He Marketed Home Services for 10 Years. Then He Started One. | Tim Brown, Owl Roofing & Hook Agency

🚀 Ready to grow your home service business with AI and marketing that actually works? Book a free strategy call → https://www.contractormarketingpros.net/calendarTim Brown has been telling home service contractors to post video for over a decade. Nine months into running his own company, he says he overhyped it and that video is probably not top five for lead generation. He still does it, and he explains exactly why that is not a contradiction.Tim is the founder of Hook Agency, a marketing agency built around home service contractors, and the author of How to Become a Hometown Hero. Earlier this year he co-founded Owl Roofing in the Minneapolis area, which put him on the other side of the table from the clients he has advised for ten years. The company is tracking toward five to six million collected in its first year.In this episode you'll learn:• Video and personal brand are worth doing, but Tim now frames them as referral generation rather than lead generation, which changes how you measure them • All that organic content is what made his paid social work, and he has flipped from anti-Facebook-ads to getting leads under $300 • Google still delivers roughly twenty of his fifty weekly leads, and he explains why emergency-driven trades stay Google-first • AI search produces two to three leads a week for him, useful but nowhere near a replacement, and he is candid about that gap • The AI content strategy is about ranking for weirdly specific questions like who handles fascia-only repair in a given state, which he calls programming AI with your website • He comments on Reddit and Quora with three-name recommendation lists, publishes best-of listicles that include competitors, and says ChatGPT has filtered that tactic down in the last three months while Google still rewards it • Next year's budget is a million dollars at 7% of a fifteen million dollar revenue target, with three hundred thousand going to billboards • Yard signs across the city outperformed expectations, and radio underperformed badly even with a top station and a recognizable voice • The review strategy is asking after every inspection even when nothing sells, because a review that says the contractor told them everything was fine builds more trust than a sale • Local search is four separate profiles planned across a three million person metro, with 70% of spend in the home base and 30% in a test market • He has avoided lead aggregators entirely while peers go hard on them, and explains the tradeoff in plain terms • His advice to other marketers is direct: go start a home service business, and it does not have to be roofingThis one is for the contractor who suspects his agency is more confident than the evidence supports, and for the marketer who has wondered whether he should be running the business instead.Mentioned in this episode:From $15 Million to $4 Million: The 7 Mistakes | Mauricio Cardenal, Contractor Marketing ProsMauricio's Calendar