The Ledger.

Everything Capstone publishes, filed in one place: numbered Field Reports — the standing frameworks and benchmark data, revised as quarters publish — and Field Notes from seven years of operating marketing inside an eight-figure home services company. Every figure sourced. Real ledgers, real mistakes, no vendor numbers.

Field Reports — standing frameworks, maintained and revised

№ 01What Acquisition Costs. On the Record.Rev. 2026.06
The 2026 acquisition-cost data, line by line: LSA cost per lead by trade, non-branded search, the break-even chain, and one fully loaded ledger from our own books — sample sizes attached.

№ 02Cost of Marketing PercentageRev. 2026.06
The framework that governs the budget: the definition, the 10–15% target band, the 25% flag, the 50% kill line, the math at three revenue sizes, and the 15.5% ledger that proves it.

№ 035 Mile FamousRev. 2026.06
The doctrine: a contractor doesn’t need to be known everywhere — just unavoidable within five miles of every job site. The premise, the mechanics, and the 10,000 doors it was born on.

Field Notes — from the operating record

FN-01The Best Channel I Ever Ran Had No DashboardJune 2026
Clipboards, a van, and a spreadsheet: $1.99M at 15.5% fully loaded. The complete 2021 ledger of a door-to-door program, and why it beat every dashboard channel in the building.

FN-02The Market Did $2M That Year. We Still Killed the TV Campaign.June 2026
The market did $2M that year, almost none of it the TV’s. Traced by source, the channel cost more than the jobs it produced were worth, and the kill line took it — the one everyone in the building liked.

FN-03How We Cut the Aggregator in Half (And What We Built First)June 2026
You can’t exit rented leads by canceling them. The three-year sequence — 2019 to 2021 — that made HomeAdvisor redundant instead of removed.

FN-04We Kept Knocking Through COVIDJune 2026
Three weeks of Zoom homework, then back to the doors: $2.2M at 12% COM through a pandemic — and what the year stress-tested about owned channels that nobody would have tested on purpose.

FN-05A Storm Saved Our Year. Two Elections Wrecked Two Others.June 2026
Same company, same systems, three year-end numbers swung by events no marketing plan touched. The dangerous part isn’t the luck — it’s the reading of it.

FN-06What a Lead Costs in 2026, by TradeJune 2026
$39 electrical, $51 HVAC, $57 plumbing on LSA; $183 in non-branded search. The published data, and the one calculation that turns a benchmark into a decision.

FN-07Your Best Channel Is Lying to YouJune 2026
Branded search wearing a paid-channel costume: strip 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.June 2026
Emergency, scheduled repair, replacement, big-ticket — four funnels, four timelines, four different winning channels. One funnel for all of them is where the margin leaks out.

FN-09The Three Days Your Truck Is the Best Ad in the NeighborhoodJune 2026
Every active job site is a temporary broadcast tower of third-party proof. The four-step harvest that most contractors let expire unused.

Every entry in this registry traces its figures to a cited source or to our own operating records. Errors flagged are corrected and logged. New entries are filed as they publish.