Guide
What actually changes when an enquiry goes to four firms instead of one, and the arithmetic that decides which is cheaper for you.
A shared lead is one enquiry sold to several trades. An exclusive lead goes to one. Every lead platform in the UK runs on the first model, because selling the same thing four times is a better business than selling it once — for them.
Whether it is better for you is an arithmetic question, and it is worth doing once properly. If you have not worked out your own cost per job yet, start with how much leads cost in the UK.
A homeowner posts a job. Three, four, sometimes five trades get the details, usually within minutes of each other. From that moment you are in a race with two parts, and you can lose either.
None of that is a complaint about the platforms. It is simply the model: they are selling access to demand, and access is worth more sold several times. We go through each of them individually — Checkatrade, MyBuilder, Rated People and Bark.
Say a shared lead costs £12 and goes to four firms. If each of you wins roughly a quarter, you win one job in four leads, so £48 of lead cost per job — before the margin you gave away to be the cheapest of four quotes.
Say an exclusive, qualified enquiry costs £35 and you win one in three, because nobody else is quoting and somebody has already checked the job is real. That is £105 per job, at your normal price.
The shared lead looks cheaper per job and often is — on lead cost alone. The question is what you gave up on price to win it. Drop your quote by ten per cent on a £6,000 re-roof and you have handed back £600 to save £57. That is the whole argument, and it is why the per-lead price is the wrong thing to shop on.
If two or more of those are true, shared leads are a reasonable buy and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.
The usual turning point is capacity. Once you have a team to keep busy and a price you need to hold, winning on being cheapest stops scaling — you cannot grow a business on the jobs nobody else wanted at that price. That is normally when trades start looking at running their own advertising, because an advert creates demand that nobody else is quoting rather than buying a share of demand that already exists. That is the whole of what we do, trade by trade: roofing, landscaping, paving and joinery.
Questions
No. If you have spare capacity, somebody answering the phone all day and small quick jobs, shared leads can be the better buy. They stop working once you need to hold a price rather than win on being cheapest.
Typically three to five, depending on the platform and how many are active in your trade and postcode. Some platforms cap it and some do not, so it is worth asking directly rather than assuming.
No. We run one business per trade, per area. We check the postcode before taking the work and if your area has gone we say so rather than sell you into a queue, which is the only way exclusivity means anything.
Then we will tell you on the first call rather than after you have paid. We would rather lose the sale than run two roofers against each other in one town, because the second one never gets what they were sold.
Check your area
Running the same ads for two roofers in one town bids them against each other and makes both of their leads more expensive. So we do not do it. Tell us where you work and we will say straight away whether it is open.
Six questions, about a minute.
You will need £1,000 a month to put behind the ads.
Below that the guarantee does not hold, so we do not take the work.
Free, and useful whether or not you ever ring us
Most trades have been burned once. Usually not by an agency that did nothing — by one that did something and called it a result. These are the nine questions that make that impossible to hide, with our own answers printed beside them.
We’d like to set advertising cookies so we can see which ads bring people here. They are not needed for the site to work, and saying no changes nothing about what you see. What we set