The marketing playbook for home services at $2M–$20M.
Most marketing advice is written for SaaS and e-commerce. None of it survives contact with a plumbing company. This is the full playbook I run — four tracks, free, no email required.
Pick your track. Each one stands alone.
- 01The true cost of purchased leads8 min
- 02Your CPA by source: the one-hour audit9 min
- 03Google Business Profile is your #1 asset8 min
- 04Local SEO in 2026: what works, what's a waste of time8 min
- 05The review flywheel: 3x your review volume without feeling spammy7 min
- 06Content that attracts home services customers8 min
- 07The referral loop most companies don't build8 min
- 08How to tell what's actually working8 min
- 01The four marketing channels that actually matter8 min
- 02How to size your marketing budget honestly8 min
- 03What your junior marketer should be doing7 min
- 04The metrics that matter (and the ones that don't)soon
- 05Agency vs. in-house: the honest mathsoon
- 06The 90-day onboarding playbooksoon
- 07The playbook, assembledsoon
- 01The brain and the body: the architecture decision nobody tells you about5 min
- 02The tech stack, with receiptsJun 22
- 03The scheduler is the heartbeatJun 25
- 04Episodic memory: how the machine remembers your customersJun 29
- 05Training modules: improving on a schedule, not by magicJul 2
- 06Guardrails before autonomy. Always before.Jul 6
- 07Build, buy, or hire: the honest mathJul 9
Get the Field Guide by email.
A chapter a day, paced so it actually gets read — plus the new Track 3 chapters as they publish. Or browse everything free right here. No pitch sequence.
Read it all and want it built for you?
That's the job. Fractional operator, month-to-month, $2M–$20M home services. The free audit is a 90-minute working session whether we work together or not.
Book a free audit
The one person company stopped being a compromise
Not hype. Specifically this: a single operator can now run a marketing function that would have taken four people in 2019. Ad accounts that optimize themselves. Design produced in minutes instead of days. Customer emails written in your own voice at volume. A phone that gets answered at nine at night. Reports that build themselves overnight and are waiting when you get up
What just became possible
For twenty years, staying small meant accepting a ceiling. That stopped being true faster than most owners noticed.
It is Labor Day, so here is a thought about work that I find genuinely encouraging.
For most of my career, "one person company" meant limited. It meant you did good work for a small number of people and that was your ceiling, because the things a bigger company had were things you could not have. A designer. Somebody answering the phone. Somebody watching the numbers. A person who wrote the emails.
That gap has closed further in the last eighteen months than in the twenty years before it.
What I actually mean
Not hype. Specifically this: a single operator can now run a marketing function that would have taken four people in 2019. Ad accounts that optimize themselves. Design produced in minutes instead of days. Customer emails written in your own voice at volume. A phone that gets answered at nine at night. Reports that build themselves overnight and are waiting when you get up.
What I find most interesting is what this does to the shape of good businesses.
Growth used to come bundled with a headache
For a long time, the way to grow was to add people, which meant adding management, which meant the founder stopped doing the work they were good at and started running a company instead. Plenty of excellent tradespeople have been quietly miserable since the day they hired their fifth employee.
That is no longer the only path. You can stay small on purpose and still compete on the things customers actually notice, which are responsiveness, quality and follow through.
The franchise down the street is not beating you on craft. It is beating you on infrastructure. Infrastructure is exactly what got cheap.
I do not think everyone should stay a one person shop. Plenty of people want to build something bigger and should. But it should be a choice now, and for most of the time I have been doing this, it was not.
If you have been holding off on growth because you did not want the headache of managing people, this is a good year to look again. The headache and the growth stopped being a package deal.
You can look like a franchise now for about a hundred bucks
The whole playbook, free
21 chapters, no email required
The marketing playbook I actually run, written for home services at $2M to $20M.
Read the Field GuideBen In Denver · Englewood, CO · The engine is running
Google is moving Local Services Ads, and home services is the first wave
Google is moving LSAs out of their own separate product and into Google Ads, where they run as Performance Max campaigns with a pay-per-lead goal. The rollout started in August with a limited group of US advertisers, and home services is one of the first categories going. The rest of the US follows later this year. Everyone else in 2027.
What just became possible
Your lead source is changing platforms this year. One thing about it is permanent, and you have a short window to get ahead of it.
If Local Services Ads are where your leads come from, this is the one to read.
Google is moving LSAs out of their own separate product and into Google Ads, where they run as Performance Max campaigns with a pay-per-lead goal. The rollout started in August with a limited group of US advertisers, and home services is one of the first categories going. The rest of the US follows later this year. Everyone else in 2027.
You get a fourteen day notice, then a seven day notice, before your account moves. That is the whole warning.
What actually changes
- Manual cost per lead bidding goes away. If you have been setting your own bid, that lever is gone. You set a target cost per acquisition and let the system work toward it.
- Your per service targets collapse into one. Today you can tell Google a water heater lead is worth one number and a drain clear is worth much less. After the move there is a single campaign level target. If your services have genuinely different lead values, and in home services they always do, you will need separate campaigns to keep that control. Nobody is going to do that for you.
- Budgeting moves from weekly to average daily.
- Your leads move to a new inbox. The Local Services inbox becomes Google Ads Lead Manager. If anyone on your team works leads out of the old one, tell them before it changes under them.
- Your details start syncing from your Google Business Profile automatically. Fine if your profile is right. A problem if it is not. Go look this week.
- BBB callouts are being discontinued. If that badge was part of your ad, pick a replacement.
Your historical performance reports do not transfer. Download them now. Cost per lead by service, by month, by season, going back as far as you have. Once your account migrates, that history is gone from the interface, and there is no version of asking nicely that brings it back.
I would do that today, before any notice shows up. Whatever else you decide about the migration, it is fifteen minutes you cannot get back later.
One more thing, and it costs people money every time
Expect performance to wobble for about two weeks after you move. That is normal for a bidding system that has to relearn from scratch. The mistake is panicking in week one and switching things off, which resets the learning and makes the dip longer and deeper than it needed to be.
Budget for a soft fortnight. Do not budget for a disaster.
What to do this week
- Download every historical LSA report you have. All of it, today.
- Open your Google Business Profile and confirm hours, service areas, phone and categories are correct, because those are about to sync automatically.
- Write down what a lead is actually worth to you for each service you sell. You will need those numbers to decide how to split campaigns.
- Tell whoever works your leads that the inbox is moving.
Google Local Services Ads Help Center
Before your account migrates
Want a second set of eyes on it?
Send me your LSA setup and I will tell you what I would split out and what I would download. No charge, no pitch.
Book a free auditBen In Denver · Englewood, CO · The engine is running