After my office manager Denise set up the estimate system I wrote about last week, she convinced me to try using AI for more things. "Just one week," she said. "If you hate it, we go back to normal."
Here's my day-by-day diary of what happened.
Monday: The Setup
Denise helped me set up ChatGPT on my phone. Took about 10 minutes. She created what she called a "custom instruction" that tells ChatGPT about our company - what services we offer, our pricing ranges, our service area in the Charlotte metro.
I felt like an idiot the whole time. I'm 47 years old and my 26-year-old office manager is teaching me how to type into a chat box. But I kept my mouth shut because I promised her a week.
Tuesday: Almost Lost a Client
A customer asked for a quote on a patio installation with drainage. I described the job to ChatGPT and it generated a nice-looking proposal. Looked professional. Sounded great.
One problem: it priced the drainage work at about $800. The actual cost for what this customer needed was closer to $2,400. Charlotte clay soil requires specific drainage solutions that ChatGPT doesn't know about.
If Denise hadn't caught it before I sent it, I would have either eaten $1,600 in costs or had to call the customer back and nearly triple part of the estimate. Neither is a good look.
Lesson learned: AI doesn't know your local conditions. Period.
Wednesday: The First Win
A potential customer emailed asking about our lawn maintenance packages. Usually I'd get to this at the end of the day or the next morning. Instead, I fed the email into ChatGPT with our pricing sheet and asked it to draft a response.
Two minutes later I had a professional, friendly email that explained all three of our maintenance tiers, answered the customer's specific questions, and suggested a free consultation. I tweaked a couple sentences and sent it.
The customer booked a consultation that afternoon. She told me she picked us because "you were the only company that responded same-day with actual information instead of just saying 'we'll get back to you.'"
That one email might have been worth the whole experiment.
Thursday: Template Day
Denise and I spent an hour building what she calls "prompt templates" for common situations. Follow-up emails for customers who got a quote but didn't respond. Thank-you messages after a job is done. Seasonal reminders to schedule aeration or mulching.
I used to either not send these at all (too busy) or send something that read like it was written by a robot (because I'm not a writer). Now they sound like me but better.
Friday: The Verdict
By Friday I was using ChatGPT for:
- Drafting customer responses (2-3 per day)
- Writing up job descriptions for our estimates
- Creating follow-up emails for old leads
I was NOT using it for:
- Pricing (see Tuesday)
- Anything that requires knowing our local market
- Decisions about what a property actually needs (that's what 12 years of experience is for)
My honest assessment
Total time saved in one week: probably 4-5 hours. Mostly on emails I would have put off or not sent at all.
Total cost: $20 for ChatGPT Plus (Denise said the free version would work but the paid one is faster).
Did it pay for itself? That one fast response on Wednesday probably brought in a $3,000 annual maintenance contract. So yes.
Would I recommend it to other contractors? Yes, with a massive asterisk: have someone check everything before it goes to a customer. Don't trust it with numbers. Don't trust it with local knowledge. Use it for the words, not the math.
And for the record: Denise has been told she was right. Once. She doesn't need to hear it again.