Case study · 60-day engagement
A Denver house painting company with 9 painters and a strong word-of-mouth pipeline could never figure out how to fill May and August. April-July was bedlam. May was always 60% capacity. The owner thought it was just how the trade worked. Two competitors had figured out something he had not: paint customers decide on a color 4-6 weeks before they hire the painter. The company that helps them choose the color usually gets the job.
The challenge
The owner came in through our free audit. The bot scored the website at 65. The marketing was fine for peak summer demand. The funnel had no front-of-funnel lead magnet, which meant he had no presence in the planning phase when customers were actually choosing.
We pulled Google Trends + his historical data:
The fix was to be present in February when the choice was being made, not just in May when the work was being scheduled.
The plan
Built /color-consultation as the new front door. Hero offered a free 30-minute in-home color consultation with the owner: bring 12 paint samples, walk the house with the customer, recommend palettes that match the home and neighborhood. Zero commitment. The page made it clear: "If you do not hire us, we still leave you with our recommendations." 142 consultation requests in 8 weeks.
Pulled 60 of his best exterior projects from the last 3 years and organized them into 8 color stories on Houzz: "Mountain modern," "Classic Tudor," "Modern farmhouse," "Bungalow refresh," etc. Each story had 6-8 photos with the actual paint codes captioned (Sherwin-Williams SW 7041 Van Dyke Brown, Benjamin Moore HC-167 Amherst Gray, etc.). Inquiries from Houzz started week 3.
Started ads February 5 — when most Denver painters were still hibernating. Targeted "exterior paint colors 2026" and "house painters Denver" with creative angled at "Lock your May start date now." CPC averaged $2.10 in February vs $4.80 in peak May. Same dollar bought 2.3× more clicks.
After a color consultation, the owner could lock the customer's May/June project slot with a $500 refundable deposit on the spot. 64% of consulted customers paid the deposit. Most painters chase quotes for weeks. Our client closed at the consultation appointment.
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 | /color-consultation page wireframe + Houzz rebuild started | First color-consult request day 4 |
| Week 2 | Page live with Calendly booking, ads turned on Feb 5 | 12 consultation requests in week 2 |
| Week 3 | Houzz "color stories" complete (8 themes, 60 photos) | First Houzz inquiry, 4 more from organic search |
| Week 4 | Owner conducts 22 in-home consultations, locks 14 deposits | May calendar 60% booked by mid-March |
| Week 6 | May calendar 96% full, June 70% full | Owner pauses ads to avoid overbooking |
| Week 8 | Final review | 28 jobs locked, retainer continues |
The numbers
The pre-season fill changed the entire summer:
The 60-day engagement at $799/mo cost $1,598. The +19 jobs locked by April vs prior year produce roughly $285k in incremental gross revenue. The owner now starts the color-consultation funnel in early January every year.
I always thought May was a slow month because Denver was a slow market. Mark showed me my customers were choosing colors in February — without me. Two months after we put a color consultation in front of them, my May was full and June was 70% booked. Same fleet, twice the work in the same window.
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