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Say what you turn down. It is the only thing that makes the rest believable.

Published 2026-08-21 7 min read

The short answer

A list of everything makes nothing believable. The strongest page in your trade is the one that names what you turn down, including the legal line where your work stops, which is a different number in every state.

Read your own services page the way a stranger reads it. Carpentry, plumbing, electrical, tiling, painting, roof repairs, gutters, fence panels, furniture assembly, odd jobs, and much more. You know what that list means: twenty years of actually doing all of it, and a van that has everything in it. He does not know that. What he reads is a man who does not have a trade, and he reads it in about four seconds.

This is the peculiar problem of your business and it is the opposite of everybody else’s. A roofer has one thing to explain and the difficulty is standing out. You have thirty things to explain and the difficulty is being believed at all. Every item you add to the list makes every other item slightly less credible, which means the page gets worse the longer you work on it.

Limits are the only credible form of range

There is one move that fixes this, and almost nobody in the trade makes it, because it feels like turning down work in public: say what you do not do.

“I do not touch gas. I do not do roofs above single story. I do not rewire — I will change a fixture and I will tell you when you need an electrician.” Read that as the customer and something happens that no amount of list-lengthening achieves: the things he DOES claim suddenly become facts rather than advertising. A man who will name the edge of his competence is telling you where the middle is.

The short list with a stated limit is the credible one. The limit is what makes the rest believable.

The hardest limit is not a matter of taste

Underneath the question of what you are good at sits a question of what you are allowed to do, and this one has an actual answer written in law. Most states set a value below which small work needs no contractor license, and above which it does. California puts it in Business and Professions Code section 7048, and the two conditions attached to it are worth knowing whatever state you are in, because the same logic shows up everywhere.

The first: the exemption does not apply if the small job is part of a larger project. The state’s own example is a three hundred dollar flooring piece inside a six thousand dollar kitchen remodel — the small number does not save you, because the project is what counts. The second: jobs cannot be broken into hourly fees to get under the line. Both of those exist because both of those were tried.

The dollar figure itself is left out of this piece on purpose. California’s own board carries two: its Building Official guide cites section 7048 at less than $500, while a 2024 board press release announces an increase to $1,000 from January 2025. When the regulator’s own site disagrees with itself, an article that picks one number is guessing — and your state’s number is different again. Look yours up, today, and put the date you checked it beside it.

That paragraph is the whole opportunity in one place. Your competitors are not going to look this up. A page that states the limit, states what happens above it, and says when checked is doing something no list of services can do: it proves you run a business rather than a van.

What the page should actually contain

The five sections, and the reason for each. Our own reasoning, from what makes a broad trade believable.
Section	Why
The four or five jobs you genuinely do every week — with a real price or a real range on each	Specific beats broad. A price beats a promise. Four believable items outperform thirty unbelievable ones.
What you do not do, in your own words	It converts the rest of the page from claims into facts, and it saves you the calls you were going to turn down anyway.
The legal limit where you work, with the date you checked it	Nobody local has this. It reads as competence, and it protects you from the job that quietly grows past the line.
The half-day and full-day rate, plainly	Your actual product is a block of time, not a task. Pricing it as time is honest and it stops the negotiation before it starts.
What a good list from a customer looks like	Your best jobs are the ones where somebody saved up eight small things. Teach them to do that and your day becomes profitable instead of fragmented.

The two blocks to copy — the limits, and the list that turns a scattered day into a good one

The limits block, headed plainly: “What I do not do” — then three or four lines in your own voice: “No gas. No rewiring — I will change a fixture or a socket face and tell you honestly when you need an electrician. Nothing above [one story] outside. No jobs where a permit is needed, and I will tell you when that is the case.”
The legal line, with a date: “Where I work, jobs under [amount] do not require a contractor license. I checked that on [date] with [state board]. Above that, or if the job needs a permit, you want somebody licensed — and I will say so rather than take it on.”
The time price, stated: “A half day is [amount], a full day is [amount], and that includes [travel / one trip to the supplier / disposal of what we take out]. Materials at cost, receipts with the invoice.”
The list invitation — the one that fixes your worst days: “The best way to use me is to keep a list. Most people save up eight or ten small things — the door that sticks, the shelf, the dripping tap, the smoke alarm nobody can reach — and I do them in one visit. That costs you less than four separate service calls and it is a much better day for me too.”
The one-line close: “Send the list as a text with photos. I will tell you which ones are mine, which ones are not, and how long the rest will take.”

Look at the last line, because it does something the whole piece has been building toward. “Which ones are not mine” is a promise to turn work away, made in writing, before he has spent anything. That sentence is worth more than the thirty-item list it replaces, and it costs you nothing but the jobs you were going to regret.

Why the saved-up list matters more than it sounds

The economics of your trade are decided by travel, not by skill. Four separate half-hour jobs in four houses is a bad day; twelve jobs in one house is a good one. But customers do not know they are allowed to save things up — they think a list is an imposition, so they call about the one urgent thing and live with the other nine.

Telling them, in writing, that the list is what you want is the cheapest change available to you. It costs a paragraph, it raises the average job, and it makes you the person who handles the whole house instead of the person who fixed one door once.