How can a business stay busy, keep buying leads, and still feel short on cash?
Some owners call it a growth problem. We call it a gap.
A reason to choose you before price decides
Nobody gives you the one thing your customers praise you for.
The number that tells you whether you can afford the next customer
Nobody shows you your acquisition recovery time, the days it takes to recover what you spent acquiring and serving a new customer.
The follow-up your office can run without us
Nobody finishes the follow-up and leaves your people able to run it.
Solving the gap has three parts
Two of the three win customers and bring them back. The third tells you whether you can afford to keep doing it.
They stop comparing prices and start comparing companies
Open your website next to your three nearest competitors'. Best service. Great prices. Licensed and insured. Nothing on any of the four tells them apart, so the customer does the only thing left and asks all four what it costs. We find the one thing your own customers love about you, in their words, and put it where everyone can see it.
You stop guessing whether the month was any good
One page a month, built from your own figures. The days it took to recover what you spent getting and serving a customer, and where you can improve it so you can reinvest faster. And the things to leave alone, because working on it would change nothing.
Every proposal gets contacted, and nobody has to make the call
A quote goes out Tuesday. It used to go quiet, because nobody enjoys making the did-you-decide-yet call, and by Thursday it was a job you had already paid to get and would never hear about again. Now somebody in your office reads four sentences on a screen, changes a word and presses send. It takes a minute.
Your industry
Six kinds of business, and the same three pieces missing in all of them. Only the word for the thing that goes quiet changes: the estimate, the proposal, the regular who stops coming, the trial, the appointment, the inquiry. Find yours.
The estimate that went out and never came back.
In home services the work is won and lost on the estimate. It goes out on Monday, nothing comes back by Friday, and whether anybody chases it depends on who remembers. Meanwhile the ad spend keeps buying more of the same calls.
We count what unchased estimates are worth against what you spend to get the calls in the first place. Then every estimate is followed up from automatically, day after day, instead of depending on someone to remember.
The inquiry call that goes to voicemail because everybody is busy.
In professional services the first call is rarely the sale. It's a question, and the answer needs somebody's time. So the prospect waits, then the proposal goes out later, but in the meantime, the prospect got ahold of a competitor who picked up the phone.
We count how long a proposal sits before anybody on your team follows up on it, and what each day costs you. Then we build the system so the answer goes out the same day from your own business, without you having to pick up the phone.
A full book this month says nothing about next month.
Personal services live on repeat business, and the customer who doesn't come back might just as easily go elsewhere. Nothing on the calendar says a regular has gone. But by the time the month looks thin, chances are they've been going elsewhere for three months or more.
We count how many days it takes to earn back what a customer cost you, so a regular who stops coming shows up in your radar after just weeks instead of months. Then the message that invites them back goes out automatically, and gets them back on your calendar.
Most of the people who ask never become members.
Fitness gets plenty of hands in the air. Somebody books a trial, asks about a class, walks in once. Whether they come back is decided in the next week or two, and most of that decision happens without anybody from the business saying a word to them.
We count what it costs you to sign a member and how many months of dues it takes before that member has paid you back, so a trial that goes quiet reaches you while it's still worth something. Then the follow-up that turns a trial into a member goes out on its own, and the one that keeps a new member coming through the first months goes with it.
The appointment nobody confirmed, and the chair sat empty.
In health services the cost of an empty slot is the whole hour, and more often than not, the client knew their slot was going to be empty several days before the appointment time. The reminder that would have saved it or rescheduled it depends on somebody in your office having time to send it.
We count what the empty slots cost you in a month, and where in the booking the appointment goes quiet. Then the confirmation and the reminders go out on their own, without anybody needing to make the time.
Enrollment is a season, and the inquiry arrives out of season.
Educational services get asked in March about a class that starts in September. The inquiry is real and the answer is months away, so it sits, and by the time it's relevant, the family has chosen somewhere that kept talking to them.
We count how long the money you spend reaching a family sits there before enrollment pays it back. Then the follow-up that holds the conversation open from March to September goes out automatically, and your people don't have to worry about it.
We've spent more than 30 years marketing local service businesses. For 14 of those years we ran the agency and billed several hundred owners by the month. Across the team, we have over 100 years of combined experience in this market, online and offline.
We know exactly what that monthly bill buys, because we're the ones sending it. We also know what you're left with once the billing stops.
Stop renting your core marketing. OWN IT.
The Cornerstone is one complete 120-day installation with three connected parts.
Once you set this stone, everything else gets squared off it. And then you build.
Each part solves a different cause of the same gap. Together, they prepare the business to support growth instead of simply buying more leads.
We build all three, teach your people to run them, and leave. You pay for one completed installation, not three separate services or a marketing relationship that has to continue forever.
What owners say
It was the first time everything, ads, posts, even calls, felt like it was saying the same thing. That's when I knew this was different.
The shift happened when everything started lining up. The messaging in the ads matched what people saw on Instagram, which matched what my team was saying on the phone. And you could feel it in the calls. People weren't asking basic questions anymore, they were already halfway sold.
I kept waiting for the catch. When am I supposed to sit down and manage all of this? But it never came. I spend maybe an hour a month reviewing things, and everything else just runs.
Start with 15 minutes
First we check whether your area is still open, because we only build this for one business per zone. Then a few questions about how your business runs.
On the same call we work the math through on one example, and then answer your questions.
If it's worth going further, we schedule a time to go through last month's figures with you and show you what they reveal.