The spend column does not move. Everything that improves here is plumbing — capture, response speed, the event you bid on, and the base that comes back.
Indicative shape of managed contractor and brokerage funnels, reported per service line — not a promise about your book of work.
Vertical 02 — Construction and Real EstateLong cycle
More leads isn't the goal. Signed work is.
Construction converts on inquiry → bid — a 30–180 day window won by who answers first. We index the local grid and wire six engines to signed work: the number your P&L reads.
city × service × projectGBP & citations at scalebid on signed value9-second routingweb proposals, view-trackedseasonal windows onlost-bid win-backsanniversary triggersreferral asks on delivered workreview enginezip-tier budget splitfair-housing-safe ads
city × service × projectGBP & citations at scalebid on signed value9-second routingweb proposals, view-trackedseasonal windows onlost-bid win-backsanniversary triggersreferral asks on delivered workreview enginezip-tier budget splitfair-housing-safe ads
01 / The leaksSix ways a local funnel loses
The leak is never the number of leads.
Every one of these was measured across managed contractor, builder and brokerage systems before we called it a pattern. Each has a fix, an owner and a number attached.
Leak 01
The aggregator tax
The same homeowner is sold to five contractors before your estimator sees the name — and you pay for every click in the auction anyway. Portals and lead networks rent you the inquiry, the relationship and the reviews you generated for them.
The lead bill looks like a growth line on the P&L. It is rent. Cut the subscription and the phone stops.
The fix — Owned local demand — city × service clusters, your GBP, your reviews — plus paid that bids on the signed contract, not the shared form fill.
Leak 02
The after-hours leak
Homeowners inquire at 7–10pm from a kitchen they want gone. The form lands in an inbox, a portal queue or a voicemail answered next business day — by which point two competitors have already booked the estimate.
Contact rates collapse within minutes. Whoever answers first books the walkthrough, and the job follows the walkthrough.
The fix — Routing to the right estimator in ~9 seconds, an after-hours agent that scopes and books, and automatic chase on every unanswered inquiry.
Leak 03
The wrong conversion event
The campaign optimizes on form fills and calls because that is all the pixel can see. The signed contract lives in your estimating software, and no platform has ever met it.
The algorithm scales tire-kickers. Your cost per lead looks fine while your cost per signed contract quietly triples.
The fix — Server-side estimate, proposal and signed events fed back into the platforms, keyed on your lead id — so the auction learns what a job is worth.
Leak 04
The invisible grid
One services page and a blog against 'roof replacement cost in Plano', 'commercial general contractor near me' and two hundred other city × service queries — while aggregators and directories own the map pack you're not in.
Every unowned near-me query is an estimate awarded to whoever wrote the page. The grid compounds; you don't.
The fix — City × service × project-type clusters at scale, GBP and citations managed as a registry, schema'd, refreshed on a cron — indexed in your name.
Leak 05
The one-shot funnel
Every lead gets one call and one proposal. If it doesn't close, it's archived forever — no chase on the sent bid, no re-engage on the lost estimate, no anniversary call, no referral ask on the delivered project.
The silent no: 40–60% of sent proposals never get an answer, and the second job at the same address goes to whoever reminded them.
The fix — Web proposals with view tracking and chase cadences, lost-bid win-backs at 6–18 months, anniversary and seasonal triggers, referral asks on delivered work.
Leak 06
The slow listing
Listing and bid pages built on portal templates and 8MB gallery shots — LCP measured in seconds, every paid click landing on the homepage instead of the project, the listing or the plan.
Half the click spend pays for a bounce. On a phone, which is where every near-me query happens, slow is the same as absent.
The fix — Edge-rendered listing, plan and proposal pages with a Core Web Vitals SLA, AVIF media, and one page per project — built to rank and close.
02 / The modelSigned-work math, in the open
Put your own numbers into inquiry → bid.
Four inputs your CRM or estimating stack already knows. The model applies the same lift coefficients we publish below and shows what they are worth as a three-year book of work — not a cost-per-lead screenshot.
