Phone & SMS Readiness for Contractors

Who This Is For

Any contractor business considering automated text reminders, missed-call text-back, review requests by SMS, or marketing calls -- whether you build this yourself or a vendor builds it for you. This is education, not legal advice; a licensed attorney should review your specific consent flow.

The Underlying Problem

SMS and auto-dialed calls are effective specifically because they're fast and hard to ignore -- which is exactly why federal law treats them differently from email. The TCPA requires prior express written consent before an automated or prerecorded marketing call or text reaches a consumer. This isn't a checkbox you add after the fact; it has to exist before the first message goes out.

What Changed in 2025

The FCC's one-to-one consent rule, effective January 2025, closed what regulators called the "lead generation loophole": a single consent can no longer be shared or sold across multiple unrelated businesses. Each sender now needs its own, specific consent from each consumer.

Separately, the FCC's expanded opt-out rules (effective April 11, 2025) require businesses to honor a consent revocation made through any reasonable method -- not just a "STOP" reply -- including a phone call, email, website form, or in-person request, generally within 10 business days.

A Practical Readiness Checklist

• Do you have a specific, documented consent record for SMS/calls -- separate from a general contact form submission?
• Is your consent language specific to your business, not shared with any other company or lead source?
• Can a customer revoke consent through more than just a reply keyword, and does your process act on it within days, not weeks?
• Do you have a documented quiet-hours policy (no marketing calls/texts outside reasonable hours)?
• Is there a frequency limit so the same customer isn't contacted repeatedly in a short window?
• Do you know who is legally the "sender" if you use a third-party CRM or marketing platform?

Where the Real Cost Shows Up

Enforcement isn't theoretical: the FCC has both revoked call-routing certifications for hundreds of providers and issued fines exceeding $200 million in a single year for robocall-rule violations. The exposure for a small business is usually private litigation risk under the TCPA's statutory damages, not an FCC fine directly -- but the underlying consent failures are the same ones the FCC is actively enforcing against at the carrier level.

Limitations

This page explains the general federal framework as of the sources cited below. State-level rules can add additional requirements. It does not cover every scenario (e.g. purely informational/transactional texts have different rules than marketing texts) and is not a substitute for legal review of your specific consent flow.

Sources

• FCC, One-to-One Consent Rule (effective Apr 11, 2025)
• FCC, guidance on consent-revocation methods (Sept 2024)
• Federal Register, Strengthening the Ability of Consumers to Stop Robocalls (Mar 2024)