Shea was doing $2M a year with a 75% close rate. He didn't need more leads. He needed bigger, more qualified ones. Within two weeks, he closed an $80K project from ads. Then he had to pause the campaign because there were too many leads coming in.
Shea DeLola has been running KMB Property Solutions in Rochester, New York since 2008. Sixteen years in business. Multiple crews. Hardscape specialist: patios, walkways, retaining walls, landscape lighting. His tagline: "Turning great properties into dream properties."
When he came to us, KMB was doing $2M a year with a 75% close rate. A thousand meetings a year, closing 650 to 700 of them. By most standards, the business was thriving.
But Shea didn't want more volume. He wanted fewer meetings with bigger projects. In his words on our sales call: "My goal is to do 500 meetings and close 250. I want to grow the project size, essentially." He was tired of splitting his crew across five small jobs when they could be knocking out one $50K project.
KMB's lead sources were yard signs, door hangers, social media, and referrals. No paid advertising. The leads that came in were a mix of everything: mulch jobs, small cleanups, and the occasional big hardscape project.
The small jobs created chaos. Shea explained it: "Small jobs, if you're not done by five o'clock, you can't start more small jobs until after you go back to that house. Now you just lost a crazy amount of profitability." Rain days made it worse. Crews bouncing between small sites instead of staying on one large project.
He needed a way to get in front of affluent homeowners in his market: people with large properties who were already planning hardscape and landscape projects. Not everyone with a yard. Just the ones ready to invest in premium outdoor living.
We started in February 2024. Built ad campaigns targeting homeowners in Shea's specific zip codes across the Rochester DMA — large properties, high-income neighborhoods. The ads showcased KMB's hardscape portfolio: patios, outdoor living spaces, the kind of work that signals premium pricing.
The landing page had a qualification form that filtered for budget and project scope. If someone wanted mulch or a $3K cleanup, they never reached Shea's calendar. Only homeowners planning real hardscape and landscape projects got through.
We also set up automated follow-up, a CRM, and a review request system. Shea had identified reviews as a gap: "That's something we suffer with as a company. I've worked really hard the last year on, but never put a system in place for."
Results came fast. Within two weeks of launching ads, Shea closed an $80,000 project from an ad lead. Not a referral. A homeowner who saw an ad, filled out the qualification form, and booked an estimate.
The lead volume was strong enough that Shea had to pause the campaign multiple times because his team couldn't keep up with the incoming appointments. That's the opposite problem most contractors have with paid ads.
Shea runs ads on his terms. When his calendar is full, he pauses. When he needs more work, he turns them back on. Over roughly two years of on-and-off campaigns, KMB has closed over $250,000 in revenue from just $6,100 in total ad spend. That's a 40x return. 159 leads generated, 110 booked estimates, 69% booking rate. All from campaigns that run only when Shea has capacity.
As Shea put it in his testimonial: "He's helped us grow our hardscaping side of the business by 10x at least."
When the lead system is working, the next bottleneck is labor. Shea needed to hire landscape installers and a project manager to keep up with demand.
We built a recruitment ad system using the same approach: targeted ads, a qualification form, and automated follow-up. The first time we launched it, Shea hired 8 people in about a month. The most recent run: 41 applications in one week from $360 in ad spend. He filled landscape installer and project manager positions.
That's the full picture. Leads come in qualified. Projects close at premium ticket sizes. And when the crew can't keep up, we turn on hiring ads to scale the team. The system feeds itself.
"When you're looking to get into bigger size projects or you know exactly what kind of projects you want to get into, I suggest you talk to someone like Henry because he's gonna make sure that no matter what it is you're looking for, you're in front of the exact person that you need to be. He's helped us grow our hardscaping side of the business by 10x at least."
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