Layomi Dele-Dare

Just got a pretty clever scam call from someone claiming to be @Google. They used my email as a recovery email for another account, triggering legitimate Google notifications. Then told me they had my license information and I needed to approve a sign-in request to “close a chat window.” The entire goal was to get me to approve access to my account. Social engineering is getting better. Never approve a sign-in request because someone on the phone tells you to.

Generate leads. Do estimates. Build pipeline. Booked out 60 days. Raise prices. Hire more people. Same process for leads. Same process for hiring. Run it again. That's it

How contractors can automate social media posting with an AI agent: Create a Google Form your crews fill out after every job: Name Address/neighborhood Job type Before/after pictures Connect the Form/Sheet to an AI agent like Grokbot. Give it your brand assets and have it: → Pick the best pictures → Create the before/after graphic → Write the post → Add the location → Send it to you for approval Connect Grokbot to GHL or another social posting platform. Once approved, it gets published. Crew finishes job → fills out form → AI creates content → you approve → it posts.

“Fire your team and replace them with AI agents” Why not empower your team to do their jobs better and faster? Use AI agents to improve your backend systems, remove repetitive work, and give your people more time to focus on what matters.

As a residential contractor, aiming for a minimum of 35 estimates per week is almost guaranteed to get you to at least $1 million in annual revenue, even with subpar sales ability.

If you bid on commercial jobs Set up an AI agent to regularly search the bid platforms you use for jobs that fit what you're looking for. Have it: • Find relevant new projects • Filter out jobs that don't fit • Identify the GC • Draft the outreach email • Send it to you for approval Set it up as a cron job so it runs automatically every day. Instead of manually checking multiple bid platforms every morning, you open your email to opportunities that already match what you're looking for.

If your customers let you put a lawn sign in their yard, try adding a QR code that opens your Google Business Profile. Neighbours who walk past can scan it and see your reviews, your project photos, and your phone number in one tap. They are looking at a finished job on their own street while they do it, which is the strongest proof you will ever get in front of a buyer. Google ranks local businesses on relevance, distance, and prominence, and prominence comes down to how well known you are in an area. When a lot of people search for your company by name, Google takes it as evidence that real people in that area know you and are looking for you. Brand demand is hard to fake, which is why it lines up so closely with who ranks at the top of the map pack. As that recognition builds, you tend to climb for the searches that bring in new customers, like "fence company near me" or "fence builder in [city]." A sign on a finished job that gets the neighbours searching your name is one of the cheapest ways to start that process on a specific street. If you test this, send the QR code through a short link you control so you can count scans per sign and see which neighbourhoods respond.

If you are using “Optimize your campaign with AI Max” in Google ads, make sure to turn off Final URL Expansion. When you leave it on, Google can send traffic to other pages on your website that it thinks are more relevant. We want: • Traffic going to the landing page we choose • The ad and landing page to stay aligned • Testing and conversion data to stay clean

What Good Marketing Economics Look Like After running ads for hundreds of contractors, a pattern starts to show. Here are some benchmarks you can use to see if your marketing dollars are actually working for you. If your average job is between $6,000 to $15,000, here's how I look at cost per qualified appointment: Under $100: Exceptional I would actually double check the leads to make sure they are truly qualified. $100 to $175: Phenomenal You should be trying to scale this aggressively. $175 to $250: Excellent Very strong economics. $250 to $350: Good Healthy and scalable. This is where I would expect the average successful campaign to land. $350 to $500: Mediocre It can still work, but your sales process needs to be strong. $500+: Bad Something likely needs attention. Your creative, offer, targeting, reputation, follow up, or overall marketing strategy could be the issue. At this point, the economics start getting difficult.

I think a lot of contractors look at lead quality the wrong way. Getting leads is the first priority. Not the ultimate priority, but the first. Let’s say you run two campaigns: Trust campaign: $80 CPL → 25 leads → 12 estimates → 4 sales Offer campaign: $25 CPL → 80 leads → 20 estimates → 5 sales The offer campaign produced “worse leads.” More people ignored calls. More people didn’t book. More follow up was required. But it still produced more estimates and more sales for the same ad spend. The mistake is saying: “These leads suck. Only 25% booked.” Instead, the question should be: How do we get better at turning those 80 leads into estimates? The funnel is: Attention → Lead → Contact → Appointment → Show → Sale Your ads need to create enough emotion and interest to get someone to raise their hand. Then your follow up and sales process need to turn that interest into an estimate. I’d rather solve the problem of converting lots of leads than solve the problem of not having enough leads in the first place.

If you’re a contractor and you’re trying to build a million dollar company aim for 35 estimates per week.

The limit as churn approaches zero is infinite but is limited by operational capacity and market demand

If your Google Ads point every ad group to the same landing page, you’re paying more for worse results.

Saw a tweet from a contractor who tracks his lead attribution. Someone saw his ad on Instagram, went to his website, filled out the form. Without tracking he’d think the lead came from his website and cut his ad spend. This happens all the time. You stare at Facebook reports thinking the ads aren’t working. Turn them off. Then the leads dry up. Track everything.

Entrepreneurship forces you to change who you are fundamentally. Every problem in your business is really a problem with you. Your patience, your ego, your decision making. Your business cannot grow unless you grow as a person. Once you start doing that you realize it was never about the business. It’s about the person you became while building it.

Most companies use Applicant Tracking Software to vet resumes before a human ever sees them. They pay thousands of dollars a year for it. At our epoxy company we use Claude on a Chrome browser to do the same thing. We tell it what we’re looking for and it filters every resume that comes in. The matches get flagged. The rest get filtered out. Cut our time spent reading resumes by 80%.

We get referrals for our epoxy company regularly now. We send the estimate, deposit paid. $0 acquisition cost. Didn't happen overnight. It took doing consistently good work for long enough that past customers started sending people our way without us asking. Every completed job has a lifetime value beyond the invoice. That customer tells 2 people. One of them calls. That person tells 2 more. Over time a second pipeline builds on top of your paid ads that's completely free. Run the ads to build the first pipeline. Do the work so well that the second one builds itself.

We used Claude to build two automations that monitor all of our client ad accounts automatically. First one checks billing status every morning. If any account has a payment issue it sends an alert to Slack before anyone on the team even opens their laptop. If everything is clean we get an "all clear" message. Second one runs three times a week and flags any campaign where cost per lead has been too high for a sustained period. Not just one bad day. A real trend that needs attention. Both run on autopilot. No one has to remember to check. The system tells us when something needs attention. When you manage dozens of ad accounts you can't manually check every one every day. So you build the system that watches for you.

Client spent just over $28K on marketing last month including our fees. Brought in $475K in revenue. 17x return on ad spend. At 15 to 20% net margin that’s roughly 2.5x net ROAS.