Case study · 60-day engagement

From $48 cost per lead to $20 in 9 weeks.

An Austin handyman with 4 trucks and 11 services on his menu was paying $48 per lead and converting only 27% to a booked job. Most callers wanted a price quote, hung up when told "we'll need to come out for an estimate," then called the next handyman. Three of his competitors were already publishing flat-rate pricing online. He thought "people will lowball us if we publish prices." The opposite was true.

The challenge

"Every call wants a price. Every call hangs up when we say it depends."

The owner came in through a referral from another Austin contractor we work with. He had a 4-page website that ended in a contact form. The bot scored it at 59 and flagged "no pricing transparency" as the top conversion issue.

We pulled his CallRail data:

  • Of 142 calls in the previous 30 days, 73% asked for a price. The script told them "we don't quote over the phone." 89% of those callers hung up and never called back.
  • 27% booking rate. Industry standard for handyman with transparent pricing is 55-70%.
  • Top 3 Austin competitors all had flat-rate pricing pages. They were not afraid of "lowballers." They were getting picked first.
  • His most common service (TV mounting at $129) had 12 different price-shoppers/week who would have paid the $129 but never got the chance because nobody told them the number.

The fix was a pricing page. He had been afraid of it for 5 years. It went live in week 2 and the funnel changed inside a week.

The plan

Four priorities for transparent pricing.

Priority 1: Service-by-service pricing page (week 1-2)

Built /pricing with 11 service categories, each with flat-rate or "starts at" pricing: TV mounting ($129), ceiling fan install ($179), drywall patch ($95), garbage disposal ($189), etc. Plus an hourly handyman rate ($95/hr) for everything else. Hero copy was direct: "We publish our prices because you deserve to know what something costs before we get there."

Priority 2: Real-time booking on each service tile

Each service had a "Book this — $129" button that went directly to a Calendly with the price pre-filled and a card-on-file requirement. Customers could book a TV mounting in 90 seconds. No phone call, no quote, no friction. Conversion on direct-bookable services jumped to 73%.

Priority 3: Phone script overhaul

When someone did call (40% of customers still preferred phone), the new script led with the price for whatever they were calling about. "TV mounting is $129. We can be there Tuesday between 1 and 3, that work?" Booking rate on calls jumped from 27% to 71% the same week.

Priority 4: Google Ads alignment with pricing intent

Restructured ad groups to match the pricing page. "TV mounting Austin" ad group → /pricing#tv-mounting. "Ceiling fan install Austin" → /pricing#ceiling-fan. Quality Score per ad group jumped, CPC dropped 35%, and the same daily budget produced 2.1× more conversions.

AI tools we used

The internal stack that did the heavy lifting.

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.

Tool 01Internal search-term scoring

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.

Tool 02Negative keyword expander

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.

Tool 03Conversion tracking validator

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-by-week timeline.

WeekWhat we shippedWhat moved
Week 1Service prices documented, /pricing page wireframe approvedOwner signs off on flat-rate transparency
Week 2/pricing page launches with Calendly direct-booking on each serviceFirst TV mount booked online day 3, no phone call
Week 3Phone script rewritten, dispatcher trained on new flowPhone booking rate 27% → 71% same week
Week 4Google Ads restructured to match pricing-page anchorsCPC down 35%, conversion rate up 2.1×
Week 6Direct-bookable services hit 73% conversionOwner adds 2nd dispatcher because volume doubled
Week 9Final reviewCPL stable at $20, retainer continues

The numbers

What changed in the data.

-58%
Cost per lead
+137%
Booked jobs / month
2.4×
Booking conversion rate

The transparency unlocked higher volume AND higher margin:

At average ticket $215 and 64% close rate on the new lead volume, the new run rate produces an extra $42,000/mo in revenue on roughly the same fixed costs. The 60-day engagement cost $1,598.

I was scared of putting prices on my website for 5 years. Mark told me my biggest competitors had been doing it for 3. Two weeks after we shipped the pricing page, my booking rate doubled. The lowball customers never showed up. Just real ones who already knew what they were going to pay.

Handyman service owner·Austin, TX · 4 trucks, 11 services

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