CAPSTONE MARKETING — THE OPERATING RECORD
The receipts behind
the advice.
Most marketers prove themselves with a wall of logos and a few five-star screenshots. This is the other kind of proof: the operating record behind Capstone’s advice — the channels we built, the dollars they produced, and the cost of producing them. Including the one we killed while it was still working. Every number here traces to a cited source or to our own books.
Put Your Numbers on This Ledger
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The totals — where the advice comes from
A decade, in four numbers
Capstone is not a marketing degree and a logo. It is a decade run inside the marketing department of an eight-figure Northwest Ohio home services company — door-to-door, broadcast, search, the call center, recruiting — before any of it became a consultancy. The career, totaled:
Self-reported career totals across all channels and roles. The exhibits below are the line-item receipts.
The span — six years on one ruler
Measured every year. For six straight years.
The receipts on this page are not a lucky quarter. They sit inside six straight years of running marketing at an eight-figure home services company — every year measured against the same ratio, through a deliberate stretch of brand and market expansion. Cost of marketing held in a tight band the entire time. It climbed as the company invested harder into brand, and it never once drifted toward the flag, let alone the kill line.
A number you check once is vanity. A number you steer for six years is a discipline.
Internal operating data, six fiscal years. The single audited year below shows what one of those years looks like with every cost counted.
Exhibit A — the channel we built from zero
A department, from nothing, fully audited
The clearest thing on this page. A door-to-door canvassing department, built from zero inside an eight-figure home services company: roughly $900K in year one, $2.2M in year two. By the end of year one it was the company’s largest revenue source other than repeat business. The year after, it outgrew repeat too. Below is the 2021 ledger in full — every cost counted, including payroll, management, materials, and the van.
Nothing excluded. The flattering version of a canvassing number drops payroll. This is not that version.
Internal operating data, door-to-door program, fiscal 2021. Full breakdown in Field Report No. 01; the narrative in The Best Channel I Ever Ran Had No Dashboard.
Exhibit B — the channel we killed
We made the channel earn its own number.
The easiest way to keep a weak channel alive is to let it take credit for revenue it never drove. A new-market expansion ran several channels side by side — door-to-door, search, and a $20,000-per-month broadcast television test — and the market produced about $2M that year. The tempting move is to hang that whole number on the TV and call it a hit. Attributed honestly, by source, the television test drove roughly $100K of it — against six months of spend that ran its cost of marketing past 100%. So we killed it.
A channel that needs the whole market’s revenue to look good is not working. It is hiding.
Internal operating data, broadcast television test, new-market expansion. The ~$2M was the market’s revenue across every channel that year, not television’s; attributed by source, TV earned a fraction of it. Broadcast itself was not the lesson — a multi-year broadcast presence in the home market remained a success. This kill was channel-and-market-specific, and it turned on honest source attribution. The framework that caught it: Field Report No. 02.
Anyone can show you what they grew. The operator worth hiring will show you what he shut off.
Exhibit C — rented attention, traded for owned
Cut the rent. Grew the asset.
A national lead aggregator sold the same leads to four companies and raised the price every renewal. We cut that spend roughly in half — and in the same year, organic search grew 2.4×. Budget migrated off rented leads and onto visibility the company owned, and the owned side compounded while the rented side shrank. Over the full span, aggregators fell from nearly a quarter of the marketing budget to under a tenth. This is the COM% asymmetry in a single move: paid holds its price forever; owned gets cheaper every month it works.
Internal operating data. The asymmetry, drawn: Field Report No. 02, Exhibit C.
Exhibit D — more from less
Half the leads. Nearly double the close.
The clearest sign a marketing system is maturing instead of just spending: it converts better while it buys less. Over the six years, lead volume was deliberately cut to roughly half of its peak — and the rate at which a booked appointment turned into a signed sale nearly doubled. The budget stopped chasing raw volume and started buying intent: better sources, qualified demand, fewer tire-kickers at the door.
More leads is the easy lever. Better leads is the operator’s.
Internal operating data, set-to-sale conversion, six fiscal years. Yield rose from roughly 16% to roughly 28% as lead volume fell to about half of peak.
Exhibit E — the owned-channel flywheel
The flywheel that pays no rent.
Exhibit C showed organic revenue climbing. This is the flywheel that pulled it. Owned channels feed each other: every finished job becomes a review, reviews lift local search rank, higher rank pulls more organic demand, more demand produces more jobs — and more reviews. Run it a few years and it compounds. Over this span the review base more than tripled, and the average rating held at 4.7–4.8 through all of it: quality did not dilute as quantity multiplied. None of it carries a per-lead price. You own it.
A bought lead is gone the day the invoice stops. A five-star review works the corner of the internet you own — for free, for years.
Internal operating data and the company’s public review profile, six fiscal years. A review is an owned asset: no per-lead cost, no renewal, no sharing it with competitors.
Exhibit F — the revenue that comes back
Built a recurring product from zero.
Most home service companies finish a job and start the next month back at zero — every dollar of revenue has to be bought again. So we built the opposite: a recurring-revenue protection program that turns a finished job into an ongoing paid relationship. From a standing start it reached just under $870,000 in its first full year, and it closed at a rate a one-time offer almost never sees — better than two of every three homeowners said yes. Recurring revenue quietly rewrites every other number on this page: when a customer is worth more over time, you can afford more to acquire them, and the kill line on every channel moves in your favor.
A job is revenue you earn once. A program is revenue that re-bills while you sleep — and it raises the ceiling on what every channel can spend.
Internal operating data, recurring-revenue protection program, from launch through its first full year. The program has continued to climb since.
The ruler — the one number behind every decision above
Target. Flag. Kill.
Every receipt on this page was decided the same way: cost of marketing as a percentage of the revenue it produced. The canvassing program lived inside the target band and got fed. The TV test blew past the kill line and got cut. No favorites, no emotion — just the ratio.
The complete framework, with the math at $2M, $5M, and $10M: Field Report No. 02. What the open market pays per lead by trade: Field Report No. 01.
Compiled by
Austin Rohleder
Founder, Capstone Marketing Group · Wauseon, Ohio
The operating figures on this page are self-reported from internal records; the market benchmark data referenced in the Field Reports is independently sourced and cited there. If you find an error, flag it — corrections are made and logged in the revision line above. This page is built to be printed.
Your numbers, on the same ledger.
The free audit puts your cost per lead and cost per booked job on a ledger like this one — channel by channel, with your intake math included. Then you will know which of your channels would survive the kill line.
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