How to get man and van work without paying for leads

You set the page up last week. One post, four likes, two of them your mum. It’s what’s on the page that’s wrong.

Cover photo: you in front of your van. Number in the bio, the towns you cover: Croydon, Penge, Bromley. Then an intro post with a real price in it: a range in public beats a hundred "DM for details".

Then the local groups. Somebody asks for a man and van in the busy ones most weeks. Answer with a rough price and a photo of a job you’ve done: "Did a 1-bed Croydon to Brixton last month, around £200 all in." Use your own number. What a 1-bed goes for swings a lot by area. Answer even the ones you can’t take. Whoever’s reading is your next customer.

Don’t paste the same line into nine groups; admins bin you. Marketplace won’t take a service listing everywhere. If the option isn’t there when you go to post, it’s not on where you are, and the groups do the same job.

Somebody in Bromley types "man and van near me" on a Sunday night. Near the top they usually get a map with a handful of local firms in it. Being one of the firms in that map costs nothing.

It’s a Google Business Profile. Pick the category that says removals or moving, not something vague about transport. Set your service area to the towns you really cover, then add your mobile and ten photos of your own van. Google will want to check you’re real first, boring, but it’s the gate.

Reviews tend to move you up that map, and they’re the first thing anyone reads. Google gives you a direct review link. Send it the day after every job.

Reply to every review, including the ropey one. The next person reads how you handled the three-star, not just the five-stars.

You’re parked outside a job in Penge for four hours. People walk past that van all afternoon and not one of them knows what you do.

Name, town, number. Both sides and the back doors, big enough to read from across the road. Cut vinyl from a local sign shop runs about £200–£400 fitted on a van your size, and most of them quote before VAT. Ring two or three, it swings a lot. Keep it to three lines; nobody copies a paragraph off a moving van.

Then wash it. A clean signwritten van says careful with your gran’s sideboard; a filthy one says the opposite. It sells you while you’re eating your lunch.

Honest bit: it’s slow. They ring in March, when the landlord gives notice, because they’ve seen your van outside the Co-op forty times.

Your first ten jobs are already in your phone. Not customers: mates, cousins, the lad you used to work with, your mum’s neighbour with a garage full of stuff.

Sort your cover first. The message below says you’re properly insured, and the insurance answer is the list to walk into a broker with. Then send it to twenty of them. Separately, not a group chat, so it reads like you meant it. Then do the jobs properly: turn up when you said, blankets on the furniture, no surprise fifty quid at the end.

Honest bit: the first ten pay badly. Somebody’s sister gets a mate’s rate, somebody else sorts you out later and never does. That’s fine. You’re not buying money yet. You’re buying reviews, photos of real jobs, and ten people who say your name when moving comes up. Do them, then put your prices up.

It’s Tuesday, the van’s empty, and half the day has gone already. That’s the one moment a lead site earns its keep.

They’re not a scam. They do produce work. How it goes: you pay £15–£30 for an enquiry, and that same one gets sold to four or five vans. The customer’s phone rings four or five times over, and more often than not they go with whoever sounded quickest.

So it only stacks up when you can answer in two minutes with a real price. Stuck up three flights with a wardrobe until five? You’ve paid for an enquiry you never got to answer.

Use them to plug a hole in a quiet week. Never as the thing your week stands on. Stop paying and the phone stops.

You put the last box down at six, took the cash, said cheers and drove off. That’s where nearly everyone stops. It’s also where the repeat work was sitting.

Message them the day after. Ask on the doorstep, stood in a wall of boxes, and they forget; ask the next day, sat down with a brew, and they do it. If you put their wardrobe back together, say so. People review the bit they remember.

Honest bit: this only works if the job went well. A follow-up after a shoddy move just reminds them to write the bad review.

Then leave them be. Six months later somebody at their work is moving, and yours is the name that comes out.

A letting agent in Bromley has four tenants moving out on the last Friday of the month. Somebody is shifting all that furniture. Might as well be you.

Letting and estate agents, storage places, charity furniture shops, house-clearance firms. They meet people who need a van most weeks, and plenty of them have nobody decent to hand them to.

Walk in, don’t ring. Clean gear, a card and one page of prices. The independent charity shops are the underrated ones. Most of the big chains have their own collection vans, but plenty of the smaller shops turn down a sofa they’ve no way of getting across Bromley. Be the one who’ll collect it.

The catch: it’s slow and most of them won’t ring. You need the one who does. Then be boringly reliable. Their name is on it too.

Search your town and your trade on your phone. If you’re nowhere on that first page, the work is going to whoever is.

The Google listing gets you in the map. A page of your own gives you a shot at the results underneath, and it’s yours, so nobody can sell your customers to four other vans. It doesn’t need to be clever: your town in plain words, the jobs you do, your reviews and your number.

Two honest routes. Build it yourself over a weekend on one of the cheap site builders, genuinely fine; a plain page that says the right things beats a pretty one. Or we build it: £500, then £25 a month, with three months of Kwotly Pro included.

Same job, different currency: your Sunday plus roughly £10–£20 a month for the builder and the domain, or £500 and £25 a month. The page matters, not who typed it.

Whoever gets a real price in front of the customer first usually gets the job. Not the cheapest: the first.

Trouble is you’re under a wardrobe when the enquiry lands. Hours later you’re back in the van and she’s booked somebody else.

That’s the bit Kwotly does. An enquiry comes in through your own quote page already priced up from the customer’s list or photos, at your rates. Enquiry in, priced quote out, you press send. Put that link everywhere the other eight send people: your Facebook bio, your Google listing, the back doors.

Small confession: it gets the list right most of the time. When it misses the chest freezer in the garage, you fix it in two taps before it goes out. You’re always the one pressing send. Free plan, no card: ten quotes a month, then £39 a month if you want more.