On this page
Not everything here is live yet. The design is approved and being built in phases. Until the cutover lands (phase 3 below), calls still ring the old way. Section 9 tracks what's live — this page is the contract for where we're going.
Why this exists
Every lead channel we have — website forms, Facebook lead ads, Messenger, email — lands in GoHighLevel automatically, with a timestamp and a paper trail. Phone calls were the one exception. Inbound calls went straight to a personal cell; outbound calls left no record at all. No timestamps, no recordings, no way to know how fast we responded or what was said.
That's a bad place for a company whose average job is $5,000–$15,000 and whose leads often start with a phone call. So we're moving the phones into GHL — the place the rest of the lead's story already lives.
What changes for you
Nothing about how you talk to customers — everything about where it happens. Calls ring you in the GHL app instead of a bare phone line, you dial leads from the contact card instead of a personal phone, and the grade you give each lead becomes real data. Your phone work becomes visible and provable.
One number to remember: 855-55-CRAWL (855-552-7295) is still the only number we publish — on the website, Google Business Profile, everywhere. That doesn't change.
The call journey
Here's a customer call, start to finish, once the system is live:
Caller dials 855-55-CRAWL
The only number we publish. Grasshopper still owns it.
Forwarded to GHL
Grasshopper hands every call straight to our GHL main line.
The team rings
Ashley first (~25 seconds), then Donny (~20 seconds), then voicemail.
Everything lands on the contact
Recording, transcript, timestamps, and your note — all on the lead's timeline.
If nobody answers, the caller gets voicemail and an instant text, so no missed call goes silent. After hours, the system answers with a text instead of ringing anyone — details in section 4.
Business hours & the ring order
Business hours: Monday–Friday, 8:00am–6:00pm ET
During these hours a human answers. Outside them, the after-hours flow takes over automatically.
The ring order
| Order | Who | How long | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| First | Ashley — GHL app or desktop | ~25 seconds | You're the primary. Answer in the GHL app so the call logs to the contact. |
| Then | Donny's cell | ~20 seconds | He hears a whisper — "Crawl Daddy main line" — before connecting, so he knows it's a business call. |
| Last | Voicemail + instant text-back | — | The caller is never left hanging. |
The missed-call text
If a call exhausts the ring order, this text fires immediately — before anyone has done anything:
Check the text thread before calling back. The caller may have already replied with their name and the problem — walking into the callback knowing that beats "hi, someone called from this number?"
After hours & emergencies
Nights and weekends, nobody's phone rings. The caller hears a short voicemail greeting, and at the same moment this text goes out:
EMERGENCY means now. A reply containing EMERGENCY (or "flood" / "water") wakes the system up: it notifies Donny first, and escalates to Caleb if Donny doesn't respond. Someone with water pouring into their basement at 11pm gets a human — that's how we honor the 24/7 water-response promise on the website without staffing a night shift.
Everything that comes in overnight — voicemails, texts, form leads — lands in the morning queue. The SLA for overnight leads: first human touch by 8:30am. Start the day there, before anything else.
Speed-to-lead: the 5-minute rule
Speed to first contact is the single biggest thing we control about whether a lead becomes a job. A homeowner with water in their crawl space is calling our competitors too — the first company that sounds alive usually wins. So we hold ourselves to a real number and measure it.
| Term | What it means | Target |
|---|---|---|
| First response | First outbound event of any kind — including the auto-texts above | Instant (automated) |
| First human touch | First call attempt or manual text by a person — this is the SLA metric | Within 5 minutes, business hours |
| Overnight leads | Anything that arrived after hours | First human touch by 8:30am |
How it's enforced (gently)
- The system stamps the moment of the first human touch on every lead — no self-reporting.
- A new lead untouched at 5 minutes pings Ashley in Slack. Still untouched at 15 minutes, it escalates to the main channel.
- The dashboard tracks median and worst-case response time by week.
The alert is a safety net, not a gotcha. On a busy morning it's easy to lose track of a form lead that arrived while you were on a call. The ping exists so the lead doesn't pay for that.
Outbound calls
Every lead call goes out through GHL — open the contact, hit the phone button, talk. The call is logged, recorded, and timestamped on the contact automatically. The number the customer sees is our local Atlanta line: local numbers get answered far more often than toll-free, and if they call it back, it rings the normal ring order.
- Call from the GHL contact card — app or desktop
- Check the text thread before calling a missed call back
- Set the grade and drop the note right after you hang up
- Quote website price ranges; let the free inspection set the exact number
- Dial a lead from a personal cell — the call vanishes from the record
- Skip the note because "the recording has it"
- Announce "this call is being recorded" — not needed in Georgia
- Promise a firm price over the phone
Donny's day-to-day doesn't change in version one — he answers the fallback ring, and Ashley logs outcomes he relays. Getting his outbound calls into GHL is a later, optional upgrade.
