Abram Mayo ran his first call on February 28, 2018 — one man, one truck, serving the Lake of the Ozarks. Two years later he had eight trucks on the road and was projecting more than $2.5 million for the year. His biggest problem was no longer finding customers. It was finding technicians fast enough.
Abram of Honest Abe’s Home Services on what changed after two years with Plumbing & HVAC SEO.
| Company | Honest Abe’s Home Services |
|---|---|
| Market | Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri |
| Services offered | Plumbing, heating, cooling and mold testing |
| First call | February 28, 2018 |
| Working with us on | Organic SEO, website, brand and truck wrap design |
One truck, one man, one market
Honest Abe’s did not start with a marketing budget or a fleet. It started the way most home service companies start: an owner in a truck, running every call himself, in a market he knew well. Abram describes it plainly — “when we started it was me, myself and I. One-man truck, one-man show.”
What he wanted was not a rankings report. He wanted the phone to ring consistently enough to justify putting a second truck on the road. That is a different problem than “get me to page one,” and it needs a system rather than a tactic.
What we built
The work was organic search first: the website, the local visibility, and the content that puts a home service company in front of homeowners at the moment they need somebody. Alongside it we handled the pieces most agencies treat as somebody else’s job — the site changes he asked for, the community promotions he wanted to run, and a truck wrap design that people in his market still comment on.
“When we started, we didn't have a truck wrap design yet, and they came through with one of the most standout designs in our area — because we hear about it all the time.”
Abram Mayo, Honest Abe’s Home Services
What actually happened
The detail worth sitting with is the last one. For the months leading up to that interview Honest Abe’s was not running paid search at all — and calls, revenue and trucks kept climbing anyway. We want to be straight about this: that is not the advice we give most companies, and we said so at the time. Paid search buys speed and control, and most contractors should use it. In Abram’s case, organic demand was already growing faster than he could staff for, so adding paid spend would have bought leads he could not serve.
The constraint moved
This is the part of the story that matters more than the revenue number. Growth did not stay inside the marketing department. Calls went up, so trucks went on the road, so hiring became the bottleneck — and hiring stayed the bottleneck.
“Make sure that you have a recruitment package and program that is out of this world, because you're going to need it. You're going to grow faster than you thought you would, you'll probably spend less money doing it on marketing, and you're going to constantly try to figure out new ways to find good quality people.”
Abram Mayo’s advice to owners considering the switch
That is the honest version of what a working growth system does to a home service business. It changes hiring, capacity, cash flow and the decisions you get to make as an owner. If your recruiting is not ready, demand will find that out for you.
Why this story is in the book
Honest Abe’s opens chapter one of How to Triple Your Sales by Getting Your Digital Marketing Right, because it makes the book’s argument better than any framework diagram can: marketing that works does not stay in a silo. You can read the book free, along with the recorded workshops and planning tools in the Growth Training Library.
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