A newsletter service for contractors who are tired of renting their leads.

The homeowner calls whoever they can find the number for

A water heater fails on a Saturday morning. The homeowner is not researching. They are looking for a number, fast, and they will take the first credible one they find — a magnet on the fridge, a sticker on the unit, a piece of mail in the pile, or the top of a search page. Whoever is findable in that ninety seconds wins a job worth thousands.

You already served hundreds of these households. They liked you. They also cannot remember your company name eighteen months later, because there was no reason to. Something arriving every month fixes that for a fraction of what it costs to find a stranger in the same moment.

Most of this industry’s budget goes into the most expensive auction on the internet

Home services is one of the most contested categories in paid search. Emergency plumbing, water damage, HVAC repair and pest control clicks are bid up by everyone in your market plus the lead aggregators who resell the same call to three of you. The price per click is set by whoever is willing to pay the most, not by what the job is worth to you.

We run ads too, and for many contractors they belong in the mix. But a newsletter to past customers is not in that auction at all. Nobody outbids you for the counter of a kitchen where you already replaced the water heater. That is the whole argument, and it is why we put this first for trades with a real customer history.

The calendar writes itself, which is why it never slips

Home services has real seasonality, and that is a gift for a monthly publication. There is a right thing to say in every month of the year and it is never the same thing twice.

• Spring — the AC tune-up before the first hot week, not during it.
• May and June — hurricane season starts June 1. Shutters, generators, roof checks, what to photograph for a claim before anything happens.
• Summer — the peak-load months when systems fail and drains back up.
• Fall — dryer vents, water heater age, the annual inspection people forget.
• After a storm — the piece about which repairs insurance covers, and about the out-of-state crews who show up door to door.

Service agreements are the point

The difference between a business that is worth something and one that is a job is recurring revenue. Maintenance plans, annual agreements and priority-service memberships are what turn a customer list into an asset — and they are sold far better by twelve gentle reminders a year than by one hard pitch at the end of a service call.

So every issue has a place for it, stated plainly rather than shouted. What the plan includes, what it costs, what it saved a customer this month. Renewals get a nudge in the month they are due, because a lapsed agreement is the cheapest revenue you will ever lose.

What we put in front of a homeowner

Not a coupon sheet. Coupons train people to wait for the next one, and they get thrown out with the other coupons. Four pages that are useful get kept, and the offer sits inside something worth keeping.

The seasonal maintenance piece. One thing they can check themselves, which builds more trust than hiding it. A job from your week with the photos — trades have the best before-and-afters of any industry and almost never use them. Your own note, ghostwritten from a twenty-minute call. Referrals and reviews asked for once, politely, in the same spot every month.

You are on a roof, so we made this take twenty minutes

You are not going to write this. Nobody in a trade is going to sit down at nine at night and produce four pages, and any vendor who plans around you doing that is planning to fail in month three. We call you, you talk for twenty minutes about the jobs you did, and we handle everything after that.

You approve the proof from your phone. Print and postage are billed to you at cost through our print partner, with no markup, so you can see the real per-piece number and decide how big the list should be.

When we would tell you to wait

If you are a one-truck operation still filling next week, more leads may not be your problem, and a newsletter aimed at generating volume you cannot service is a bad trade. If your customer records are a stack of invoices and a phone with no addresses in it, the first job is getting that into one place — which we can do, but it is the honest first step rather than the fun one.

And if you have never asked a past customer for anything, start with the free version: a review request after every job. It costs nothing and it works. Come back for the newsletter when the list is real.