The Ledger.
Everything Capstone publishes, filed in one place: numbered Field Reports and Field Notes from seven years of operating marketing inside an eight-figure home services company.
We publish what this work costs and what it returns, because the numbers are the argument.
Field Reports
Standing frameworksMaintained and revised as quarters publish. Every figure sourced.
No. 01What Acquisition Costs. On the Record.The 2026 acquisition-cost data line by line: LSA cost per lead by trade, non-branded search, and the break-even chain.No. 02Cost of Marketing PercentageThe framework that governs the budget: the definition, the 10–15% target band, the 25% flag, and the 50% cut line.No. 035 Mile FamousThe doctrine: unavoidable within five miles of every job site. The premise, the mechanics, and the doors it was born on.GuideThe Budget GuideThe band in dollars at $2M, $5M, and $10M, and the channel math that self-corrects the budget.
Field Notes
From the operating recordReal ledgers, real mistakes, no vendor numbers.
FN-01The Best Channel I Ever Ran Had No DashboardClipboards, a van, and a spreadsheet: $1.99M at 15.5% fully loaded. The complete 2021 ledger of a door-to-door program.FN-02The Market Did $2M That Year. We Still Killed the TV Campaign.Traced by source, the channel cost more than the jobs it produced were worth, and the kill line took it.FN-03How We Cut the Aggregator in Half (And What We Built First)The three-year sequence, 2019 to 2021, that made HomeAdvisor redundant instead of removed.FN-04We Kept Knocking Through COVIDThree weeks of Zoom homework, then back to the doors: $2.2M at 12% COM through a pandemic.FN-05A Storm Saved Our Year. Two Elections Wrecked Two Others.Same company, same systems, three year-end numbers swung by events no marketing plan touched.FN-06What a Lead Costs in 2026, by Trade$39 electrical, $51 HVAC, $57 plumbing on LSA; $183 in non-branded search. The data, and the calculation that turns it into a decision.FN-07Your Best Channel Is Lying to YouStrip your company name out of the campaign and the true acquisition cost often doubles. The twenty-minute check.FN-08Plumbing Isn’t One Market. It’s Four.Emergency, scheduled repair, replacement, big-ticket: four funnels, four timelines, four different winning channels.FN-09The Three Days Your Truck Is the Best Ad in the NeighborhoodEvery active job site is a temporary broadcast tower of third-party proof. The four-step harvest most contractors let expire.FN-10Our Lead Count Fell by Half. Conversion Nearly Doubled.Six years of data on what happens when the dashboard’s favorite number stops being the goal.FN-11Facebook “Didn’t Work” for Four Years. Then We Built a System.Every owner who says the channel failed is right about their experience and wrong about the channel. What changed when the system did.FN-12Our Cost Per Lead Quadrupled. The Business Got Healthier.$85 to $371 over five years, and why that chart is a sign of health, not a firing offense.FN-13In Detroit, Boots Beat Broadcast by 60 Points. They Still Weren’t Good Enough.The other half of the Detroit expansion: the canvass ledger, side by side with the broadcast campaign that got killed.FN-14We Put Our Prices on the Website. It Closed $342K.The three objections every contractor raises about publishing prices, and the ledger from doing it anyway.FN-15It Launched at 137% COM. Fourteen Demos Is Not a Verdict.Our own kill bands say cut anything over 50%. Why this launch got sample size instead of the axe.FN-16A Demo Is Not a DemoA 55.1% close rate that is real and also a fiction. What the single number hides about the demos underneath it.FN-17We Stress-Tested Losing Our #1 Channel. Half of It Was On Purpose.In 2021, 784 demos rode one channel. What we did about the concentration before it did something to us.FN-18We Upgraded to Higher-Quality Leads. I’m Still Not Sure It Was Right.The 2024 rebuild of the door-to-door channel, and the volume-for-quality tradeoff that still is not settled.FN-19Five Call Center Managers in Five Years. The Seat Finally Taught Us How to Fill It.Every lead dollar funnels through one seat. What five hires taught us about who belongs in it.FN-20One Vendor Was 95% Brand. The Other Was 100% Discount. Both Were Wrong.Two broadcast vendors with two opposite religions, and where the working mix actually sits.FN-21The Cheapest Channel on Our Books Took Five Years to Build500 Google reviews became 1,620 while organic revenue grew from $676K to $1.21M a year, at near-zero media cost.FN-22A Demo Costs $992 Now. It Is the Best Money on the Sheet.Cost per demo nearly tripled from $337. Close rate and average ticket rose faster, and the appointment got more valuable.FN-23We Cut Aggregators for Five Years. This Year We Raised Them on Purpose.Share of budget fell 22.6% to 9.3%, then went back to 14.5% by choice. The difference between a dependency and a dial.FN-24We Set 9,548 Appointments. Reps Got 3,993 of Them.The funnel stage with no media budget attached to it, and why our best revenue year had the worst intake discipline.FN-25A Channel Only One Person Can Run Is Not a ChannelA division that already worked collapsed months after one person changed seats. What it took to rebuild it as a system.FN-26Two Halves of Our Calendar Ran on Different Clocks. Nobody Noticed.Canvass booked two to three months out while the call center booked next-day. Which metrics get orphaned, and why.FN-27The Best Hire I Ever Made Interviewed BadlyInterviews test the traits that make someone good at interviews. How to test the trait the seat actually requires.FN-28We Were Certain Someone Was Stealing. It Was a Missed Step in a Process.Distance from the work makes personnel theories feel obvious. The four questions that come before any of them.
Every entry in this registry traces its figures to a cited source or to our own operating records. Errors flagged are corrected and logged. The operating record behind these entries is filed in The Record.
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