For plumbers, electricians and the trades
Most small trades businesses are losing jobs they never hear about — to a Google listing nobody has touched since 2019, or to a phone that rang while their hands were full. Both are fixable, and neither is your fault.
A customer needs a plumber. He does what everybody does — he searches, and Google hands him a short list. Three or four businesses, each with a star rating, a pile of photos, some recent reviews, and a website link.
Then there is the fourth one. No photos. Hours that were right in 2019. Four reviews, the most recent one unhappy and unanswered. Maybe a “Claim this business” button sitting on it, which means nobody owns the listing at all.
The reason it does not get fixed is not laziness. Answering reviews, keeping photos current, and asking every finished customer for a rating are small jobs that take five minutes each and never stop arriving. After a ten-hour day with a truck to unload, they lose to everything else. Forever.
Claim the listing, fix what is wrong with it, merge the duplicates, answer every review, and ask your finished customers for one after each job.
How it works →A straightforward site that answers the three questions a customer actually has — and then stays current, because that is the part everyone gives up on.
What goes on it →A phone that gets answered when you are under a sink or on a roof. Not built yet — this is honest roadmap, not a product you can buy today.
Where it stands →Every part of this exists for one reason: more of the work that is already out there ends up on your calendar instead of somebody else’s.
The phone rings while both your hands are inside somebody’s vanity. It goes to voicemail. Almost nobody leaves one — they hang up and call the next name on the list, and you never learn the job existed.
It gets answered. Who is calling, what they need, where they are — written down and sitting on your calendar as a request. You finish the job you are on, then ring them back and set the time yourself.
local plumbers whose Google listing was unclaimed — all three real, working businesses.
had duplicate listings splitting their reviews. One had four separate listings.
photos on the busiest listing in one town, against the quietest one on the same page.
businesses we looked at had no website at all, which removes a button Google would otherwise give them.
These are counts from real Google Business Profile data, not projections. We will not tell you what any of it is worth in dollars, because nobody honestly can.
There are a dozen companies selling versions of this. Most will not tell you a price without a phone call, and the demonstration is of their software rather than of your business.
We do it the other way round. Before we ask you for anything, we look at your actual listing and tell you what is on it — the real numbers, which you can check yourself in about two minutes. If the answer is “that is fine, you do not need me,” that is a perfectly good outcome and we will say so.
Prices are published, on the page for each service. There is no sales call to sit through and nothing to sign up for in order to find out what something costs.
The other difference is that we would rather explain than pitch. Every page here tries to leave you understanding your own situation better, whether or not you ever hire us. If you read the Google page and then go fix your listing yourself over a weekend, that is a fine result.
PolyMathDuck is run by Scott Dorsey out of Martinsburg, West Virginia. It is a small operation on purpose — small enough that if you email, you get me rather than a ticket number, and small enough that I am not paying for a sales floor out of your monthly invoice.
Before this: health physics, paramedic, military, detective, and a stretch building websites by hand back when that meant writing the HTML yourself. The habit that survived all of it is redundancy — everything automated here has a documented manual version, permanently, because systems fail and the work still has to get done.