Case study · Construction / Trades
Marketing & operations advisory for an Ontario construction company
Service-area strategy, pricing review, quote-pipeline mapping and a marketing-to-operations handoff playbook, the strategic frame the lead-engine website was later built against.
The challenge
What we had to solve.
The company had grown to a comfortable size doing one thing in one geography, and wanted to expand, but didn't know whether to expand by service line, by region, or both at once.
Lead volume was fine; quote-to-close rate was strong. The bottleneck was somewhere in the operations layer, but the operations layer wasn't instrumented enough to find it.
Our approach
How we tackled it.
Two weeks of discovery: market sizing per service line per region, competitor density, win-loss reasons on the last 200 quotes, project-margin analysis by service.
The data made the answer clear: two adjacent service lines had higher margin and lower competition than the core line, but the team didn't have the marketing or sales-pipeline structure to support them. We sized the expansion at three service lines, not two, with the third earmarked for year two.
The marketing-to-operations handoff was redesigned: how a web lead becomes a quote, how a quote becomes a project, where the friction lives, what the SLA is at each step. We instrumented every step.
The output was a 12-month plan: where to fish (regions and service lines), what to fish with (the marketing brief), and what the kitchen needs to be ready for (operations capacity per service).
Deliverables
What we built.
Specific, named outputs, not vague "strategy".
Market sizingService line + region grid with TAM, competitor density and recommended priority.
Win-loss analysisQuote-level review across 200 historical quotes with patterned reasons.
Service-line planThree-line expansion sized by margin, competition and operational readiness.
Marketing-to-ops handoffPipeline mapping from web lead to project, with instrumented SLAs at each step.
12-month planPhased rollout with quarterly checkpoints and revenue targets.
Outcomes
What it returned.
- Two of the three planned service lines launched in year one and met their quote-volume targets.
- Quote-pipeline visibility went from anecdotal to dashboarded; the bottleneck step was identified and fixed in week 6 of the plan.
- The lead-engine website was scoped against this plan rather than against generic "more leads" intent, which is why the leads it generated were qualified for the right services.
- Year-two revenue plan was set against actual year-one performance, not against guesses.
The takeaway
What we learned.
Construction-trades growth is bottlenecked by the operations layer more often than by the marketing layer. Adding lead volume to a broken handoff produces an annoyed customer, not a project. We fixed the handoff first, then turned the leads up.
Services used
How we got it done.
Related work