A card has one job: let someone reach you next week, when they've lost the card but remember your name. Everything that helps that job belongs; everything else is decoration.

The front

• Business name — big, and the name people say out loud.
• Your name — people hire people.
• What you do — three or four words: "Driveway plowing and salting." Not "property services."
• Phone number — the biggest thing on the card after your name.
• Website address — davesplowing.com.

That's a complete card. White card, black type, one accent color if you like. It will look better than 90% of the cards in the hardware store's stack.

The back

Most people leave it blank. Two better uses:

• The towns you serve. "Grand Island · Tonawanda · Kenmore · North Tonawanda." If someone's card is on a fridge in a town you don't cover, you've saved them a call.
• Hours and what happens when they call. "Mon–Sat 7–6. Leave a message, I call back same day."

A list of every service you offer also works on the back — six bullet points maximum. More than that and it stops being readable.

What to leave off

• A slogan. "Quality you can trust since 2011" adds nothing and takes the space the phone number needed.
• Fourteen services. It reads as "I'll do anything," which reads as "I'm not good at any of it."
• A QR code that points at a Facebook page. Nobody scans it, and fewer people know how than you'd think.
• Your home address, if you work from home and don't want strangers knowing where the tools are.
• Social media icons for accounts you don't maintain.
• A photo of yourself in sunglasses. A plain photo is fine; a tough-guy pose is not.
• Glossy finishes you can't write on. People write on cards.

Format details that actually matter

Size: standard 3.5 × 2 inches. Anything else won't fit in a wallet.

Type size: if your phone number is smaller than 10pt, it's too small for someone reading it in a truck cab. Bigger than you think.

Contrast: dark text on light background. Light grey on white disappears in bad light.

Material: plain matte cardstock. Cheap is fine; unreadable is not. 100 cards costs $20–$40 online and lasts a year.

The website address on the card

This is the part people get wrong most often. If your site is at fastpages.online/daves-plowing, that's a long thing to print and a longer thing to type. It works, but it's not great on a card.

A domain you own — davesplowing.com — is $10–$20 a year and is the only part of this that also helps your website, your email and your Google listing. If you're printing 500 cards, buy the domain first. See how to buy a domain name.

Print it without https:// and without www. People know what to do with davesplowing.com.

How many, and when

100 to 250 to start. You will change something — the number, the website, the service area — and cards are the least fun thing to reprint. Get 100, hand them out, and reorder when you know what's right.

Keep ten in the truck, ten in your wallet, and a box in the glove compartment. The card that matters is the one you have when someone asks.

One more thing

Hand it to people, don't leave it on counters. A card in a stack at a pizza place is a card in the trash by Thursday. A card handed to someone who just asked what you charge is a customer.