Marketing Strategy
Understand where money is being spent and what actually creates customers.
The problem
Most owners have five vendors, four dashboards and no single answer to: what did this month's spend actually produce?
What we do
We rebuild the marketing economics from job value backwards, then decide what to keep, cut and scale.
How it runs
- 01
Full spend inventory across every vendor
- 02
Unit economics by service line
- 03
Channel contribution modeling
- 04
Kill / keep / scale decisions
- 05
Quarterly operating rhythm
Deliverable
One-page acquisition model
Cadence
Monthly review, quarterly reset
Primary metric
Cost per booked job
Most home improvement companies do not have a marketing problem. They have five vendors, four dashboards, three definitions of the word 'lead', and no single number that answers what last month's spend produced.
Strategy here means arithmetic before creativity. Start at average job value and gross margin, work backwards through close rate, estimate rate and inquiry rate, and the budget conversation resolves itself in an afternoon.
The output is not a deck. It is a one-page acquisition model your team can argue with, plus explicit kill, keep and scale decisions with dates attached.
You probably need this if…
- Different vendors take credit for the same customer
- Spend is set by last year's number plus a percentage
- No one knows cost per booked job by service line
- Seasonality is handled by panic, not by plan
- Sales and marketing disagree about lead quality with no shared data
- Every new tactic gets added; nothing ever gets removed
Full spend inventory
Every dollar across every vendor, platform, directory, sponsorship and subscription — including the ones nobody has reviewed in two years.
Unit economics by service line
Job value, gross margin, close rate and cycle length per line, so budget follows margin rather than volume.
Acquisition model
A single page that turns spend into inquiries, estimates, jobs and revenue with your real conversion rates and a sensitivity view.
Kill / keep / scale plan
Explicit decisions with owners and dates, including what gets cut this quarter to fund what gets scaled.
Seasonality plan
Where to build pipeline ahead of the season and where to protect margin during it, mapped to your capacity rather than the calendar.
Operating rhythm
A monthly read-out and a quarterly reset with a fixed agenda, so decisions happen on a schedule instead of after a bad week.
- DiscoveryWeeks 1–2
Spend inventory, CRM extract, interviews with sales and operations.
- ModelWeek 3
Unit economics and acquisition model built and pressure-tested with the owner.
- DecisionsWeek 4
Kill / keep / scale session; budget reallocated with owners and dates.
- InstallWeeks 5–8
Reporting, definitions and the monthly cadence put in place.
- OperateQuarterly
Reset against actuals, capacity and season.
Instead of
Budgeting as a percentage of revenue
Do this
Budgeting from cost per booked job and capacity
Instead of
Comparing channels on cost per lead
Do this
Comparing on cost per booked job and margin contribution
Instead of
Adding channels to fix a conversion problem
Do this
Fixing the multiplier before buying more traffic
Instead of
Cutting all spend in the slow season
Do this
Shifting to pipeline-building work when auction costs fall
How we judge it
- Cost per booked job, overall and by channel
- Marketing contribution margin by service line
- Pipeline coverage against crew capacity
- Spend concentration risk across vendors
- Forecast accuracy month over month
- What if our CRM data is a mess?
- It usually is. We work from what exists, note the confidence level on each number, and fix the two or three data gaps that actually change decisions rather than boiling the ocean.
- Do you require us to cut vendors?
- No. We make the economics visible and recommend. Plenty of vendors survive the review — the ones that do not typically fail it on their own numbers.
- How much should a home improvement company spend?
- There is no universal percentage. The honest answer comes from your close rate, job value and crew capacity, which is exactly what the model produces.