iTrade Marketing
- Sep 9, 2021
- 5 min read

Set Up Your Business Systems with iTrade

Handy Manners: A Handy Man with a Mission

"Everything is in the cloud. There is no single feature and if I wanted a single feature product I would still be using Excel sheets. It's the integration that makes it special."

- Leonard Bloksberg,

Founder and Original Handy Man, Handy Manners

The Business: An Introduction

Handy Manners. Your "one call to fix it all" home handyman service.

This tagline sums up Handy Manners nicely. Founder, director, and original handyman Leonard Bloksberg, started his business in November 2018, and it has continued to grow from a one-person operation to having teams out on the road, managing numerous sized projects ranging a wide set of client needs.

Straight up, Leonard is not your average tradie, nor is his business your average handyman operation. Its variety of jobs, skills required, and staff poses a unique challenge in itself and is one of the reasons Leonard turned to iTrade.

We manage a very large number of small jobs with a multi-team staff

A lot of competitions will not touch the ‘smaller’ below 10k or 40k jobs.

Working in this gap, Handy Manners “manage a lot of small end, high volume projects.” And they do it with courtesy and a commitment to customer service. “No cowboys or ruffians, just a bunch of guys who really enjoy fixing stuff and solving problems for you.”

These gentlemen of property maintenance will clean, fix, build, repair, mow trim, and more!

Their promise to their clients:

Good Price, good Quality, but best value. We won’t up-sell you to a gold-plated solution you don’t need and we won’t leave you with a “she’ll be right” patch that falls apart next week. We deliver a good quality job that will last, at a reasonable price.

We enjoyed chatting with Leonard and getting to know more about the driving force behind his business, a social enterprise focussing not only on making its client's lives easier by providing a one-stop-home-service shop but also by giving providing a lifeline to those in the community who need it.

Through support and hard work, the team provides a top-quality service, which Leonard attributes to taking care of his people, so they can take care of their clients.

The Heart and Soul: Leonard’s Mission

Leonard has built an incredibly unique and inspiring trades business. Its major point of difference is that it focuses on taking care of people. The social mission is to hire those who “no one else wants to hire and help them back into the workforce.”

This could include individuals who are homeless, solo Dads, people facing redundancy due to a lack of available work in their chosen industry, and many more who are looking to do good work, want to work, and have useful skills.

It’s therefore Leonard’s role to find, offer work to, and support to these people so that they can perform at their best. And out of it, a reliable, conscious, and top-quality service business has been born.

It’s been a real blessing to have this company and build it into something good.

His philosophy is, and will continue to be:

Treat staff with dignity and good pay. It’s amazing what can be achieved by looking after people.

To summarise the good his business and his work does for the community is this quote from Leonard:

So far I've hired 27 people and from that I have 17 stories of major life improvements from the experience of working with me. We are delivering quality service and most of our business comes from returns and referrals, and we are giving people dignity.

Leonard’s goal with Handy Manners is to scale it into something large. Therefore he needs systems to grow this. As he says: ‘hence iTrade’.

iTrade feels privileged to be involved in this journey, and that our systems help free up administrative time so that Leonard can really focus on the task of helping his people.

The Problem: A complex schedule needs a smart system:

A growing business needs systems. Simply put, the more a team or business expands, the more growing pains it will face if there aren’t ways to effectively manage and communicate between all of the moving parts. Whether it's team members on the roads, jobs coming in, quotes going out, or invoicing to wrap up client work, these are all part of a complex network that makes a trades business tick.

With Leonard’s success in building up his business so far, as well as his goals to expand, the first thing that needed to be established was his systems.

I have systems for doing things. How do you cut time without cutting corners? Systems. Teaching the team systems gets things done more efficiently.

We couldn’t agree more. That is why iTrade offers a range of features that are designed for tradespeople and businesses in the trades because we understand what needs to be tracked and managed in this type of work.

From timesheets to materials management, quoting to invoicing, these systems which often require a lot of administrative time to keep on top of, are all including in our job management software. Cloud-based technology allows it to be accessed anytime, from anywhere, giving teams and business owners so much more freedom from carrying out these processes manually.

For Leonard, this is extremely effective in terms of having his systems run on auto-pilot. The most useful feature he finds is:

Cloud-based integration of my pipeline. I set things in motion and sit back and let the work roll in.

Handy Manners has not only established simple, hassle-free systems for job management, but by integrating iTrade, the business has seen growth that would not have been possible otherwise. This is the kind of news we love to hear and share.

As my number of teams and jobs grow, iTrade makes it easy to manage. I get economy of scale.

I couldn't do this without iTrade or something like it.

The Solution: Cloud-based systems that grow teams and dreams.

When asked what the most beneficial features of the iTrade job management software were for Leonard and his team at Handy Manners, his response included the following:

A cloud-based server allowed me to hire an admin assistant. Files are shared allowing easy remote working.
I’m finding that being able to write quotes efficiently is hugely helpful. Being able to send them out in a uniform and efficient way also absolutely helpful.
Partial payments and tracking is so easy. Really brilliant. Guys can pick up jobs on the road from their phones. It allows for remote work and flexibility.
iTrade is available on different phones. Samsung, iPhone is great. It means the team doesn’t have to come to base to get a printout.

By allowing his business to operate on auto-pilot while using a program he trusts, Leonard and the team have increased their valuable time to pursue good work and an admirable social mission.

The solutions iTrade offers to trades businesses are infinite. With so many ways to mix and match features, the software is customisable and constantly changing to better suit our clients. The introduction of our Xero add-on, plus training options are just a few ways in which we aim to further assist our customers to settle into using the software.

Our customer service and support team is always looking to take on feedback from our clients, and this helps us grow our programs, features, and deliver what YOU as a tradesperson and small business owner needs.

Final Thoughts:

We asked Leonard what advice would you give a business looking for a new Job Management system?

His answer:

Use iTrade.

Simple. Succinct. And we have to say, we’re inclined to agree!

Thank you to Leonard from Handy Manners for taking the time to speak with us. He has shared valuable feedback and experience on using the iTrade system. We hope to help his business, and businesses like his to grow, develop, declutter, and simplify.