Turning a service department that ran on callbacks into a booked calendar.
- +25%
- 2 months
- Rev share
How this was measured
A quarter is the round number; the monthly reconciliation is not. Growth is counted on invoiced work rather than booked work, sourced to a tracked number or a channel-tagged form, and reconciled against their service management system. Maintenance agreements already in place at signing were carved out of the baseline, so renewals cannot flatter it.
Situation
At around $50M a year, Vitality is the largest firm we work with and the one with the least to prove. Licences, trucks, a twenty-year name in commercial mechanical across metro Detroit. What they did not have was a way to fill next month. Work arrived when something broke, so a strong quarter was followed by three weeks of technicians washing vans. Two previous agencies had been paid a retainer to fix it. Neither took a position on whether it worked.
Strategy
We put the bulk of our fee on the outcome rather than on the hours, and said so on the first call. An empty calendar cost us what it cost them.
The work split in two. Emergency demand already existed, so we took it: paid search against failure intent, a tracked line per channel, and a dispatcher script that stopped qualified calls dying on hold. The harder half was planned maintenance, which is where a mechanical contractor's margin actually lives. We built a quoting path for annual agreements and gave the field techs a reason to raise it at the end of a call.
The first build was a data layer. Every service request, quote view and call on the site now emits a structured event carrying the equipment type, the building type and whether the enquiry is a breakdown or a planned replacement. Before that, the ad platforms could see that something had happened and nothing about what it was worth.
That intent signal is what the campaigns are built on. An emergency no-cool call and a rooftop unit replacement are the same lead to a form and wildly different jobs to a mechanical contractor, so they are separated, budgeted and bid as separate businesses.
Identity resolution carries it into retargeting. Matching people across devices and sessions means a facilities manager who priced a replacement in March can be reached in the buying window rather than the week after, and anyone already on the books drops out of the audience instead of being paid for twice.
The loop is the point. Richer intent going into the platforms means the optimisation is chasing invoiced work rather than form fills, return on ad spend rises because the budget is aimed better, and our share is taken out of that increase — which is why the reporting is built around it.
Results
Revenue growth of +25% across 2 months, on a business doing around $50M a year. A single-digit share of tracked new revenue came to us out of that growth, which is the part of our fee that exists only if the number moves.
“Two agencies before this one sent me a report every month. These guys sent me an invoice that only went up when my revenue did. That is a completely different conversation.”
Tell us what you're trying to grow.
We'll look at your numbers and tell you honestly whether a performance deal makes sense. If it doesn't, we'll say so.