Inquiries / month400
253,000
Inquiry → signed rate8.0%
1.0%30.0%
Average signed contract value$85K
$5,000$2.50M
Repeat & referral share of work22%
5%75%
Coefficients applied — shown, not hidden
+18% more bid-ready inquiries from owned search
+30% faster response + qualification + proposal close
+10pts base-sourced work, absolute points
−15% cut on cost per signed contract
Modeled on your inputs● COMPUTED LIVE
Book of work today — 3 years
$41.4M
32 signed / mo
Same market, engines wired
$71.2M
49 signed / mo
Incremental contract value
$29.8M
close 10.4% · base 32%
Cumulative book of work from this year's signed contracts
Year 1
$50.1M vs $32.6M
Year 2
$66.1M vs $39.8M
Year 3
$71.2M vs $41.4M
An inquiry is worth $4,191 instead of $2,875 when the funnel is wired to signed work and the base comes back.
Directional model on published coefficients — not a forecast, not a guarantee, and not a substitute for your own pipeline view.
03 / The machineSix engines, wired to inquiry → bid
Same six engines. Local wiring.
No bespoke methodology, no invented process — the machine that runs in every vertical, configured against the event this category has. Here is what each one actually ships for a contractor, builder, broker or operator.
Nobody buys all six on day one. The audit names the two engines that own the weakest stages of your funnel — usually response speed and the conversion event — and the rest are added as they pay for themselves.
A bathroom remodeler and a brokerage are different businesses.
One block per business type, because the demand, the cycle and the rules are not the same. This is how the machine is configured per side of the industry — and what we would start with in each.
01 — business
Residential remodelers & GCs
near-me · cost queries · design inspiration
7–90 days
Start: AI Automations. Speed-to-lead wins the walkthrough. Response in seconds, an estimate calendar that fills itself, and proposals with view tracking — so the bid you already priced gets chased instead of ghosted.
02 — business
Specialty trades
roofing · HVAC · plumbing · electrical · painting
1–30 days
Start: Precision Paid Media. Media that turns on with the weather window — storm, season, emergency — and turns off when it closes. Bid-intent queries only, geo-fenced to zips with margin, with capacity-aware budgets so you never buy leads you can't serve.
03 — business
Commercial GCs & design-build
sector × market capability queries · pre-RFP research
30–180 days
Start: Programmatic SEO. Capability pages by sector and market that get you shortlisted before the RFP is drafted, and a pursuit cadence that nurses a six-month decision without going dark on the owner's desk.
04 — business
Homebuilders & developers
community · plan · inventory · off-plan registration
30–180 days
Start: Video & Multimedia. Films that pre-sell the build: cinematic plan tours, drone site progress, neighborhood stories. Paired with sub-second plan pages and a registration flow that qualifies buyers before the sales gallery calls.
Start: Lifecycle CRM. The sphere is the business. Anniversary and equity triggers, listing pages that rank and load instantly, and fair-housing-safe ads — so the mandate is signed before the portal pitch arrives.
06 — business
Commercial real estate & investment
property type × market queries · market reports · cap-rate research
60–365 days
Start: Programmatic SEO. Property-type × market clusters and quarterly market reports that own the research query, with tenant and investor journeys timed to lease expirations and disposition windows.
07 — business
Property managers & multifamily
availability · 'apartments near me' · reviews · renewals
1–30 days
Start: Web Core. Availability pages that load before a renter's thumb scrolls on, a review engine that compounds, and renewal journeys timed to the lease — occupancy as a system, not a scramble.
05 / The 90 daysWhat ships, in what order
Measurement first. Then the grid. Then capture. Then compounding.
Ninety days to stand the machine up; rolling 30-day after the first quarter. Every phase has an artefact you can keep if you stop.
01Days 1–14
Instrument the leak
Nothing is bought, built or rewritten until the number is agreed. This is the phase most contractor and brokerage marketing has never had — and the reason 'leads' and 'work' have never reconciled.
