He answers the budget question on his phone, before he ever sees your calendar. Scope, timeline, and address too. The ones who cannot pay for the job never get through.
The problem is not how many names you get. It is that you find out what he can pay while you are standing in his yard.
A name comes in. You call him back, you set it up, you drive out. You walk the yard, you listen, and in your head you are already building the thing. Then he tells you he was thinking $15,000 for a job that starts at fifty.
You write the quote anyway, because the afternoon is gone either way. He goes quiet. Do that four times in a week and most of the week went to jobs that were dead before you got in the truck.
That is not a volume problem. You have names. What you do not have is anything sitting between the form and your windshield.
Four things agencies optimize that make your business worse while the report looks better.
More leads at a lower cost per lead. Both of those numbers can improve every month while your calendar gets worse and your close rate falls off a cliff.
Name, email, phone, submit. Everything that decides whether the job is real gets discovered in your driveway instead of on his phone.
Are you interested in a new patio? filters nobody. A qualifying question only works if the wrong homeowner reads the honest answer and picks it, because it feels perfectly reasonable to him.
What works for a design-build firm in Sacramento is not what works on the North Shore of Chicago. Different markets, different price expectations, different competitors, different ads.
Six steps. We are not trying to get you more names. We are trying to get you fewer ones that are worth the drive.
Which jobs you want more of. Which ones you are done taking. Your real minimum, not the polite one. How far you will drive, and the parts of that radius you would rather skip. What you want the business to look like this year.
That conversation is the filter. Everything after it is just building it.
We pull the words your market actually uses: what they searched, what they complain about, who they are comparing you to, what makes them stall.
The ads get written out of that. It is why they sound like a homeowner in your area and not like an agency writing about craftsmanship.
The copy says what kind of work you do and roughly what it costs. We do not run discounts. A discount brings you the exact guy you spend your evenings trying to get off the phone.
An ad that gets fewer clicks and better ones is doing its job.
Project type, then timeline, then budget, then the property, then his contact details. One decision per screen on his phone, so he is committing a little more with every tap.
Anyone under your minimum gets a polite exit instead of your calendar. He never turns into a name you feel bad about not calling.
The calendar comes up with real openings already on it, and the reminders take over from there. That whole flow is on the automated booking page.
Every qualified booking, and eventually every job you sign, goes back to the ad platform as a conversion event. So it goes looking for more people like the ones who actually bought. That mechanism is on the tracking page, and almost nobody in this trade builds it.
The filter gets sharper every monthThe fastest way to judge an agency is to look at what it actually runs. Here is what is live in client accounts.
Drop three to six live client creatives here (static images or video stills). For each one: the trade and market, the angle the ad is running, and the qualifying question behind it. Client permission needed before any named creative goes public.
Replace this whole block before the page is deployed. It is the only unfinished section on the page.
This is the front of the system. What it is judged on is at the other end of it.
Those are sums across every client account, pulled on 2026-08-20 from the same client records the tracking reads: ad spend on one side, booked estimates and signed projects on the other. The two averages move month to month. We update them when they move, and we do not round them up.
Yes, on purpose, and the number that matters moves the other way.
You will see fewer names and more estimates worth driving to. If you judge the first month on cost per lead you will hate it. Judge it on how many appointments you would take again.
Then the filter gets set there. A higher minimum just means the questions do more work.
The point of the funnel is to say no on your behalf, at a moment when saying no costs nothing.
Meta. Facebook and Instagram, and that is the whole list.
Nobody wakes up planning to spend $60,000 on a backyard. He sits out there in April, looks at the cracked patio and the dead grass, and starts thinking about it. Meta is where you get in front of him during that stretch, and where one photo of a finished build does more work than any sentence you could write.
It is also where the budget question can sit in front of the click instead of behind it. We run one platform because we would rather be very good at one than average at three.
No. One contractor per market.
That is not fake scarcity. The system stops working if we are bidding against ourselves in your city, and your cost per booked job would be the thing that pays for it.
Answer the onboarding questions honestly, send footage when we ask for it, and call your booked estimates.
The clients who do well here own their sales process. We fill the calendar and we tell you the truth about the numbers. We do not close the jobs for you, and any agency saying otherwise is selling you something.
On the call we will look at who is already advertising in your area, what it would cost to compete there, and what the qualifying questions would have to be to keep the wrong homeowner off your calendar.
Month to month. No annual contracts.