year, who is paid in the months the invoices land and the months they do not.

You can run both columns at once. Most trades should, for a while. The goal is not purity, it is getting the owned column large enough that the bought column becomes optional.

The mistake is cancelling first. Build the replacement while the old thing is still feeding you, then turn the tap down gradually.

1. Months one and two: build, do not cancel. Keep paying. Finish the Google Business Profile, get the website up, and start asking every single customer for a review. Nothing changes in the diary yet, and that is fine.
2. Month three: start counting. Write down every platform fee you pay and every job you win from it. Separately, record every enquiry that came from Google, your website, a repeat customer or a referral. You need six weeks of this before you can make a decision worth trusting.
3. Months four to six: turn the tap down. Cut the platform budget by roughly a third and watch what happens. If your owned enquiries are climbing, cut again. If the diary tightens, hold the level and keep building reviews.
4. Month seven onwards: keep only what pays back. By now you have real numbers on cost per won job for each source. Keep any platform that clears the bar and drop the rest. Some trades keep one permanently for filling gaps, and that is a perfectly good answer.

Two rules while you do it. Never cancel in a quiet season, because you will judge the results by panic rather than by the numbers. And never stop asking for reviews, because the review count is the thing that makes every later month easier.

Four numbers tell you whether it is working. Track them monthly and nothing else matters much.

• Cost per won job, by source. Total spend on that source divided by jobs actually won from it. Not enquiries. Jobs.
• Share of work from owned channels. The percentage of this month's jobs that came from Google, your website, repeat customers or referrals. This is the number that should climb every quarter.
• Google review count. Count it on the first of the month. If it did not move, you did not ask.
• Repeat and referral rate. How many of this month's customers had used you before, or were sent by someone who had. This is the compounding showing up.

If you want the starting position without doing the counting yourself, the free Tradehand AI report checks your website and your Google Business Profile, scores you out of 100, and names the competitors ranking above you in your area. It takes a couple of minutes and it tells you which of the seven steps above you are actually missing.

Every step in the ownership plan works without us. Claim the profile, ask for reviews, keep the list, ring people back. None of it needs anything bought.

The reason most trades do not do it is not that they disagree. It is that all seven steps are office work, and you are on the tools. The review request does not get sent because at six o'clock you are still on site. The quote goes out on Thursday instead of Monday. The follow up that would have won next March's boiler service never happens, because nobody wrote it down.

Tradehand is a whole office team without hiring a single person. It answers the phone and the messages when you cannot, sends the quote the same day, chases it when it goes quiet, sends the review request the day the job is finished with your Google link already in it, and chases the invoice until it is paid. It also builds and runs your trade website, which is step three done for you.

It earns 5% of the invoice payments it chases and collects, with card processing absorbed inside that, so you keep exactly 95% of what lands. No monthly fee, no setup fee, no card fees, no contract. If it does not collect, it does not earn. An office admin costs £25,000 a year whether or not the invoice lands. That is also a different shape of deal from a lead fee, which is paid at the introduction, before anybody knows whether there is a job.

Start with the free AI report and see where you stand. Then, if the office work is the bottleneck, get your office set up.