What clients make of the deal.

“I’ll be straight with you: the commercial side wasn’t worth anything at the start, and I knew it. Six weeks in I was ready to call it off. If the full bill had been due every month regardless, I’d have pulled the plug before it ever turned — and that’s not me talking tough, I’ve done exactly that to two other agencies. The only reason I let it run was that it wasn’t costing me anything it hadn’t already made. Somewhere around week eight the commercial calls started, and they were the right kind — property managers, buildings that call you back, not one-off drain clogs at eleven at night. We’re up about fifty percent and I’m not the one chasing it anymore. I still think most marketing companies are full of it. These ones just happened not to be.”

“For years we were completely at the mercy of Local Services Ads. Google would change something on their end, or somebody would outbid us, and the phone would go quiet for a week — and there was nothing I could do about it except wait it out. The paid search account they built is the first channel that’s actually mine. I can see what a booked move costs me to get, I know roughly what’s coming next week, and when I want more of it I turn it up. Nobody tells you that the predictability is the part worth paying for. I thought I was buying leads. I was buying the ability to plan.”

“We had never really done marketing. Thirty years of word of mouth and a website somebody’s nephew built that just sat there doing nothing. This was the first time we deliberately spent money to go and get work, and I’ll admit I dragged my feet on it for a long while. The new site is the whole difference. Same trucks, same guys, same phone number — people land on it now and they actually call. The only thing I’d change is the ten years I spent assuming referrals would keep being enough.”

“We doubled revenue in seven months with the same number of people, which is not what I expected to happen. I came in asking for more traffic. What I got was somebody sitting me down and telling me which products were worth advertising and which ones to stop running entirely — two of what I thought were my best sellers were losing money once you counted the ad spend against them. Nobody in four years had shown me that. The growth is nice. Knowing which half of it to feed is the part I’d pay for again.”