Conversion events defined and signed: inquiry · estimate booked · proposal viewed · signed
Server-side tags wired to your CRM or estimating stack, keyed on the lead id
Baseline cost per signed contract by service line and source
Aggregator spend, portal fees and lead bills pulled into one view for the first time
02Days 15–40
Own the grid
The cluster map is the strategy session — service, city, project type, price band, objection. Then the pages ship in waves, with schema and internal links from day one.
city × service × project-type cluster map, scored by demand and difficulty
First 60–400 pages live, entity-unique, schema'd, license and disclosure clean
GBP profile, service areas and citations run as one registry across locations
Reviews engine: the ask routed to delivered projects, never bought, never gated
03Days 41–70
Capture with intent, not with auctions
Paid is rebuilt around the signed event the measurement phase created, and the estimate flow is fixed where it actually leaks.
Signed-contract value signals feeding bidding, per service line
Negative lexicon, tire-kicker exclusions and a real budget split by zip tier
Web proposal system: view tracking, e-sign, expiry, chase — the silent no, closed
CRO on the two weakest steps of the inquiry flow, tested not guessed
04Days 71–90
Make it compound
The base is where a local funnel pays twice: once on the signed job, again on the referral, the renewal and the win-back it produces.
Seasonal, anniversary, referral and lost-bid win-back journeys live
The funnel that survives the license board and the listing agreement.
In construction and real estate, the fastest way to lose is not a bad campaign — it's an unlicensed claim, a fair-housing misstep, a TCPA letter, or a review profile you can't defend.
Licensed and disclosed, by jurisdiction
Contractor license numbers displayed where state law requires them, permit and insurance language your compliance or legal owner approves, and advertising claims checked before a page goes live — not after a board complaint.
Fair-housing-safe real estate marketing
Every real estate ad, audience and landing page is audited against fair-housing rules: no steering language, no exclusionary targeting, compliant ad copy. Reach is bought on geography and intent — never on protected classes.
Consent-aware calls and texts
TCPA-aware SMS and call flows with consent captured at the form, hashed identifiers, and first-party server-side measurement. Homeowner names, addresses and project details stay in your stack and off any ad platform's browser pixel.
Review integrity, engineered
We route the ask to delivered projects and make leaving a review effortless — never bought, never incentivized, never gated to five stars. Honest negative reviews get answered with a workflow, not buried.
Measurement your owner or CFO signs
Signed contract value is the reporting currency. Incrementality comes from geo holdouts and a modeled mix, and the reconciliation ties back to your CRM or accounting system, not to a platform export.
Versioned pages, archived claims
Every landing page, proposal template and ad is archived with the date it ran — so a licensing question, a fair-housing review or a 'what did we promise' dispute is answered in minutes, from the record.
What we will not do
We don't sell, buy or resell leads — we build the owned side of the funnel.
We don't guarantee a number of signed contracts. We guarantee the measurement is right.
We don't run an ad, mailer or listing page your license or compliance owner hasn't approved.
We don't manufacture reviews or bury honest ones.
We don't build your funnel on a portal or aggregator you rent.
07 / ProofThe numbers behind the vertical
Already running on contractors, builders and brokerages.
The crew that answers in nine seconds books the estimate. The estimator who follows up twice more signs the job. Everything else on this page is how we buy you that head start — and keep the next one out of the aggregator's funnel.
— The Growlith construction & real estate desk
How to read these
Indicative results across managed client systems, reported per engine and per service line on one telemetry view — finance-grade numbers, not platform-inflated screenshots. No client is named without written permission, and no figure here is a forecast for your book of work.
A growth engine is infrastructure, and infrastructure only pays when the operator can build alongside it. Two minutes of honesty here saves a quarter of each other's time.
Right fit
General contractors and specialty trades with proven margin and a service area worth owning
Homebuilders and developers with inventory, spec or off-plan to move
Brokerages and teams with 5+ agents and a CRM we can integrate with
Property managers and multifamily operators with occupancy targets
$50K–$5M+ a month of marketing-influenced contract or commission value
Someone who can sign the claims and reviews workflow in two weeks
Not a fit
Buying a lead deal under a growth-engineering label
Wanting a guaranteed contract count in writing before an audit
No estimator or agent available to receive a routed lead for the next 90 days
A phone line nobody owns answering the leads we make ring
A one-off campaign brief dressed as infrastructure
Minimum engagement is 90 days. After the first quarter every tier is rolling 30-day — Ignition (any two engines), Momentum (any four engines) or Full Machine (all six, principal-led).
