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About
Austin Rohleder.
Founder of Capstone Marketing Group, and the working marketing director of an eight-figure Northwest Ohio home-services company. Everything below is my own operating record, published with the numbers attached.
Most fractional CMOs are selling a career they already left.
2019 to present
The Operating Record
More than ten years in marketing, seven of them inside one home-services company. Each entry links to the note where the full numbers are published, wins and misses alike.
Handed a division with no script
Hired at 23 to build a door-to-door department from nothing. No training cycle, no system, leads captured on paper and dried on the dashboard of the company van when it rained. $900K in year one at 9 to 10% cost of marketing.
2020Kept knocking through a pandemic
Three weeks of Zoom lessons and homework while everyone worked out how serious it was, then back to the doors. $2.2M at 12% cost of marketing.
2020Found the schedule nobody was reading
Systemized myself out of the field, opened the sales calendar, and found canvass booking two to three months out while the call center booked next-day. It had run that way for months. Fixing that stage took appointments actually reaching a rep from 41.8% to 60.2%.
2021Published the whole ledger, not the highlights
$1.99M in net revenue against $308,543 in fully loaded cost. A 15.5% cost of marketing, inside the target band, with the clipboards and the van included in the number.
2022Radio ran at 88.4% cost of marketing
$67,059 spent to produce $75,849. Close to the definition of a channel that is not working. We changed who bought it and how the spots were written instead of killing it. It runs at 13.2% today, the most efficient line in the book.
2023Best revenue year, worst intake discipline
A storm delivered volume faster than we could qualify and schedule it, and only 36.1% of set appointments reached a rep. The biggest year in the record and the sloppiest one. Good years hide bad process.
2024Rebuilt the door channel, still cannot call it
Traded volume for inspection quality. Close rate climbed ten points, volume fell off a cliff, and rep pay went up. Two years on the verdict is genuinely undecided, and I published the three numbers that will settle it rather than picking a story.
2025The cheapest channel took five years to build
Google reviews from 500 to more than 1,600, and organic search revenue from $676K to $1.21M a year, at effectively no media cost. Nothing about it was fast.
2026Turned the aggregator dial back up on purpose
Cut paid-lead platforms from 22.6% of budget to 9.3% over five years, then raised them to 14.5% once the brand engine could carry the volume. The cut was strategy. So was the raise.
Figures are drawn from our own CRM reporting for a single market. The company is not named here; the work is documented in full across twenty-eight numbered field notes in The Ledger.
I am still in the seat, which means every number here is one I have to live with.
Said up front
What I Do Not Take
Qualifying is cheaper for both of us before the call than after it.
No
Roofing, siding, and windows
That is my day job. Taking exterior clients would be a conflict I have no interest in managing, so I do not.
No
Paid search
I ran it for years and stopped offering it. If that is what you need, you need a media buyer, not me.
No
Companies under about $2M
Below that band the honest answer is usually sales and operations, and marketing spend makes the problem more expensive rather than smaller.
No
Anyone who wants a pair of hands
I take the seat that owns the number. If the role is executing someone else’s plan, we will both be frustrated by month two.
The rest of it
Off the Clock
Husband. Father of two. Crossroads Church on Sundays, a 500 pound deadlift on weekdays, and a board seat at the Holland Springfield Chamber of Commerce. I live twenty minutes from most of the companies I work with, which is the entire point.
Want this read on your numbers?
One page of findings on your marketing, held to the same standard as everything I publish about my own. Free, and no meeting required to get it.
Or call (419) 575-9023