I've been in and around the construction business my entire life. My dad started Kyle Construction about thirty years ago, and I spent nearly twenty of those years working in it. For the last ten years I've been running Adapt Digital Solutions, and in that time we've personally worked with hundreds of contractors across the country on getting more customers. I've probably had this conversation — or some version of it — thousands of times.
This is everything I know.
First, Let’s Get One Thing Straight
Contractors don’t find customers. Customers find contractors.
Unless you’re bidding on government work or big commercial projects where someone posts a listing and you submit a bid along with 50 other companies — that’s really the only case where you go out and find jobs. For the average remodeler, electrician, plumber, HVAC tech, or landscaper? People look for you when they need you. Your job is to make sure they find you, and that when they do, you look better than everyone else they see.
That’s the whole game.
Step One: Get Your Google Business Profile (It’s Free)
If you have zero customers and zero budget, this is where you start. Go to google.com/business, fill out the forms, and get your listing live. It’s completely free. There’s no excuse not to have it.
Once it’s live, this becomes the place where you collect every customer review. Every person who’s happy with your work — ask them to leave you a review. Make it part of your routine after every single job.
Here’s why this matters so much: whether a customer finds you online or hears about you from a neighbor, they’re going to Google your business before they ever call you. What they see when they Google you will either close that deal or kill it. A company with 3 reviews looks like they just started. A company with 40 reviews? That tells people you’ve done 40 jobs for real customers who were happy enough to say something publicly. You must be doing something right.
One thing worth knowing: buying fake reviews is now illegal. The FTC made it a federal offense with fines up to $50,000. The fact that they felt the need to make a law about it tells you everything about how much reviews matter. Don’t mess with it — just earn them.
The Magic Review Number
There’s a tipping point. I’ve watched it happen over and over with contractors we’ve worked with. Somewhere around 20 to 40 reviews, something clicks. Calls start coming in more consistently. Google shows you more. Customers stop second-guessing whether you’re the real deal.
The exact number varies by market and trade, but the direction is always the same: more reviews = more calls. Don’t stop at 10 and call it good. Don’t compare yourself to where you started — compare yourself to the other companies that show up when someone searches for what you do. If the top result in your area has 80 reviews and you have 12, that’s the gap you need to close. Make getting reviews a daily habit, not something you do once and forget.
While You’re Building That Foundation: Hustle the Old-Fashioned Way
Google takes time. Reviews take time. While you’re building that organic foundation, you need to get out there.
Make sure every person in your life knows what you do. Tell your neighbors, your family, people you run into. Ask if they need anything. Ask if they know anyone who does. I know guys who hang out at Home Depot and strike up conversations with people buying materials — they pick up customers that way. I know guys who go door to door in neighborhoods where they’ve done work and introduce themselves. That stuff works.
There’s a weird mental block a lot of contractors have around promoting themselves. It feels like bragging. Here’s how I think about it: if you truly do excellent work, you owe it to people to let them know you exist. There are bad contractors out there. When a homeowner hires the wrong person, they lose money, they get headaches, they get problems in their home. If you’re one of the good ones, make sure people have a chance to hire you instead. That’s not bragging — that’s doing people a favor.
The fix for the discomfort? Focus all your energy on being the best at your craft. When you know beyond any doubt that you do exceptional work and treat people right, promoting yourself becomes easy. You’re not selling anymore — you’re just spreading the word about something genuinely good.
The Truth About Angi Leads and HomeAdvisor
I can tell you exactly what I’ve seen, because I have more data on this than most people.
My family’s company, Kyle Construction, used HomeAdvisor for about ten years starting in the early 2000s. In those days it was genuinely great. We were getting leads for $5 or $10 each, they were solid, and we made good money from it. But over the years it just got worse and worse. The leads got more expensive and lower quality. We’d call people and they were already hired out, or they weren’t actually looking to hire anyone — they’d accidentally filled out a form. When we finally tried to cancel, it was a nightmare. They kept charging us anyway. We had to do a chargeback on the debit card. Then they called us multiple times a week for years trying to get us back.
Across the hundreds of contractors I’ve worked with, about nine out of ten have that exact same experience. Started decent, got progressively worse. The one out of ten who make it work usually have minimal local competition and end up grabbing most of the good leads before anyone else can call.
The core problem is the business model. These companies need to sell leads to stay alive. So they get leads any way they can, and a lot of those leads are garbage. When someone fills out a form on Angi, they often have no idea their contact info is about to be sold to five or six contractors who will all call them within minutes. That’s a weird experience for the homeowner, which is why most of them don’t answer. And you’re competing with five other contractors the second you try to reach them.
Beyond that: you have zero control. They can raise their prices. They can remove your reviews. They can change their policies overnight. Your entire lead flow is at their mercy. That’s a bad position for any business to be in.
I’m not saying never use them — if you’re brand new and need work right now, use them as a bridge. But they should not be your main source of customers. Build something you own.
