Paid Firepower. Three ways to get found. Pick the right one.

On top — the $2,000 minimum is your monthly ad budget paid straight to Google or Meta, and it sits on top of the required $500/month foundation plus the 15% management fee. Paid ads point traffic at the website, so the site has to exist first; the ad budget is fuel, not a substitute for it.

Three separate things, no overlap: the $500 keeps your website and hosting running, the $2,000-plus goes to the ad platforms as media spend, and my 15% covers building and managing the campaigns. So a client running the minimum is looking at roughly $500 + $300 management + $2,000 media. Ads don't replace the site — they feed it, and the site is where the lead actually converts.

Yes — the 15% is a management fee for building, running, testing and improving the campaigns, so it's tied to what you spend, not what you book. I don't sell guaranteed results, and I won't pretend to. What you get instead of a guarantee is full transparency and someone actively working every dollar.

I'd be lying if I said "no jobs, no fee," because the work still happened — research, build, tracking, daily optimization. What I will tell you: a month with zero jobs off $2,000 is a signal something's off, and it's my job to find it — wrong targeting, weak landing page, a market that needs a different channel. We look at the numbers together and change what's not working, month over month. No lock-in while we do it.

You're never locked in — everything is month to month, and you can pause or cancel a campaign any time. The $2,000 is a per-month floor for a month you choose to run ads (below it the math stops working), not a recurring contract, and you only ever pay 15% on what actually got spent.

If a campaign's not working, we don't ride it off a cliff — we pause it or fix it. Turn ads off for a slow month and there's no penalty and no minimum to hit, because you're simply not spending. The floor only matters in a month you decide to run; it's there so we don't waste your money on a budget too small to learn anything from.

It scales with you automatically — the fee is 15% of whatever you spend, so cut your budget and the fee shrinks right along with it; pause entirely and there's no management fee that month because there's nothing to manage. Seasonal businesses dial spend up and down constantly, and nothing about that is penalized.

Flat percentage cuts both ways, and that's the point. Busy season, spend more, I make more and you make more. Slow season, pull the budget back and my cut drops with it — no minimum retainer sitting there draining you when the phone's quiet anyway. You control the throttle; the fee just follows it.

It's a flat 15% of total ad spend, no matter how many channels — one campaign or all three, the rate doesn't change and there's no volume surcharge or discount. Run $6,000 across Search, LSA and Facebook and the management fee is $900, the same 15% you'd pay on a single channel.

The math stays simple on purpose: 15% of whatever you spend, added up. That said, I usually steer people away from lighting up all three at once — it splits your budget too thin to learn what's actually working. Better to nail one channel, prove the numbers, then expand. But if you want all three, the cost is never a mystery: it's 15% of the whole.

A "real lead" is a genuine call or message from someone in your area asking about a service you offer — not a booked job, and not junk. You pay per qualified inquiry, not per completed job, but Google lets you dispute spam, wrong-number, and out-of-area leads for credit, so you're not paying for garbage.

It's per lead, not per close — nobody in the ad world charges per completed job, and anyone who says they do is playing games. But "real" does the heavy lifting here: a wrong number, a robocall, someone outside your service area, or a service you don't offer can be disputed with Google, and I handle those disputes for you. You pay for the inquiries that actually count.

The $1,500 Local Services Ads setup fee is non-refundable — it pays for building your LSA profile, prepping your license and insurance documents, and submitting you to Google, and that work happens whether or not Google approves you. If verification fails, the setup fee isn't returned.

I'll be straight with you: this is the one fee that isn't results-based, because the effort is real and it's spent before Google renders a verdict. The good news is that legitimate, licensed, insured contractors almost always clear the check — it's built to screen out fakes, not real businesses. So the move is to make sure your license and insurance are current and match your business details before we submit. Once we do, the setup fee is earned.

You're ready for Local Services Ads if you can pass Google's license-and-background screening and you already have a solid Google Business Profile with real reviews — those are the gatekeepers. If you're brand new to paid ads or still building reviews, Google Search Ads is the cleaner first step while that foundation catches up.

LSA rewards trust signals: Google literally checks your license and insurance, and the "Google Guaranteed" badge leans on your review profile to decide who shows up. So if reviews are thin or you haven't been screened yet, you'll get more out of Search Ads first — they catch people already typing "plumber near me" without the verification hurdle. Tell me your review count and license status and I'll tell you straight which to run.

I write and build the campaigns and creative, and you review and approve everything before it goes live — especially the trade-specific details that have to be exact: your license number, service area, guarantees, and offers. Day-to-day optimization I run inside what you've signed off on; nothing publishes making a claim you didn't approve.

Ad accounts are one place where "just trust me" is a bad idea — a wrong license number or a service-area typo is your name on the line, not mine. So you see the copy and creative before launch and green-light it. After that, the ongoing tuning — bids, audiences, which ad wins — is mine to handle, because that part moves daily and you've got jobs to run.

Facebook and Instagram ads are geo-locked to your service area the same way everything else is — we target the ZIP codes and radius you actually cover, so your budget only shows to homeowners near you, not the whole internet. "Before they search" is about timing, not throwing your money at strangers three states away.

Demand-gen doesn't mean untargeted. We draw the same service-area boundary you'd use for anything local, then layer on homeowner and home-improvement signals so it's people who could plausibly hire you, in the towns you serve. You're not paying to reach renters in another county — you're paying to plant your name with local homeowners before they need you, so you're the first call when they do.