The home-services marketing stack we run for $3–8M operators

If you run a home-services business doing $3M to $8M a year — HVAC, plumbing, roofing, electrical, garage doors — your marketing stack is probably four years behind your operations. That's not a slight. Service ops scale by adding trucks. Marketing ops scale by adding systems. Most operators we audit are running on one good Google Ads account, a Yelp page nobody manages, and a manual call-back process that loses three jobs a week.

Here's the stack we actually run for operators in this band. Not theory. The channels that produce booked jobs at a CAC that pencils out against your average ticket.

The five-channel mix

Google Local Services Ads (LSA) is the single largest paid channel for residential trades right now. It's pay-per-lead, the Google Guarantee badge produces obvious trust signal, and the auction is shallow enough in most metros that disciplined operators win. Per LSA's own product documentation, the lead is qualified before the phone rings — wrong service area, wrong job type, and bad-fit calls are filterable as not-charged.

Why Search Ads still matters next to LSA

LSA gets your phone ringing on commodity intent ("plumber near me"). Search Ads gets you the high-margin work — emergency, specific brand or system, anything with a modifier ("tankless water heater install", "sewer line repair financing"). The CPCs are higher but so is the close rate and ticket size. We run them in parallel, not either-or.

The automation backbone

The two automations that move the needle for a $5M operator are not glamorous: missed-call-text-back and review-request-after-job.

Missed-call-text-back

Per the Lead Connect / InsideSales study on lead response, the odds of qualifying a lead drop ~10x between minute 5 and minute 10 after first contact. For home services that means: if the call goes to voicemail and you call back in 35 minutes, the customer has already booked your competitor. Missed-call-text-back closes that hole. The text fires automatically the moment a call rings unanswered: "Hi — this is Mike at Ridge HVAC. I missed your call, want me to call you back in 10 minutes, or text me what's going on?"

Cost to set up: a Twilio number, a $40/mo automation tool (Make.com or similar), one webhook. Recovery rate we see in audits: 18–32% of missed calls turn into booked jobs that would otherwise have evaporated.

Review-request-after-job

Per BrightLocal's 2024 Local Consumer Review Survey, 76% of consumers "regularly" read reviews when evaluating local businesses, and the median person reads 7 reviews before they trust a business. Volume and recency both matter — a Google Business Profile with 12 reviews from three years ago is dead weight.

The fix is a single SMS that fires 90 minutes after invoice. One link. Pre-filled rating. If they click 5 stars it routes to Google; anything below routes to a private feedback form. That last bit is not a hack to suppress negatives — it's so the operator gets a chance to fix a 3-star issue before it becomes a public 3-star review.

Dashboards that survive month four

Every operator we audit has a dashboard somewhere. Half of them haven't been opened in 60 days. The reason is always the same: it tracks 22 metrics nobody acts on. The dashboard that survives month four tracks four numbers: cost per booked job by channel, average ticket by channel, review velocity (new reviews in last 30 days), and missed-call recovery rate.

That's it. Four numbers. If any one of them moves more than 15% week over week, something is happening that deserves attention. Anything more granular goes in a monthly review, not a daily dashboard.