Ad spend down 62%, leads up 160%. Eighteen years and counting.
In 2008 the housing market was pulling back, and a Southern California manufacturer and installer of vinyl windows and doors was spending $160,000 a month on advertising it couldn't measure. They were hemorrhaging cash at the worst possible time. The way in was small: they were paying another company to buy their Google ads, weren't seeing results, and couldn't even find themselves in the search results. I suspected the money wasn't all going to ads, so I told them I'd set up a parallel campaign and run it side by side, and we'd see. We still work together.
These are this engagement's results. Your business is different, so they aren't a promise of yours.
Mine produced results, so we took the money they were spending with the other company, added it to what I was buying, and kept growing. In the meantime I learned everything else they were spending on advertising, $160,000 a month across radio, print, mail and the web, and they had no idea what was working and what wasn't. In a market that was shrinking under them, that spend was the precarious part. Leads went to a call center. Some got followed up. Some didn't. Nobody could tell you which ad had produced a single phone call.
Before we touched the ads, we made it possible to see. I set up full tracking and attribution systems for every advertising and revenue source: a tracked phone number for each one, and the reporting behind it. Then we watched. Within a few months we knew which spend brought in calls and which didn't, and we started moving money from what wasn't working to what was, and cutting spend at the same time. Ad spend went from $160,000 a month to $60,000, and leads went up 160%.
Seeing the calls wasn't enough, because a call isn't a sale. So we rebuilt the rest of the revenue operation, and I wrote the software the company runs on to this day.
Call center, scripts and CRM
I revamped the call center and wrote the scripts, then wrote the lead tracking and distribution CRM the company still runs on: every lead captured, routed and booked for the sales people with its ad source attached, so we'd learn how the call went, who bought and who didn't.
Follow-up that fit the lead
A no-show got one piece of mail; a "thinking it over" got another. Scheduling, printing and mailing ran on their own and tied back to the same source.
Better ads, new offers
With the numbers in front of us we changed offers, found new places to advertise, and stopped paying for the ones that only looked busy. Conversion rose 20% and the average sale grew 20%.
Lead to client to referral
We followed every lead to a client and every client to a referral, and fed what we learned back into the ads, the scripts and the offers. The owner could see where every order came from and what every dollar returned, without asking anyone.
What I did was the residential side: the ads, the call center, the CRM and the follow-up that turned an advertising budget nobody could measure into one that paid its way. That's not what took the company to nearly $100 million. The company did that itself, by building a national dealer distribution network, and I want to be clear that it wasn't my work. My systems grew alongside it; new channels came and the tracking covered them, the team grew and the CRM grew with it. In December 2022 one of the largest window and door manufacturers in the country bought the company, the relationship continued under the new owner, and the work has shifted with the business. Right now that means a parts store.
Nobody keeps an outside advisor for eighteen years out of loyalty. They keep you because the thing you created together keeps paying for itself, and because every year the numbers get a little richer and the advantage gets a little harder for a competitor to copy. I spend their money like it's my own. That's most of it.
Do you know which ad produced your last sale?
If not, that's usually where I start. Tell me what you're spending and what you've tried; if there's a fit, the next step is a conversation of about 30 minutes, at no charge. Eighteen years of this is what the advisory retainer looks like in practice.