10Questions
Job-site checks.
The questions an owner, builder or broker asks before letting a growth firm anywhere near the phone that rings. If yours isn't here, a principal answers within one business day.
No — and we'll put that in the first call. We don't sell, buy, rent or resell leads, and we don't take a cut of your aggregator spend. What we build is the owned side of the funnel: indexed local demand, first-party capture, response speed, proposal chase and a base that comes back. If a lead network changes its pricing next quarter, none of that flinches.
That's where the funnel actually closes. We integrate against the common platforms — Buildertrend, Procore, Jobber, ServiceTitan, HubSpot, Salesforce, Follow Up Boss and kvCORE for brokerages, plus the mainstream website and proposal tools — through webhooks or a middleware layer where no API exists. Where there's genuinely nothing to integrate with, we run the event through a secure export instead of pretending the attribution works.
It depends on the job value more than the trade. A $9K gutter replacement and a $2.4M commercial TI have completely different auction economics — the number that matters is cost per signed contract against your gross margin, not CPL. The audit returns your own baseline and a target cost per signed contract by service line — not an industry benchmark lifted off a slide.
Your system stays authoritative. We define the estimate, proposal and signed events with you, fire them server-side from the CRM or estimating stack (API, webhook or export), and carry the click and lead id end to end — so the ad platform optimizes against signed value while you read the number out of the same system you already trust. Reconciliation is a deliverable, not a discrepancy in a monthly deck.
Same machine, different event. A contractor's conversion is inquiry → estimate → signed bid; yours is inquiry → appointment → exclusive mandate or closed side. The wiring changes — sphere and anniversary CRM, listing pages that rank, mover-intent capture, fair-housing-safe ads — and the guardrails change with it. Tell us which side you're on in the first call and we'll size the tier accordingly.
It's the architecture, not the ambition. One cluster template, N city × service pages, with licensing, disclosure and registration rules baked in per jurisdiction — so a new market is a data exercise, not a redesign. New York covers the tri-state licensing spread; London handles UK GDPR and CPRS; the DIFC desk runs Arabic-first project and off-plan pages with ar-ae hreflang and WhatsApp response paths; Sydney covers APAC hours and locales.
We write it, you approve it. Every headline, license claim, financing offer and ad variant is drawn from a versioned claims library your owner or compliance lead signs once, then we localize inside it at speed. The review loop is a 48-hour SLA on new work, and every live page stays archived with the date it ran.
Response speed and the paid conversion event move inside the current cycle — 30 to 60 days, because nothing new needs to be trusted. Local clusters index in weeks and compound over 60–180 days. Repeat, referral and renewal journeys pay at the first anniversary or season after they switch on. Anyone promising you a 14-day pipeline is describing a different industry.
You keep them. Code in your repo, templates and schema in your CMS, audiences and conversion actions in your ad accounts, journeys and automations in your CRM stack, plus a handover call and documentation. That's the difference between infrastructure and a service — and it's the reason we can offer rolling 30-day terms after the first quarter.
That's a design goal of the machine, not an add-on. Creative is pre-approved and pre-built, budgets sit on standby with trigger rules — weather events, hail swaths, season openers, enrollment windows — and media turns on with the window and off when it closes. Capacity rules cap spend at what your crews can actually serve, so surge leads never become refunded leads.
11 / Next moveOne 30-minute audit
Q3 audit window open — construction & real estate desk
Stop renting the lead. Own the neighborhood.
The audit reads acquisition, speed-to-lead, proposals and the base against the signed event, then names the two engines to fix first. You leave with the model above rebuilt on your real numbers — and the cluster map for your own grid — whether or not you build anything with us.
High-ticket means high-intent — on both sides. Four questions route you to the right bureau pod — then a direct line to the Academy Team, if you'd rather not wait.