What a marketing report hides

Order dinner on your phone and you can see all of it: who's driving, when they picked it up, how far away they are, when it'll land on your porch. That's a sandwich.

Now look at your ads. How much did you spend last month? How many estimates came from it? How many of those turned into jobs, and what were those jobs worth? For most contractors the honest answer is: no idea. The report came, it had charts on it, and the invoice was the same as always.

Here's the problem with most marketing companies: the one thing they market well is themselves, to you. They tell you they're doing something. They can't show it. It's behind a curtain, and you're supposed to guess and trust.

You've learned not to, and not because you're cynical. It's because the money you spend doesn't line up with the estimates and the jobs you can count on your own calendar. When the numbers don't match, the curtain is doing its job.

Good business owners make good decisions when they can see where each dollar goes and what it brings back. Most contractors are good business owners. They've just never been handed the data.

Picture it as one line: the ads you pay for, the estimates they produce, the jobs those estimates turn into, the money those jobs bring in, and what that does to your bottom line. Every link in that chain is a number. If you can see the whole chain, you can run the business. If you can only see the first link, you're guessing.

If you run a backhoe or a skid steer, you know exactly what every lever does. Pull this one and the bucket drops. Nobody has to tell you.

Marketing has levers too: more spend on Facebook, a new page on the site, a different offer, a different area. But most owners are pulling them with no idea what each one does, because nobody ever showed them the history. With the data in one place, you can look back and say: last time I added spend on Facebook, this is what came back. Now you know which lever to pull, and roughly what happens when you do.

The thing that creates the most value for any business owner is an asset. In this case, the asset is a dashboard with all of your business's numbers on it: how the website performs, which ads bring estimates, what those estimates close at, what the jobs are worth.

Think about how a buyer, or a private equity group, looks at a company. Clean, clear numbers. How you arrive at them. Whether you can repeat them. A shop that can show that is worth more money than a shop that can't, whether you ever sell or not. And you can look at it the same way a buyer would, any morning you like.

That's the bigger goal for us: raise the value of contractors across the whole trade by standardizing how they see their own data, and how others can see it.

Estimates, by source, by month. Cost per estimate. Booked jobs and what they were worth. Return on what you paid, including what you paid the marketing company. All of it in your own login, in your own accounts, so it stays with you if you ever leave.

If the report you get today can't show those things, it isn't a report. It's a curtain with charts on it.

Ask for those numbers for last month. Give it a week. Then decide.

If you'd rather see them live, every day, without asking, that's what the dashboard is for.