The Math Most Contractors Never Figure Out
This is the biggest unlock I’ve seen, and I’ve had this conversation probably thousands of times.
I ask contractors: how many leads do you want? Almost every single one says “as many as possible.” And I have to push back, because that’s not actually true. If I could get you 1,000 leads tomorrow, you can’t handle that. You can’t even handle 100. Maybe you want 5 or 10 a week — enough to keep your crew busy without drowning.
But here’s the more important number: how much can you afford to spend to get a customer?
I’ve talked to HVAC contractors who regularly do $10,000 to $15,000 installs. They’ll say something like, “I was using Google Local Service Ads and the leads were $65 each — way too expensive.” And I have to stop them right there.
Let’s do the math. You pay $65 per lead. It takes 10 leads to close one job. You spent $650 to get that job. That job is worth $15,000 at 50% profit margins, meaning $7,500 in profit. You just spent $650 to make $7,500. That’s over a 10x return on investment. Any investor on earth would take those numbers without blinking.
The mindset shift is this: the company that can afford to spend the most to acquire a customer will get the most customers. If your competitor is willing to spend $100 to get a lead and you won’t spend $65, they’re going to get all the customers and you’re going to wonder why the phone isn’t ringing.
Stop thinking about how to get the cheapest leads possible. Start thinking about how you can afford to spend more than your competitors — because that’s what wins markets.
A Real Story: From $400K to $4.5 Million
I talk about Aaron Lundy a lot, because his story is such a clear example of what’s possible when you get Google working for you.
Aaron runs a lawn care and landscaping company. When he came to us, he was doing about $400,000 a year — solid business, around 120 regular customers. His whole strategy was to use lawn care as the entry point and upsell customers on bigger landscaping projects. Good plan on paper, but it wasn’t converting the way he hoped.
We rebuilt his website with separate, optimized pages for every service and customer type he wanted to reach. We worked his Google Business Profile and built out his online presence to rank for all those services — not just “lawn care.” We focused his entire web footprint on the full range of what he offered.
In the 22 days after his new site launched, Aaron did 69 estimates. That’s more than ten times his previous pace. And these weren’t small jobs — he was suddenly bidding on the biggest projects he’d ever seen. His business completely changed direction almost overnight.
That was about four years ago. Today he’s sitting somewhere between $4 and $5 million a year. He spun tree services off into its own separate business. Everything changed — and all because he showed up on Google in the right way and had more reviews than his competitors.
That’s not magic. That’s just what happens when customers can find you and trust what they see.
Word-of-Mouth vs. Paid Ads: Stop Treating It as Either/Or
Word-of-mouth should always be happening. If you’re never getting referrals, something is wrong — either the work isn’t great or you’re not making it easy for happy customers to send you business.
We use referral cards at Kyle Construction. The concept is simple: the card says something like “$250 for you, $250 for a friend.” You give them to satisfied customers. They hand a card to someone they know who needs your service. That person gets a $250 discount when the job is done, and your original customer gets $250 as a thank-you. Everyone wins.
If you’re already spending money on marketing, you’re already paying to acquire customers. Referral cards just add a channel that also rewards the people who already trust you. It’s one of the highest-ROI things any contractor can do.
As for paid ads: I wouldn’t start there. Build your organic foundation first. Get your Google Business Profile live and stacked with reviews. Get a professional website that shows up for the searches you care about. Once people can find you and trust you without you paying for every click, then layer in paid ads to pour gasoline on the fire. Running ads before that foundation is in place just means paying to send people somewhere that won’t convert them.
The Simple Framework
Here’s the whole thing, in order:
- Set up your Google Business Profile. Free. Do it today if you haven’t. Fill it out completely with photos, services, and hours.
- Start collecting reviews immediately. Ask every satisfied customer. Make it part of your process after every job. Don’t stop at 10 or 20 — keep going.
- Let your network know what you do. Tell everyone. Ask for referrals. Don’t be shy — you’re doing people a favor by letting them know a good contractor exists.
- Get a professional website built for SEO. Separate pages for every service. Optimized for the actual searches your customers make.
- Understand your acquisition cost numbers. Know what a customer is worth to you, and figure out the most you can afford to pay to get one. That number is probably higher than you think.
- Add paid ads when the foundation is solid. Not before.
That’s it. There’s no secret. The companies that dominate their local market did these things consistently over time. The ones struggling are usually missing one or more of them — most commonly reviews and SEO.
The Bottom Line
I’ve spent ten years watching contractors succeed and fail at getting customers. The pattern is consistent. The ones who win show up on Google when someone searches for what they do, they look better than the competition when people compare their options, and they have enough reviews that no one doubts they’re legitimate.
None of this is complicated. But it takes time, it takes consistency, and it takes actually believing in your work enough to put it out there.
If you want help figuring out where you stand — what your Google presence looks like, whether your website is actually working for you, how you stack up against competitors in your market — we offer a free market report. No pressure, just data. You can grab it using the link in the sidebar.