Get quotes from three marketing agencies and they'll land somewhere between $1,500 and $3,000 a month. Then you find something like us at $297 and the first sane reaction is suspicion. Fair. Let's take the number apart.
What a retainer actually buys
An agency retainer is mostly people's time. An account manager to meet with you, a designer billing hours, someone assembling the monthly report, an office to keep lit. None of those people are bad at their jobs — but you're paying all of their salaries a slice at a time, and most of that cost never touches your phone ringing.
The report is the giveaway. When a big slice of the monthly deliverable is a PDF explaining what the retainer did, the retainer is partly justifying itself. You didn't want a report. You wanted the phone to ring.
What a system is
A system is built once, properly, and then it runs. The website, the missed-call text back, the review requests, the follow-up campaigns — machinery, not hours. Setting it up for the hundredth contractor costs a fraction of what it cost the first time, and that's the honest reason the price can be $297 instead of $2,000. Nobody's doing your marketing "by hand" every month, because almost nothing about local contractor marketing needs doing by hand.
The honest trade-offs
A system isn't better at everything, and you should hear that from us:
- A retainer agency will run your ad campaigns, test creative weekly, and manage a real ad budget. A system won't. If you're spending $10k/month on ads, you need those humans.
- A retainer gives you a person to call for anything — new brochure, event banner, one-off landing page. A system does what the system does.
- A system wins on the fundamentals: answering fast, stacking reviews, following up, being findable. The unglamorous machinery that decides whether a local contractor's phone rings — and the part retainers routinely neglect, because machinery doesn't bill hours.
For most owner-operators doing $500k–$3M, the fundamentals are 90% of the game. That's the bet we've built the whole company on.
The question that settles it
Ask any marketing vendor — us included — one question: "What exactly happens when a customer calls me and I don't answer?" If the answer involves a strategy meeting, you know what you're buying. If the answer is "they get a text from your number in five seconds," you know too.
Here's everything in our system and the number, in public. $297, flat, no setup fee. If you'd rather pay $2,000 for the report, at least now you know what's in it.