One of the biggest lessons from my conversation with Steven Ullman is that growth becomes easier to manage when you stop guessing and start measuring.
Alarm Masters has nearly doubled in size through a combination of acquisitions and organic growth. But buying businesses is only part of the equation. You need a system for improving performance after you take over.
The same principle applies to marketing. Here's how I'd put it into practice.
1. Establish Your Baseline
Before spending another dollar, understand how your marketing performs today.
Track five numbers:
- Leads: How many opportunities are you generating?
- Booking rate: What percentage of leads become appointments?
- Close rate: How many appointments turn into paying customers?
- Average ticket: How much revenue does each completed job generate?
- Cost per booked job: How much are you spending to get an appointment on the calendar?
Break these numbers down by marketing channel. Otherwise, you won't know where your best customers are coming from.
2. Find the Biggest Leak
More leads won't fix a broken sales process.
If you're generating 300 leads per month but only booking 50%, that's 150 opportunities that never make it onto the calendar.
Improve that booking rate to 70%, and you're looking at 210 appointments from the same lead volume.
That's 60 additional booked jobs without increasing your marketing budget.
Before buying more traffic, determine whether your biggest opportunity is lead generation, booking, closing, or average ticket.
3. Test One Improvement at a Time
Steven described his approach as test, measure, test, measure.
That's how you should approach marketing.
Start with one change:
- Reduce lead response time to five minutes or less.
- Add follow-up calls for unbooked estimates.
- Test a new Google Ads landing page.
- Improve your Google Business Profile.
- Reactivate customers who haven't booked in 12 months.
Set a clear target, measure the results, and compare performance against your baseline.
Changing everything at once makes it difficult to identify what's actually working.
4. Put More Money Behind Proven Results
Not every marketing channel deserves the same budget.
If one channel consistently produces booked jobs at a lower acquisition cost, consider shifting more resources toward it.
But don't judge performance by cost per lead alone.
A $40 lead that never books is worth less than a $100 lead that turns into a $5,000 job.
Follow the numbers all the way through to revenue and, where possible, gross profit.
5. Turn Your Wins Into a Repeatable System
Once something works, document it.
Create a simple playbook covering your campaigns, budgets, follow-up procedures, reporting, and performance targets.
Review results weekly. Identify what's improving, what's slipping, and what needs another test.
This becomes especially valuable as you add locations or acquire businesses. Instead of rebuilding your marketing strategy every time, you have a proven starting point you can adapt to each market.
The bottom line: You don't need to reinvent your marketing every quarter. Build a system that identifies opportunities, measures improvements, and consistently puts more money behind what works.
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