A 30-minute weekly short-video routine for trades businesses

The principle: capture daily, publish weekly

Crews are busy, and asking them to edit is how most video plans die. So split the work:

• On site (crew): capture short raw clips at four moments in the job. No editing, no posting.
• In the office (one person, once a week): pick the strongest clips, trim, add captions, schedule.
• Monthly (owner): look at the numbers for 15 minutes and decide what to make more of.

Step 1: The four capture moments

Ask each crew lead to capture these on every suitable job. Each takes under two minutes.

1. The arrival: a five-second wide shot of the work area as you found it.
2. The problem: a close-up of what's wrong. Rot, a leak, a cracked paver, a scorched breaker.
3. The key step: the most satisfying moment of the job. A cut, a pour, a reveal, a final coat.
4. The finish: the same angle as the arrival shot, now done and tidy.

Before each clip, the crew lead does a quick frame check for house numbers, faces, plates and personal items. The photo consent guide covers this in more detail, and consent should already be logged in the job notes.

Step 2: Get the clips to the office

The simplest system wins. A shared folder in whatever cloud storage you already use, with one subfolder per week. Crews upload at the end of the day, ideally on Wi-Fi to save data.

Name files as Town – Job type – Moment, for example "Moncton – fence – finish". Thirty seconds of naming saves twenty minutes of searching on Friday.

Step 3: The 30-minute office block

Book the same half-hour every week. Here's how it breaks down:

Captions on screen matter because most people watch short video with the sound off. Keep each caption to a few words: "Rotten sill plate", "New pressure-treated plate", "Done in a day".

Step 4: Caption formulas that work for trades

You don't need to be clever. These formulas cover most posts. Replace the brackets with your details.

• The fix: "[Problem] in [Town]. Here's what we found and how we fixed it."
• The question: "Ever wondered why [common issue] happens? Here's the [Trade] answer in 20 seconds."
• The process: "How a [Job type] goes from [start state] to [end state] in one day."
• The local: "Another [Job type] done in [Neighbourhood]. Swipe for the before."
• The tip: "One thing to check before you hire a [Trade]: [tip]."

Finish with a simple line telling people how to reach you, such as "Call or text for a quote in [Service area]."

A worked four-week calendar

Here's what a month looks like for a small painting company posting three times a week. Your trade will differ, but the rhythm transfers.

Notice that a quarter of the posts aren't finished jobs. Tips, explainers and behind-the-scenes clips fill gaps and show expertise.

Step 5: Track what matters

Once a month, spend 15 minutes on a simple sheet with one row per post:

• date and platform
• job type
• format (fix, question, process, local, tip)
• average watch time or percentage watched
• saves and shares
• messages or calls that mentioned it

After two or three months, patterns appear. Perhaps "the fix" format beats "the tip" by a mile, or deck content outperforms interiors. Make more of whatever wins.

A worked example of the maths

Suppose you post 12 clips a month. Over three months that's 36 posts. If four of them led to a message that turned into a quote, and one of those quotes became a $6,000 job, you have a real number to judge against the time spent: roughly two hours a month in the office plus a few minutes per job on site. That's the kind of honest arithmetic that tells you whether to continue, change formats, or put a few standout clips behind paid social.

Seasonal adjustments across Canada

Canada's climate shapes what you can film. Outdoor trades in the Prairies, the North and much of Atlantic Canada have a compressed season, so bank extra footage in summer and autumn to post through winter. Coastal BC trades contend with rain more than snow, so plan around grey light. Interior trades often get busier in winter, which is when to show basements, kitchens and bathrooms.

Each region page on this site has notes on seasonality and local rules that affect posting, such as Quebec's French-language requirements.

Common mistakes

• Waiting for the perfect job. Ordinary jobs, filmed consistently, beat one spectacular job filmed once.
• Filming horizontally. Turn the phone upright.
• Letting crews post from personal accounts. Keep everything under the company page.
• Skipping the frame check. One licence plate in a viral clip is one too many.
• Changing everything after one bad week. Judge formats over months, not days.

When to get help

If the routine slips during busy season, which it often does, that's usually when an outside hand helps most. A platform playbook can tighten the plan for in-house teams, or we can run the editing and publishing for you. Call, text or email and send us a few raw clips; we'll tell you honestly what we'd do with them.