Home services marketing
measured in booked jobs.
Contractors do not have a lead problem so much as a response problem. The lead that gets called back in ninety seconds books; the one that waits until the crew is off the roof calls somebody else. We run the demand side and the response side together: paid media and local search that generate the call, and AI agents that answer, qualify, and put it on the schedule while the intent is still live.
The lead was fine. Nobody picked up.
In the trades, the largest recoverable loss is almost never targeting or bid strategy. It is the calls that go to voicemail during the workday, the form fills that sit until evening, and the after-hours emergency that reaches an answering service with no ability to check the schedule. Homeowners with an urgent problem contact three companies and hire whoever responds first. Every one of those misses was already paid for at full click price.
Meanwhile the office is buried in coordination: confirming appointments, chasing reschedules, answering the same six questions about pricing and service area, and re-typing details into the CRM. That work is real, and it is exactly the shape of work that software agents now do reliably, which changes what a marketing budget can be expected to produce.
Demand and response, as one system.
Paid media built around service area and margin
Search, Local Services Ads, Performance Max, and Meta structured by service line and by the geography your trucks can actually reach without eating the margin in drive time. Emergency and planned-work demand are bought differently, because they convert differently.
Paid media →Local search that wins the map pack
Google Business Profile optimization, review generation built into job completion, service-area and service-line pages that answer the question the homeowner typed, and citation hygiene. In the trades the map pack outperforms the blue links, so that is where the work goes first.
Local SEO →An AI agent that answers immediately
Inbound calls, forms, and texts answered on the spot, qualified against your service area and service list, and either booked or escalated to a human with the context already captured. It runs at 9pm on a Sunday, which is when a fair share of emergency demand shows up.
Automate operations →Appointment booking wired to the calendar
The agent reads real availability, books into the field service system, sends the confirmation, and handles the reschedule. Integration is with the CRM and dispatch software you already run, not a parallel calendar the office has to reconcile by hand.
Estimates that stop going cold
Unsold estimates are the most underworked asset in most contracting businesses. Automated follow-up sequences by job type and value, seasonal maintenance reminders, and membership or service-plan renewals, all attributed back to the revenue they produce.
Nurture and retain →Cost per booked job, not per lead
Call tracking, form and chat attribution, and CRM integration so campaigns are reported on jobs booked and revenue collected by service line. When the cost per job moves, the report says whether the cause was demand, response, or close rate.
Measure what matters →We build the agents. We also buy the media.
Most agencies will resell you an answering service and call it AI. We build the agent layer ourselves, which is why it can be wired into your dispatch software, your service area, and your pricing rules rather than reading from a script. The same team runs the paid media, so when response time improves, the bid strategy changes to take advantage of it instead of continuing on last quarter’s assumptions.
Our productized version of this for smaller operators is Carcin, an AI operator built from thirteen years of running growth for more than a thousand businesses. Larger contractors and multi-location groups get the same machinery run as a service. The reasoning behind both is written up in productizing AI agents for service businesses and AI agent operators and lead routing.
Measure the misses before spending more.
- 01Week 1 — response auditWe measure what actually happens to inbound demand: answer rate by hour, average time to first callback, how many form fills never got a call, and what share of after-hours contacts were lost. Most operators have never seen this number.
- 02Weeks 2-4 — close the leakAgent layer deployed against your service area, pricing rules, and calendar; call tracking and CRM attribution wired up; local profiles and service pages fixed. This usually raises booked jobs before a dollar of new media is added.
- 03Month 2 onward — scale demandWith response solved and cost per booked job visible, media scales into the service lines and geographies where the margin is real, and gets pulled back where drive time eats it.
What contractors ask first.
Does the AI agent actually talk to my customers?+
It answers, qualifies, and books, and it hands off to a human the moment the situation calls for one. It is not a chatbot pretending to be a person: it identifies itself, works from your service area and pricing rules, and escalates anything ambiguous with the context already captured so the human is not starting from zero.
Will it integrate with our field service software?+
That is the requirement, not a bonus. The agent reads real availability and writes the appointment into the system your dispatchers already use. If your setup has no API, we look at what it can export and how, and tell you honestly what integration will and will not be possible.
How is this different from an answering service?+
An answering service takes a message. This checks the schedule, applies your qualification rules, books the job, sends the confirmation, and logs everything in the CRM, at 2am with no queue. The economics are also different, since it does not scale by headcount.
What does it cost to find out if response time is the problem?+
Nothing but the call. The response audit measures answer rate by hour, callback latency, and after-hours loss against your own last ninety days. If the audit shows your response is already fast, we will tell you the problem is demand or close rate instead, and price accordingly.
Do you only work with contractors in Portland?+
No. Local search work is geography-specific, but the paid media, agent layer, and attribution run anywhere in the United States. Our home base is Lake Oswego, Oregon, and a good share of the client base is national.
Stop paying for calls
nobody answers.
Ten-minute intro call, then a response audit against your last ninety days. We will show you what the misses are costing before recommending a single dollar of additional media.
Talk to a strategist