Recording & notes
Calls are recorded, with no announcement. Georgia is a one-party-consent state and the business is a party to the call, so no robotic notice is required — calls stay natural. Recordings and transcripts attach to the contact automatically. (If we expand into Florida, this gets revisited — Florida requires all parties to consent.)
The rule that survives everything
Every touch gets a note. The recording supplements your note — it never replaces it. A recording is ten minutes of audio; your note is the three lines Donny reads before deciding where to spend his afternoon. The note template and qualification sheet live in the Onboarding guide, section 3 — and it's becoming a one-click snippet in GHL so you never have to paste it again.
Lead grading
The Hot / Warm / Cold grading from the onboarding guide stops being note prose and becomes a real field on the contact: lead_grade, set by you at the first real conversation. The moment you set it gets stamped automatically.
| Grade | Means | Your move |
|---|---|---|
| Hot | Active symptom (water in the crawl space now, visible structural movement), owner, in-area, wants someone out ASAP | Get the inspection booked on THIS call if you can |
| Warm | Real problem, but flexible timing or comparing quotes | Book the inspection, set a follow-up |
| Cold | Out of area, renter with no owner buy-in, pure price-shopper, DIY researcher | Be polite, note it, don't over-invest |
Why your grade matters more than you'd think
- It steers the ad money. Your grades feed back into our Facebook ad optimization — when you grade leads Cold, the ad system literally learns to stop finding us more people like that. Your judgment trains the machine. (In July we burned real budget on junk leads precisely because this signal didn't exist yet.)
- It shows on the dashboard. Grade mix by source means a bad batch of leads is visible in a day, not discovered in a month-end postmortem.
- It sets follow-up priority. Hot leads get tighter follow-up; Cold ones don't eat your afternoon.
There's no algorithm scoring leads here on purpose — at our volume, your judgment is the model. The system's only job is making it fast to record and impossible to lose.
Under the hood + build status
The architecture in one paragraph
Grasshopper keeps owning 855-55-CRAWL; we only change where it forwards — from a personal cell to the GHL main line. That's one setting, and it's the whole cutover. GHL then handles ringing, voicemail, texts, recording, and logging. Nothing is ported, no new software is bought, and the vanity number never moves.
The safety net
Rollback is one setting, about one minute, zero data loss: point Grasshopper forwarding back where it was. If anything misbehaves on cutover day, we're back to the old world before anyone notices.
What deliberately doesn't change
- 855-55-CRAWL stays the only published number, everywhere, still Grasshopper-owned.
- The tracking numbers on the paid landing page keep working exactly as they do today (they get rewired last, carefully, behind their own tests).
- Qualified Lead → Jobber handoff, pipeline stages, and ad tracking — untouched.
- Donny's phone habits — no forced change.
Costs
No new subscriptions. GHL phone usage runs pennies per minute and per text — single-digit dollars a month at our call volume. Grasshopper stays at its current cost as the number owner.
Build status
| Phase | What | Status |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | System design + review (BJG-233) | Done · approved 7/10 |
| 2 | GHL main line, ring order, hours calendar, whisper (BJG-234) | Up next |
| 3 | The cutover — 855 forwarding flips to GHL (BJG-237) | Queued |
| 4 | Missed-call text-back, after-hours texts, EMERGENCY escalation (BJG-238) | Queued |
| 5 | Recording + transcripts on the contact (BJG-239) | Queued |
| 6 | Grade fields, note snippet, onboarding-guide updates (BJG-235) | Queued |
| 7 | Speed-to-lead stamping + Slack SLA alerts (BJG-236) | Queued |
| 8 | Dashboard tiles: response time, calls, grade mix (BJG-240) | Queued |
| 9 | Paid-LP tracking numbers rewired to the native ring flow (BJG-241) | Queued |
What we said no to, on purpose: porting the 855 out of Grasshopper (one-way door for little gain), CallRail or any new call-tracking service, Meta's WhatsApp AI messaging, and algorithmic lead scoring.
Golden rules
- Five minutes. A new lead during business hours gets a human call or text within five minutes. Overnight leads by 8:30am. Speed is the job.
- Every touch gets a note. The recording supplements the note; it never replaces it.
- Grade every lead at the first real conversation. Hot, Warm, or Cold — on the contact, before you move on. Your grade steers real ad dollars.
- Lead calls only through GHL. If it didn't happen in GHL, it didn't happen.
- EMERGENCY means now. An after-hours emergency text gets a human on the phone ASAP — Donny first, Caleb as backup.
- Check the text thread before calling back. The auto-text may have already started the conversation for you.