Chalkline Reports
reads your business the way a homeowner does before calling. It sets your reviews and Google listing beside the three rivals winning your area. Then it prices the jobs that gap is costing you. I designed how it works.
You are never in the room where your job gets decided.
I've spent my working life finding out what happens in that room. First in other industries, and now in yours.
Raman Arunsi
About
01 The origin
I started out looking after other people's names. What a stranger already believes is the whole contest. There's no appeal.
Back then I watched people decide about someone they'd never met. They read a page, a headline or a post, and made up their minds. Nobody I worked with ever talked a stranger out of a first impression. You lose that argument every time. All you can do is find what's out there, then fix what can be fixed.
I've done that same work ever since, in very different rooms. A design and branding agency, and a media firm. A maker of natural health goods, and some small food and fashion labels. Then a builder, a hotel, and two design schools. Last, owners in Home Improvement, where I stayed.
The problem never changed, only the trade.
A homeowner decides the way those strangers did, from whatever they can find. They decide long before they ever speak to you.
02 The problem
The part of the job nobody watches.
I teach a room of owners and operators from this trade, about twenty five at a time. The useful part comes after the class is over, when somebody stays behind. She tells me about a job she was sure of, a homeowner she'd met twice, and a phone that never rang again. She never found out why. In seven years I've never once heard that the work was the problem.
So I went and looked at what a homeowner finds in the ninety seconds before the call. Not the advertising. The reviews, the Google listing, and the two or three rivals on the same screen. It was there nearly every time. Most of it was the kind of thing an owner could have fixed in an afternoon.
Almost every piece of advice in this trade is about getting found. Ads, vans, yard signs, a new website every three years. Very little of it is about what happens next, once a homeowner has found you and started reading.
A homeowner about to hand over sixty thousand dollars isn't really shopping. They're frightened, and they're hunting for one good reason to cross you off. A shorter list is the only way they can decide at all.
The companies taking your work are often not better than you. They're easier to believe.
03 The work
I founded a company to build for one trade and nothing else.
At Design Glyphe Limited, all we make is for Home Improvement.
Forja
is a 16-week startup competition for the trades. Up to 360 founders compete across 14+ subsectors. Each founder must design a product, build it and release it to the market. Nobody wins with a pitch deck. Winners show invoices from at least two paying customers. The top three share $250,000 in investment.
i-dex
is the International Interior Design Expo. It's built for owners whose businesses build, fit out and furnish homes and offices. On one floor, they meet architects, contractors, developers and retailers who buy at scale. Working demos show the tools that take a workshop from manual to modern. An owner looking for a partner or investor can be introduced before the doors open.
All three rest on one belief. Whoever can prove the work wins the job, not whoever tells it best.
04 The writing
I write down what I find, one problem at a time.
Most of it, you can fix yourself, without an agency.
I publish it here, as the Playbooks. Each one answers a question owners ask about their reputation: reviews, replies, the Google listing. I link every source, so you can check me. That's mostly Google's own rules, and the law where it applies.
You leave each one knowing what to do this week, and the exact words to use. Once it's done, there's a box to tell me how it went. I read every reply, and it's how I learn what to write next.
Some of what I found had no name. So I named it.
- The customer's punch list
- The customer's punch list is the second list at the final walkthrough.
- From “Ask for Google reviews before the crew leaves”
- Quiet months
- Quiet months are months with finished jobs and no new Google review.
- From “Ask for Google reviews before the crew leaves”
- Reward the ask
- Reward the ask means paying your crew for asking every customer, never for reviews.
- From “Paying for Google reviews: what to stop today”
- The look-up
- It's what a homeowner finds before calling: the reviews, the Google listing, and the two or three rivals showing up alongside.
- From “How contractors get more Google reviews”
- The two-fact reply
- The two-fact reply answers a bad review that isn't fair.
- From “Respond to a bad Google review, fair or not”
05 Teaching
I learned this in two places.
Inside real companies.
A classroom.
Some came from inside real companies, where I was paid to fix what people found. The rest came from a classroom. I teach at Top Notch Interior Design School in Abuja, and at Albedo Design School. Since 2019 I've taught 500+ owners and operators in Home Improvement. Their work runs from furniture to solar panels.
There's nothing here to enroll in, and I'm not selling you a class. I keep teaching because of what I hear in that room. An owner who has just lost a job will tell a teacher things they would never tell a rival.
06 Connect
Bring me a job you lost and still can't explain.
On a call, we'll look at what the homeowner saw before they chose someone else.
You know your trade better than I ever will. I bring the other side: what the homeowner found and what they believed.
You'll leave with the likeliest reason you lost it, and what to fix first. Whether we work together after that is up to you.
Pick a time, and bring the job.
Connect with meRaman Arunsi