Almost every piece of marketing advice assumes you already have something. Reviews to leverage, past customers to email, jobs to photograph, a close rate to improve.
On day one you have none of it. Which makes the order of operations more important than the list, because doing the right things in the wrong sequence wastes the only ninety days you get to spend before the bills become urgent.
Days one to fourteen: the free foundations
Nothing here costs money and all of it compounds.
Claim and complete your Google Business Profile. This is the highest-return hour available to a new local business, and it is free. Get the primary category right first, because it is the heaviest single ranking signal on the profile, weighted at roughly a third of relevance for service-specific searches. Choose the most specific accurate one, then add every legitimate secondary category.
Fill the services section. Take the pre-defined services Google offers before writing custom ones. Testing by local SEO researchers found ranking changes appearing within 24 to 72 hours of services being added, which makes this one of the very few things you can do in week one and observe by week two.
Decide how the phone gets answered. Not a system, a decision. Roughly half of inbound calls to home services businesses never reach a person, and every one you miss as a new business is a customer you will never know you had. If you cannot answer while working, say so on the voicemail with a specific callback promise, then keep it.
Days fifteen to forty-five: manufacture proof
You have no evidence you are any good. Everything in this window exists to change that.
Photograph every job. Before and after, same angle, one wide and one close. The discipline is entirely in remembering the before, because nobody forgets the after. These become your website, your social posts, and your service pages for the next year, and they cost nothing because the work is already happening.
Ask every single customer for a review. This is the hardest and most valuable thing in the ninety days, and new owners consistently underdo it out of embarrassment.
Ask at completion, while they are pleased and remember your name. Send a direct link rather than instructions. Phrase it as a favour rather than a process. Ten reviews in your first quarter puts you ahead of a great many established competitors, and recency counts as much as volume.
Write down where every enquiry came from. Five columns: date, source, did you speak to them, did you quote, did you win. This is worth nothing in month one and a great deal by month six, and there is no way to shortcut the wait. Start it now while the volume is low enough to be easy.
Days forty-five to ninety: build what you own
Make pages for the towns that actually produced work. Not every town on your service map. The ones your invoices show. Each one carrying something true that could not be copied to another page: the actual jobs, your real response time to that area, the housing stock, a customer testimonial from someone who lives there.
Set your minimum job size and your real radius. By now you have enough jobs to see which ones lost money. A two hour job forty five minutes away is three and a half hours of your day billed as two. Decide the numbers deliberately rather than discovering them repeatedly.
Rebuild your estimate. Itemised scope, materials named, labour separate, permits and disposal called out, an exclusions list, a warranty term, and a sentence about what happens if something unexpected is found. It is the only written artifact most customers see before deciding, and for a business with no reputation yet it is doing a great deal of work.
What not to do in the first ninety days
This part matters as much as the list above.
Do not buy leads. You have no close rate, no cost per booked job, and no idea what your customers are worth. Buying shared leads before you can measure any of that is paying to compete against three other contractors while flying blind.
Do not run ads. Below roughly a thousand dollars a month a search account cannot gather enough data to optimise on, and you do not yet have the landing pages or the reviews that make clicks convert. Ads amplify what is already there. Nothing is there yet.
Do not buy a wrap. A full wrap runs $2,500 to $6,500 and commits your identity to vinyl before you know what your business looks like. Door lettering at $300 to $800 does most of the work and leaves you free to change your mind.
Do not build fifteen pages. One page that clearly says what you do, where you do it, what it costs roughly, and how to reach you, plus a handful of real photographs, beats a large site with nothing on it.
The through-line is that everything on this list amplifies. With nothing to amplify, you are paying to broadcast an empty signal.
The one exception
If you genuinely have no pipeline and need cash this month, shared lead platforms deliver work within days, and that is a legitimate reason to use them.
Just know what you are buying: short-term supply at poor economics, on somebody else's platform, where nothing you accumulate transfers when you leave. Use it to bridge, not to build, and stop when the free channels start producing.
The ninety day scorecard
Four numbers, and they are worth more than a revenue figure at this stage.
How many reviews you have. How many jobs you photographed. How many enquiries you recorded with a source attached. And whether you know your close rate.
A business ninety days old with fifteen reviews, sixty photographs, a complete profile, and a record of where its work comes from is in a genuinely strong position, regardless of what the bank balance says. One with revenue and none of those things has bought itself another ninety days of the same problem.