Case study · 60-day engagement
A Charlotte deck builder with a 7-truck crew was losing 6 weeks of summer revenue every year. Lead flow did not pick up until April, the build calendar did not fill until June, and by August the crew was booked but margin had been left on the table. The owner thought it was just how the seasonal business worked. It was not.
The challenge
The owner came in through a referral. He had stopped running ads in October and was waiting until March to spin them back up — same as every year. His Google Ads account showed the rhythm clearly: November-February nothing, March-July full burn, August-October winding down.
We pulled Google Trends for "deck builder Charlotte" over the last 3 years and showed him what was actually happening:
The fix was not more ad spend. It was being open for business 8 weeks earlier than the competition assumed.
The plan
We pulled every job photo from the last 3 years off his phone (4,800+ photos), filtered to the 80 best, captioned each with the deck size, lumber spec, and price band. Uploaded them to Houzz with a "Charlotte, NC" tag on every image. Profile went from 4 photos to 80 in 4 days. Inquiries from Houzz started 11 days later.
Built a single landing page at /spring-build-2026 with one offer: lock in your build slot now, design phase happens in February-March, build starts first week of May. $250 design deposit, refundable if they did not move forward. The deposit was the qualifier — anyone who paid it was 5× more likely to book the build.
Standard Charlotte deck advertisers come back online late March. We came back online January 10. CPC was 60% of summer rates. We targeted homeowners in zip codes where the average home value justified a $35-50k build. Ran two creative angles: "Skip the summer rush" and "Lock your May start date now."
Every lead from the landing page got a Loom video within 90 minutes from the owner himself, named, walking through the lot from Google Earth screenshots, suggesting deck size and shape. The personal touch closed at 3.4× the rate of the standard email reply our client used to send.
AI tools we used
We do not pretend the work happens by hand. Three of our internal tools are the reason this engagement moved as fast as it did. Each of them replaces what used to be days of human time.
Custom AI we built that grades every search term on commercial intent, urgency, and local match in under a second. Replaces a half-day human audit.
Takes one bad search term and proposes the related variants we should also negate before they show up. Found 87 negatives nobody had thought of.
Crawls the site and fires every conversion event in a sandbox so you can see what is actually being recorded vs what should be. Caught the duplicate form fire in 4 minutes.
The execution
| Week | What we shipped | What moved |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | Houzz rebuild + landing page wireframe approved | First Houzz inquiry by day 11 |
| Week 2 | Landing page live, $250 design deposit Stripe link added | First two deposits paid by week 2 |
| Week 3 | Google + Meta ads turned on, $80/day cap each | 14 leads in week 3 alone, all qualified |
| Week 4 | Loom-video consult workflow built, owner shoots first 12 | 9/12 booked design phase |
| Week 6 | Pre-summer book at 28 jobs, ad budget bumped 25% | Owner pauses ads briefly because crew capacity capped |
| Week 8 | Final calendar review | 38 jobs locked through August, May-July slots gone |
The numbers
The 38 booked builds at an average ticket of $38,000 = $1.44 million in pipeline locked before the typical Charlotte deck builder had even refreshed their ads.
Total ad spend across both platforms over 60 days: $9,400. Total pipeline value generated: $1.44M. The retainer was small. The math was not.
I always thought February was a dead month. Mark showed me 60% of my future customers were already searching, and the only deck builder they could find with a real portfolio was the one who would beat me to the job. I was just not in the room.
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