How writing things down changed my revenue as a glazier

I forget things. Always have. I’m on the tools most of the day, the phone rings constantly, and by the time I’ve finished a job and packed the van, half of what happened that morning is already gone.

For a long time I didn’t think much of it. I figured I was keeping up. But I started noticing — at the end of a busy day, I’d have this vague feeling that I’d spoken to more people than I could actually account for. Jobs I half-remembered. Numbers I never wrote down. People who probably called someone else by the time I got back to them.

It wasn’t one big moment. It was just this slow realisation that being busy and actually capturing all of your work are two different things.

As a glazier, you’re quite busy. Calls come in while you’re cutting glass, while you’re driving, while you’re mid-job. The last thing on your mind is finding something to write with.

What I found — and this took me longer than I’d like to admit — is that writing down the details straight away, the moment the call ends, made a real difference to my revenue. Not eventually. Pretty much immediately.

Name, number, suburb, what they need. Takes about thirty seconds. But I was skipping that thirty seconds constantly, telling myself I’d remember, and then not remembering.

When I started actually doing it — every call, straight away, no exceptions — I stopped losing leads I didn’t even know I was losing. Jobs started filling up more consistently. I wasn’t doing anything differently on the tools. I was just capturing the work that was already coming in.

It sounds almost too simple to be worth writing about. But for a glazier running around Adelaide all day, this was actually the thing that moved the needle. Not an app. Not a system. Just writing it down before I moved on to the next thing.