If you run a home services company, you have lived a version of this story. The leads are coming in, and you are paying more for them every year. But somewhere between the form fill and the first phone call, the good ones are quietly walking out the door to whoever called back first. You cannot watch it happen, and it never shows up in a report.
That was Cris Keeter’s world. He had built All States Home Improvement the hard way, with good crews and good work across siding, roofs, windows, baths, and kitchens, and on paper the marketing was doing its job. Underneath, he was frustrated and perpetually rushed: chasing answers from reports that were already out of date, setting customer expectations he was not sure he could hit, and quietly fearful that real opportunities were slipping through a pipeline he could not fully see.
The numbers that were supposed to settle it only made it worse, because the CRM, the spreadsheets, and the ad accounts never agreed with each other. So, a sharp operator with a real business ended up making six-figure spending decisions on gut feel, and burning his own evenings rebuilding the sales report by hand at eleven o’clock at night.
The toll was not only the late hours. It was booked jobs lost to slow callbacks, marketing dollars he could not trace to a single sold job, and the slow erosion of trust in his own numbers, which is about the most expensive thing an owner can lose. The business had quietly outgrown the way he could see it.
The real problem was speed and trust, not more leads
When we met Cris he was exasperated, but shortly after Cris brought CDA in, he realized the problem was not the one he had been trying to solve. The first conversation reframed it for him: this was a speed problem and a trust problem, the two that quietly bleed a home services company while everyone stays busy, and more leads would have made neither better.
One idea landed with him and never left: a dashboard is not the deliverable. Booked revenue is. He did not want a prettier report. He wanted his marketing spend wired to the jobs it actually closed, and the one number that mattered most, how fast a fresh lead got called, made impossible to ignore. For the first time, he had a partner pointed at the same thing he was.
Seven weeks to one source of truth
Over the next seven weeks, the business Cris could not see came into focus. He got an automated lead pipeline that pulled every lead and every ad source into one place on its own, every day, so nothing depended on anyone remembering to export a file. An AWS data foundation gave him a single source of truth, so his marketing report and his sales report finally came from the same numbers instead of three systems that disagreed. He also had command center dashboards, one each for Cris, the sales floor, and the call center, which meant every person on his team opened the view that mattered to their job while he could finally see the whole company at a glance.
The part that rebuilt his trust was the quietest. Rather than ask him to take the new system on faith, CDA reconciled it line by line against the report he had relied on for years, and did not stop until the two agreed. Cris never had to believe the new numbers. He watched them tie out to the numbers he already trusted, and made them his own.
Finally, to make it something he would actually use, everything was stored in a custom portal built and hosted for him. Instead of logging into one tool to read reports and another to enter data, Cris opens one screen. That is the difference between a pile of dashboards and a system an owner reaches for every morning, and it is why he runs the whole thing himself, with no analyst on the payroll and no standing dependency on anyone outside his own team. The command center is his.
The results: a faster response and $650K in booked revenue
The results showed up where it counted. Median time to first contact fell from 6.6 minutes to 2.5, and about ten points of his leads shifted into the zero to five minute window where deals actually close. On the same lead budget, with no new ad spend, that speed gain traced to roughly $650K in attributable sales in the first seven weeks, about 25 times what the build cost. Cris had not bought a single extra lead. He had simply stopped letting the good ones go cold.
But the change he felt every day was quieter than the headline. The marketing and sales numbers reconciled, so he stopped doubting his own reports and started making decisions from them. The eleven o’clock nights rebuilding the sales report by hand were over. The frustration and the rush gave way to something closer to confidence, the simple ability to open one screen and see, in plain terms, where the business stood and what to do next. He was not flying by feel anymore, and he was not waiting on anyone to tell him how he was doing.
Ask Cris how it is going now and he does not reach for a metric. “I know it’s making a difference,” he says. On the project as a whole, he put it this way:
“They were easy to work with, had great ideas, and were always willing to listen. I’m overall very pleased with the outcome, and what they built for us is really going to make a difference in our company.”
Cris Keeter, owner, All States Home Improvement