Most owners shopping for a remodeling marketing agency get shown the same slide: how many contractors the agency has worked with, how many accounts the team manages, how many states it serves. Those numbers are meant to make you feel safe.
I show you the opposite. BAD 2 BADASS has one person in the accounts, and that person is me. I keep the client list small on purpose, and when it is full I stop taking clients instead of hiring juniors to absorb the overflow.
This post explains why, what it changes for you, and where a bigger agency is the better choice.
How most agencies staff your account
I know this model from the inside. Before I started BAD 2 BADASS, I led paid search at agencies and built a team from the first hire to 13 people.
Here is how it usually works. A senior person sells you. Once you sign, your account goes to an account manager who is running a stack of other accounts at the same time. That person follows a playbook built to work across many clients. The senior person comes back for the quarterly review.
Nobody in that chain is doing a bad job. It is what the business model requires. An agency that grows by adding clients has to spread its most experienced people thin, so the day-to-day decisions about your money are made by someone newer. I wrote about what that handoff costs a remodeler in more detail.
The larger problem is what each person answers for. The agency answers for the lead. You answer for the sale. Nobody answers for the path between them. So the account gets judged on lead counts, and it gets very good at finding people who fill in forms. Not people who sign.
What a small remodeling marketing agency does differently
1. The person you talk to is the person in your account
I do the diagnosis, the build, the weekly decisions, and the reporting. When you ask why something changed, you are asking the person who changed it. There is no account manager relaying your question to someone else and getting back to you Thursday.
If I ever bring in help, it will be production work against a plan I wrote. The judgment about your money stays with me, and if that ever changes I will tell you first, in writing.
2. Your account is built for your market
Templates are how a large agency serves hundreds of accounts efficiently. In my experience they are also why so many agency-built Google Ads accounts look alike.
A kitchen remodeler in a dense suburb and a whole-home firm covering three counties need different campaigns, different service areas, and a different idea of what a good lead is. That takes time per account, and time per account is what a capped list buys. It is also one of the main reasons Google Ads fails for remodeling companies.
3. Problems get caught in days, not at the monthly report
An account that is watched closely shows trouble early. A search term starts pulling in price shoppers. A form breaks on phones. A week goes by where calls come in and nobody books.
With a short client list, I am in your account often enough to see it while it is still cheap to fix. On a long one, it surfaces in the monthly report, after the money is spent.
4. I can say no
An agency that needs the next client to cover its overhead has a hard time turning anyone away. I can.
Every engagement starts with the BAD-ectomy™, a $297 diagnosis. If it shows your problem is not your ads, I will tell you that, and you keep the findings. I also turn down companies I cannot help: job sizes under $20K, or a budget too small for paid search to pay for itself.
5. I answer for what happens after the lead
This is the one that matters most. Every price shopper costs you the drive, the hour at the table, and the two hours writing an estimate at 9pm. Your ads keep buying them because nobody ever told Google which leads turned into signed jobs.
Connecting your job tracker back to your ad account, and then running the ads on booked estimates and sold jobs instead of lead counts, is slow, specific work. It does not fit a model where one person is spread across a long list of accounts. It is the main reason my list is short.
To be clear about who does what: I build the whole machine: the ads, the pages, the tracking, getting every lead to the right person fast, the reporting. What I can’t do is pick up the phone or sit at the kitchen table. That part is yours, and you’ll be able to see exactly what it’s worth.
Where a bigger agency is the better choice
I would rather you hear this from me than find it out later.
- More hands. A larger agency has people to cover when someone is out, and someone is always reachable. With me there is one person.
- More services. If you want your ads, SEO, social media, email and website from one vendor, I am the wrong call. I do paid search: Google Ads, Local Services Ads and Microsoft Ads. I will tell you when something else is costing you jobs, and who to hire for it.
- A faster start. A bigger agency can usually begin right away. A capped list means I am sometimes full. When that happens, the conversation is about a start date, and you will hear that before you spend a dollar.
One more thing you should know. I have run paid search for remodeling companies before, as a freelancer. That work is under NDA, so I can’t name the companies, and I don’t have case studies from it to show you. I would rather tell you that up front. What I can point to is 10+ years in paid search, $68M+ in ad spend managed, and a pattern I have seen repeat in every business where one sale is worth real money, remodeling included: the ads get judged on leads, and nobody connects them to what sold.
My dad is a contractor. I grew up watching the marketing money go out every month with no clear answer about what came back. That is the problem I built this to solve.
4 questions to ask any remodeling marketing agency
Whoever you hire, ask these before you sign:
- Who is in my account each week, and how many other accounts does that person run?
- If I call about a change in my account, do I get the person who made it, or someone relaying the answer?
- What number are you judged on: leads, or signed jobs?
- What happens when you are full?
A good agency of any size has clear answers. Vague ones tell you nobody is paying close attention.
The short version
A big agency sells you coverage and a process. A small one sells you one senior person’s attention on every decision in your account. Neither is wrong. They are different things, and you should know which one you are buying.
If the second one is what you want, start with the BAD-ectomy™: a $297 diagnosis of where your leads stop turning into jobs, delivered in 5 business days, with nothing in your account changed. The findings are yours whether or not we work together. Not ready for that? Book a discovery call.