Podcast Guest & Speaker
Austin Rohleder
Marketing operator, not marketing commentator. Austin built and ran the marketing engine inside an eight-figure Northwest Ohio home services company — door-to-door, broadcast, search, call center — and now runs Capstone Marketing Group, a fractional CMO practice for home service contractors. He talks about what the spend actually did, including the parts that failed.
Or email austin@capstone.marketing
Hear Him First
Austin on The Successful Contractor (CertainPath) — the growth story behind a home services company that scaled from under $7M in 2019 into an eight-figure operation, and the door-to-door program built from zero inside it.
Can’t see the player? Watch on YouTube.
The Arc
From the Dish Pit to the Marketing Budget
No agency apprenticeship, no marketing degree mythology. The credential is the sequence — every level of the funnel, worked in person, in order. His first “marketing strategy” was a junk drawer of business cards and a Facebook page no one updated. It got better.
Cooking and dishwashing
Where work ethic gets installed and nobody cares about your ideas yet.
Commission-only door-to-door sales
Nearly two years, 10,000+ doors. No salary, no leads handed over — eat what you knock. The most honest marketing education that exists: every pitch gets graded on the spot, in person, by a stranger.
Hired to build a D2D department from zero
Joined an exteriors company with nothing on that org chart — recruiting, training, comp design, territory systems, all built from scratch. The department became the company’s highest revenue source and has held that position every year since.
Marketing Director — the whole budget
TV, search, call center, recruiting, branding, lead partnerships. Two years from knocking doors to owning the number — and accountable for it ever since.
Segments Worth Stealing
What Austin Talks About
No platitudes, no “consistency” sermons. Each of these is a story with numbers attached:
The market did $2M. We still killed the TV channel.
A $20K/month broadcast TV test ran during a new-market expansion that did about $2M that year, so the easy story was that TV bought the market. Traced by source, TV drove a fraction of it and cost more than the jobs it produced were worth, and we killed it at six months. The framework that separates a channel’s real contribution from the revenue that merely happened around it, and the sunk-cost pull to keep a “working” channel alive.
COM% — the only number a marketing budget answers to
Cost of marketing as a percentage of revenue: target 10–15%, flag 25%, cut 50%. How one ratio replaces gut feel, ends vendor theater, and settles every “should we keep this channel” argument. The full framework — including a real 15.5% ledger — is published here.
Cutting the aggregator in half while organic grew 2.4x
Rented leads versus owned visibility — the year we ran the trade deliberately, what broke, what compounded, and why most contractors are renting attention they could own.
Building a door-to-door program from zero
From personally knocking 10,000+ doors to building and running the department — recruiting, training, comp design, and why D2D is marketing infrastructure, not a sales gimmick.
5 Mile Famous
Why a contractor doesn’t need to be known everywhere — just unavoidable within five miles of every job site. Hyperlocal concentration as a strategy for $2M–$10M operators who can’t outspend the metro players.
What the midterms did to our lead flow
In fall 2022, lead generation fell off the planet through September and October — then December outproduced October for the first time in company history. Election cycles as a demand variable nobody in the trades plans for, and what an ad market full of political money does to a contractor’s cost per lead.
Information isn’t leverage
Most home service companies gate everything — pricing, process, what to expect — because they think information is leverage. It’s backwards. Transparency as a competitive weapon: why the contractor who publishes the number wins the researched purchase.
The Short Bio (Copy-Paste Ready)
Austin Rohleder is the founder and CEO of Capstone Marketing Group, a fractional CMO practice for home service contractors in the $2M–$10M range. Before consulting, he spent a decade inside an eight-figure Northwest Ohio home services company — starting on the doors, building its door-to-door program from zero at 23, and running the entire marketing operation as director by 25: broadcast, search, canvassing, call center, recruiting. His operating philosophy is built on one number — cost of marketing as a percentage of revenue — and one conviction: transparency wins. He lives in Wauseon, Ohio with his family.
Headshot, longer bio, and episode prep available on request — austin@capstone.marketing.
For Hosts
What audience is this a fit for?+
Owner-operators and leadership teams in the trades — HVAC, plumbing, electrical, exteriors, and adjacent home services — plus marketing audiences who want the contractor-side view of what actually converts. The material lands hardest with the $2M–$10M operator deciding where next year’s marketing dollar goes.
What makes this different from another marketing guest?+
Operator receipts. Austin ran the budget he talks about — including the expensive failures most guests edit out. Every framework on this page was paid for before it was named.
Recording logistics?+
Remote-ready with quality audio and video, flexible on scheduling (Eastern time), comfortable with both structured interviews and open conversation. Episode prep call welcome but not required.
Need a Guest Who’s Actually Run the Budget?
Reach out with your show, audience, and format — you’ll get a direct answer, fast.
Or email austin@capstone.marketing