When a plumbing group stops growing, price and mix are usually the reason.

Four areas and a plan. Pricing, meaning the effective ticket the company collects rather than the number in the book; job mix, meaning contribution and acquisition cost by service line and lead source; recurring revenue through membership and service agreements; and branch or capacity economics, so the growth target matches what the crews can carry. The output is a written plan with owners, a marketing brief your vendors can be held to, and a monthly scorecard your team maintains.

A business coach works with the owner over months on leadership, habits and accountability, and good coaching changes companies. This is a shorter, narrower engagement: a data project that produces a commercial diagnosis and a written plan, then ends. We are not a coaching program, we do not run a membership community, and we do not sell training curricula. Many groups run both, using the plan as the agenda the coaching then holds people to.

An agency is paid to buy media and generate calls. This engagement is paid to find out where the company actually loses money, and in plumbing that is usually price, mix, booking rate or crew utilisation rather than reach. Because we take no execution work inside the engagement, the plan can conclude that you should spend less and fix dispatch. If you want execution afterwards it is scoped separately, and the brief is written so any agency, including your current one, can deliver against it.

It can be, but be honest about the constraint first. The analysis is worth paying for when there is enough job volume for the numbers to be stable, several service lines competing for the same crews, or a real pricing question. A newer company with one crew usually gets more from operational coaching and a tighter price book than from a four-week diagnosis. We will say so at the scoping call rather than sell you the wrong thing.

A fixed fee quoted after a scoping call, with deliverables and dates written down before you commit. It varies with the number of locations, how many service lines are in scope and the state of the field management data, so publishing a rate would mislead most readers. For budget context, The CMO Survey puts marketing at an average 9.0% of company revenue, with 33.6% of digital activity run by outside agencies. Book a meeting for a scope and a number.

No, and fixing it is usually part of the value. We work with what exists, reconcile job data against invoices and the general ledger, and state plainly which findings are solid and which are directional. 62% of organizations report losing revenue directly because of poor data quality, and only 41% have a dedicated data governance owner, so this is the norm rather than an embarrassment. The plan includes the small set of field and process changes that make next year's analysis reliable, or marketing operations consulting if the rebuild is larger.

Sometimes, and only where the data supports it. The more frequent finding is that pricing is uneven rather than low: the same job is quoted differently by branch and by technician, options are presented on a minority of calls, and discounting is used to rescue conversations that better presentation would have won. Fixing consistency and option presentation usually moves the effective ticket more than a headline increase, and it does it without a customer satisfaction cost.

The same method, run per operating company and then compared, because that comparison is the whole point of a platform. Booking rate, effective ticket, membership performance, utilisation and contribution are cut by company and by market, which shows which acquired model deserves to become the standard and which integration assumption is not supported. The plan is written so a sponsor's operating partner can read it and act on it, and the marketing brief is portable across the platform.

We analyse them and recommend, and your operations leadership decides and delivers. We are not an operations consultancy, we do not restructure your dispatch team and we do not recruit technicians. What the plan does is name the capacity ceiling, sequence hiring and training against the growth target, and flag where a marketing recommendation would break if the crews or the call centre are not ready for it.

They matter because they change the shape of the business. Members give a company a booked calendar in a slow month, a warmer pool for replacement work, and revenue that does not have to be bought again. 87.5% of top-performing contractors run an active membership program with paying members. The advisory question is not whether to have one, it is whether the price covers the visits, who owns renewals, and what the attachment target is per technician.

The owner or whoever can decide on price and mix, the operations lead, a branch manager, whoever runs dispatch or the call centre, and the person who handles the numbers. Expect a kickoff, a data pull, several short interviews, one decision session with the leadership team and a final review. We work around the schedule board and take read-only access through your own accounts.

Booking and pricing changes show within weeks because booking rate, option presentation and effective ticket move immediately. Mix and membership work take one to three quarters, and the margin effect lags further because crew and overhead decisions take time. That is why the scorecard tracks leading indicators such as booking rate, ticket, attachment rate and contribution by branch, rather than a consolidated margin that reports too late to steer.

Yes. The mechanics are close enough that the same engagement runs for adjacent trades, with the mix categories and seasonality changed. The parent version is growth advisory, and there is a sibling page for HVAC growth consulting where maintenance agreements and replacement timing dominate the analysis instead of drain and repipe work.

A marketing audit examines what is currently running and what it returns. This engagement is wider: it covers price, job mix, recurring revenue and branch capacity, which is where plumbing growth is usually decided, and it ends in a plan rather than findings. Companies that want positioning and brand work rather than commercial mechanics should look at marketing strategy consulting instead.

Your team runs it, and every workstream has a named owner on your side. Many groups book a review at ninety days to re-measure booking rate and ticket, which takes half a day and is optional. Where you want ongoing marketing leadership rather than a project, a fractional CMO or scorecard advisory is the next engagement, quoted separately.