Not every business needs what I build. Here’s how to tell.

I’ll talk myself out of work here, because it saves us both a meeting.

Some businesses should not buy anything complicated from me. A cheap off-the-shelf phone tool will serve them fine, and I’d rather say so than sell somebody a thing they’ll cancel in four months.

There’s one test that sorts it.

The test

When somebody calls you, is the right answer the same for everyone — or does it depend on which customer it is?

That’s it. Sit with it for a second, because most people answer it wrong on the first try.

If the answer is the same for everybody

You run a shop. People call and ask what you charge for a thing, when you’re open, and whether you can do it Thursday. The answer to “how much is an oil change” is the same whether it’s me asking or my neighbor.

If that’s you, you need something to pick up, say the right price, take the job down, and text it to you. That’s a solved problem. Plenty of tools do it and they don’t cost much. Buy one of those. You don’t need me building you anything custom, and if I tried to, you’d be paying for machinery you’d never use.

The only thing I’d watch is whether the price on the tool’s answer is actually your current price. Most of them get it by reading your website, and your website is probably out of date. Check it once a month.

If the answer depends on who’s calling

Now it’s a different business entirely.

Somebody calls about a late fee. The answer is on the third for one tenant and the fifth for another, because they signed different leases. Somebody calls about a dog. One lease says fine, one says no. Somebody calls about whether the tow is covered — that’s the policy they bought, not the policy you sell.

There is no general answer to give. There’s only a lookup, and if the thing answering your phone can’t do a lookup, it will do the next best thing available to it: guess, confidently, in your name, to your customer.

That’s when it’s worth building properly. Not because the phone part is harder — because the knowing part is.

Who’s usually in the second group

In my experience it’s businesses where a signed piece of paper differs per customer:

• Property management, once you’re past a few dozen doors
• Self-storage and equipment rental, where the unit and the terms vary
• Independent insurance, where every policy is its own set of facts

And who’s usually in the first group: most trades, most shops, most restaurants. One price list, one set of hours, same answer for everybody. Genuinely simpler, and it should stay that way.

Why I’m telling you this

Because the fastest way to waste a year is to sell the complicated thing to the business that needed the simple one. They pay for it, it works, and they still cancel — because they were never getting anything from the expensive half.

If you read the test and landed in the first group, take that as a free answer and go buy something small. If you landed in the second one and something is currently guessing on your behalf, that’s worth a conversation.