Most fence and deck contractors are using a CRM that wasn’t built for them — and they’re paying for it in lost deals every month. Tanner Mullen, founder of DripJobs and a former contractor himself, joined me on the Fencing Success Podcast for a 36-minute conversation about what a fence and deck CRM should actually look like, and why he built one from scratch when nothing on the market fit.
Watch the full episode
What you’ll learn in this episode
- Why most CRMs fail home service contractors — and what’s missing
- The story behind DripJobs: built by a contractor for contractors
- How Monday is where most contractors’ weekend plans die — and how to prevent it
- What an automated lead-to-quote-to-close pipeline looks like for fence companies
- The texting and reminder system that recovers the appointments most contractors lose
- Why investing in the right tools is a mindset shift most contractors haven’t made
Chapter timestamps
- 0:00 — Welcome to Fencing Success Podcast
- 5:00 — Tanner’s contractor background and the volatility that drove him to build
- 10:00 — Lessons learned working in small businesses
- 15:00 — Building emails that don’t look like robot emails
- 20:00 — Why Monday kills weekend plans for most contractors
- 25:00 — A real example: recovering a forgotten appointment with a text
- 30:00 — The mindset shift around investing in tools
- 35:00 — Pricing your fence installation — why you can charge more
Why most CRMs fail home service contractors
Tanner’s story starts with a problem every fence contractor will recognize: he was running his own contracting business, the volatility of feast-and-famine months was crushing him, and every CRM he tried was built for software companies, real estate agents, or insurance brokers. None of them spoke the language of a contractor running estimates, quoting jobs, scheduling installs, and following up with customers. He’d configure a CRM for two weeks, give up, and go back to spreadsheets. That cycle is exactly where most fence and deck contractors live today.
The “all-in-one” CRMs are bloated. The simple ones don’t have the features. And the ones built for service businesses are usually built for plumbers and HVAC techs whose business model is different from a fence contractor’s. You can’t run a project-based business on a CRM designed for repeat-service calls.
What a contractor-built CRM actually does
The thing that makes DripJobs different is that Tanner built it from the perspective of a contractor who’d lived the pain. The features that matter aren’t fancy automation flows or enterprise integrations. They’re things like: a lead-to-quote pipeline that mirrors how contractors actually sell, automatic follow-up texts because customers forget appointments, professional-looking email templates with the company logo and brand colors, and a workflow that lets one person on the office team manage 30 active jobs without dropping any.
This is the value of building software for a specific niche: every feature exists because a real contractor asked for it. There’s no dead weight.
Monday is where weekend plans go to die
One of my favorite moments in the episode was Tanner describing Monday as the day where every contractor’s weekend plans die. You spent Saturday and Sunday building a list of follow-ups, planning your week, getting organized — and then Monday hits with a wave of new leads, customer issues, and crew problems, and everything you planned gets pushed aside. By Tuesday you’re back in reactive mode for the rest of the week.
The fix is automation. If your CRM is auto-sending appointment reminders, auto-following up with stale quotes, auto-tagging leads by source, you don’t lose Monday to the wave. You stay on the proactive work that actually moves the business forward.
A simple example: the forgotten appointment
Tanner shared a story from a fence contractor using DripJobs. A homeowner had scheduled an estimate, forgotten about it, and wasn’t home when the tech showed up. The CRM automatically sent a text saying “We’re at your door — are you home?” The customer responded “Oh my God, I forgot about our appointment” and rescheduled on the spot. Without that automated text, that appointment would have been a no-show, the tech would have wasted an hour, and the customer would have probably hired a competitor by the time they remembered.
That’s one text. Multiply it across every estimate your company runs in a year. The recovered appointments alone pay for the CRM ten times over.
The mindset shift
The hardest part of selling tools to contractors, Tanner said, is the mindset shift. Most owners have been doing things the manual way for years and they don’t see the cost of that manual way — because the cost is invisible. It’s the deal you didn’t close because you didn’t follow up. It’s the customer who hired your competitor because their CRM texted faster. It’s the team member who quit because the chaos burned them out. The right tools don’t feel like a cost. They feel like leverage.
Why you can charge more
We closed the episode on pricing, and Tanner made a point I share with every fence contractor: you can charge more than your competitors if you give the customer a reason to pay more. A 20-year warranty. A professional onboarding email. A real follow-up call after the install. The customer is already emotionally bought in by the time they’re picking a fence contractor — the question is whether you give them confidence that you’re the right choice. Tools like DripJobs are what make that professional experience consistent across every customer.
About the guest: Tanner Mullen
Tanner Mullen is the founder of DripJobs, the CRM built specifically for home service contractors. He’s a former operator who built the tool he wished he’d had, and it now powers thousands of fence, deck, painting, and remodeling businesses.
Want to fix the back-office side of your fence business?
If your weekend plans are dying on Monday, the issue isn’t discipline — it’s systems. Reach out through my Professional Network page and I’ll point you to the right tools. And if you want to pair this with the marketing playbook that fills the pipeline, watch Dollar-a-Day for Contractors next.
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