For service business owners who've paid for marketing and can't trace one job to it
Five to seven small ads, run as tests on a three-to-five-dollar daily budget, will out-produce one five-thousand-dollar campaign. Because you'll know exactly which ad produced which customer — and which one to put real money behind.
30 minutes. We map the ads, the budget and what a lead should cost you. You keep the plan either way.
Leads by ad
LAST 7 DAYSIllustration of the ledger. Your numbers will be your own.
01 — The part nobody says out loud
Not a lead. Not an impression. A job, with an address and an invoice.
You can't. And that isn't your fault.
The SEO company sent a line going up. The social media manager sent screenshots of likes. The agency sent a deck with the word reach on it.
Twelve months and thirty-five thousand dollars later, the phone rang about as often as it always had, and nobody could tell you which of the three was responsible.
So you cancelled one. Nothing happened. You cancelled another. Nothing happened.
That's the part that gets under your skin. Not that it was expensive. That it was invisible.
You weren't buying leads. You were buying a story about leads.
02 — Why every agency quote looks the same
Every agency sells one big campaign. One audience, one message, one invoice, six weeks before anybody knows anything.
It's a single bet with your money. And when it loses, nobody can tell you which part lost.
The alternative is much smaller.
Instead of one five-thousand-dollar campaign, you test five to seven small ads at three to five dollars a day — each one aimed at one service, in one town, with one promise.
Now something is always working. And when something isn't, you know in three days instead of three months, and it cost you a few dollars to find out.
Small ads aren't a cheaper campaign. They're a different instrument.
Run the arithmetic yourself. Five dollars a day is about a hundred and fifty a month — for the whole test, not for each ad.
For most service businesses, one job covers it many times over. That's the whole trick: the ad doesn't have to be brilliant. It has to be cheap enough that being wrong doesn't hurt, and specific enough that being right is obvious.
03 — The method
This is what we build and run. Five parts — and only one of them is the ad.
Five to seven ads at a time, on a $3–5 daily budget in total. One service, one town, one promise per ad.
Not because more is better. Because one campaign tells you nothing when it fails, and a handful of small tests tell you exactly which one to scale and which to kill.
Each ad sells a single specific thing. Not "plumbing." Water heater replacement in Bozeman, $150 off, this week.
Specificity is what makes a cheap ad work. A general ad is noise. A specific one is a signpost.
Every ad points at a page built for that ad, using the same words, offering the same thing, with one action to take.
Most wasted ad spend dies here — the ad promises a water heater and the page says "Welcome to our website."
Every lead gets a reply in minutes, then a sequence that runs for ninety days instead of one email.
You paid for them once. Most businesses work them once. That's why their cost per customer is three times what it should be.
Every lead tagged to the ad that produced it. Cost per lead, per ad, per week — in a screen you can open without asking us for a report.
This is the part the agency model can't give you, because a single campaign has nothing to compare itself to.
That's the machine. Nothing clever. Small, specific, and counted.
And because we build it in your accounts, it stays yours if we ever part ways. That's a footnote, not the pitch. The pitch is the leads.
04 — The arithmetic
We hold $17.02 CPM and a 4% click rate — our own numbers, from a live account. The other four are yours.
The whole model needs one thing to be true: that a small share of the right conversations turns into work.
And when a test wins, you don't celebrate. You put the budget behind it and write more like it. That's how a testing budget becomes a lead machine.
05 — Has this worked
We ran this method for an independent hotel. One property, one market, competing against Booking.com and Expedia.
It produced 6,000+ direct bookings. Not leads. Bookings — people who chose the hotel and paid.
The ads were small. The budget was small. What was different was how many there were, and the fact that every booking could be traced back to the ad that produced it.
Nothing about that changes when you swap a hotel for an HVAC company. The ads get smaller and more specific, and the arithmetic gets better — because a water heater replacement is worth more than a room night.
A promise that you'll get forty leads next month. I've never met a business that worked that way, and I'm not going to put a number on a landing page and hope you forget it.
What it is: a method where the spend is small enough to test, the results are countable, and the number that matters — cost per lead — gets quoted to you on the call before you decide anything.
And the honest part. We're opening this to service businesses for the first time. The method is the one we've run for years in hospitality. If you want a vendor with fifty plumbers on the wall, we're not that yet. If you want the leads, we're very good at the leads.
If the arithmetic is interesting, the plan call is the next step.
Thirty minutes. You keep the plan whether we work together or not.
06 — What you're applying for
No slide deck. No "let me tell you about our process" for twenty of the thirty minutes.
What a job is worth to you. What you've spent. Where the phone rings and where it doesn't. What you'd call a good lead, in dollars.
We write ten specific angles for your business, live on the call. The services, the towns, the offers, the exact words. Ten real ads, not categories.
Budget, expected cost per lead, what to run first, and what to kill if it doesn't work in a week. Written down. Yours to keep.
You keep the plan either way.
If we're a fit, we'll tell you what it costs to build and run the ads — and you can decide with the number in front of you. If we're not a fit, we'll say so on the call and point you at the cheapest fix.
I'd rather turn down a bad fit than carry one for a year.
07 — Let's save us both some time
08 — What you're probably thinking
Good. That's the qualification, not the objection. The businesses that do best with this are the ones who've already learned what an untraceable invoice feels like. You'll spot the difference in the first ten minutes.
So did everyone. The problem usually wasn't the channel — it was that nobody built it so you could count what it produced. A hundred social posts and one campaign all look the same on a report. Five small ads do. That's the difference.
Because it's a testing budget, not a scaling budget. Three to five dollars a day across five to seven ads tells you which one people actually respond to. Then the winner gets the real money — your money, at a size you choose, once you know it works.
The ad spend is yours and it's small — you can start under $50 a day. On top of that there's a build fee and a monthly fee to run the ads and the follow-up. Both numbers come out of the plan call, in writing, before you decide anything. We don't put "starting at" pricing on a page. It's either your number or it isn't.
If people search for what you do and a job is worth more than the ad spend, yes. If you sell something nobody looks for — a one-off specialty with no search volume — we'll tell you on the call and save you the money.
You'll know in about three weeks, not three quarters — that's the point of small ads. And you'll have the plan and the ten angles from day one, so even a failure leaves you with something you can run yourself. What I won't do is promise you a lead count on a landing page. Nobody honest will.
09 — The only promise I'll make in writing
If we can't write ten specific ad angles for your business on the call — ten services, towns or offers you could actually run tomorrow — the call is free and we'll part as friends.
The call is free either way. The guarantee is that you won't leave it empty-handed.
— Anthony Butler, Can-Do Ideas
10 — Apply
A few questions, then pick a time that suits you.
Got it.
Now pick a time on the right. Your confirmation lands by email, and we'll text a reminder the day before.