Can a free inspection program be a lead source?

Can an annual inspection program generate leads for a contractor?

Yes, if there is a crew to inspect and a rep to follow up. At the eight-figure Toledo exteriors company where I direct marketing, a free annual exterior inspection for past customers produced roughly $870,000 of net revenue in 2025 at 11.1% cost of marketing as the CRM books it, with a cost per demo of $347 against a company blend of $1,012.

What the program is

Every customer gets a free exterior inspection once a year for as long as they own the house, along with a lifetime workmanship warranty, and the inspection is a real one, an inspector at the house with a checklist rather than a sales call with a ladder. When the inspector finds something, the homeowner gets a report, and if the something needs work, a rep follows up. That is the whole mechanism. It is not complicated, and the complicated part is everything around it.

Why it was built

Leadership and I built it in 2024 as a unique selling point, a reason to choose us over the shop down the road that does not come back once the check clears, and I want to be clear that revenue was not the goal. We put the initial structure together, the comp model for the inspectors and the efficiency they would have to hit for the program to pay for itself, and then sales management took it and ran it. The first year, 2024, it produced $48,323 of net revenue on $12,915 of program cost, which is 26.7% cost of marketing on a launch year, and I would have been fine with that as the price of the selling point.

What it cost, and what was hard

The biggest costs are inspector wages and vehicles, which is the same cost structure as our door-to-door channel, because an inspector is a person in a truck. What was hard was not the inspecting. It was scheduling those people properly in the CRM, organizing regions so an inspector was not crossing the county three times a day, and getting customers called back after the report went out, and that is where nearly all of the optimization has gone. A program like this fails in the calendar before it fails on the roof.

What it returned

In 2025, its first full year, the program produced roughly $870,000 of net revenue on $97,166 of program cost, which is 11.1% cost of marketing against a company blend of 19.4% that year. Cost per demo was $347 against a blended $1,012, and the close rate on those demos was 71.3%, behind only repeat customers and the leads reps generate themselves, because the homeowner already trusts the company that installed the roof. As a lead source it went from nothing to one of the five biggest in the book in about fourteen months.

I should say one thing about repeat business, because the question always comes up: the repeat line in our CRM is a separate source, and I do not attribute its movement to this program, because the data does not connect them and I am not going to pretend it does.

Where this is wrong

The cost line is the program’s own line in the CRM, and some inspector wages sit under the door-to-door channel where the inspectors started, so the true fully loaded figure is higher than 11.1% and I cannot say by how much. A program without install capacity behind it produces demos nobody can sell, and a program run by a shop with a thin customer base has nobody to inspect. It works because there were twenty-five years of past customers to call.

What to do

• Tonight: count the customers on file from the last ten years. That is the size of the program before a single inspection.
• This quarter: write the comp model first. Decide what an inspector costs, how many inspections a day is realistic, and what the program has to return to cover it, and get sales management to own the follow-up before the first appointment is set.
• Ongoing: give the program its own source in the CRM from day one, with its own cost line. Ours has one, and that is the only reason this note has numbers in it.

Sources: Lead Perfection “Cost of Marketing by Source” and “Set Appointment Statistics by Sub-Source,” Toledo, 2024 and 2025, first party. 2025 revenue rounded to the nearest $10,000; the two reports differ by a few thousand dollars on it.

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