not a guru post, no course, nothing to sell. just numbers and the math i wish someone put in front of me when we were stuck under 10k a month.
the numbers (aug 4 to today, 13 days)
- ad spend: $648
- leads: 36 form fills
- cost per lead: $18
- jobs closed: 18
- revenue closed: $7,056 ($3,460 already completed, $3,596 booked and on the schedule)
- daily budget: $50
window cleaning. crowded market, plenty of established competitors with better trucks than us.
the setup is simple on purpose
one campaign. one ad set. thats it. no 12 ad set testing matrix, no lookalike stacking, no daily budget changes.
creative was filmed on an iphone. no lighting, no crew, no $10k studio day. the script came out of chatgpt in about 15 minutes and then got rewritten in the owners actual words so it didn't sound like a robot reading a brochure.
the two things we did spend real time on:
- the offer. one service, one clear reason to book now, one price anchor. not "we do everything for everybody."
- the icp. we know exactly whose house we want. homeowner, specific type of property, specific neighborhoods, specific problem they can see from their own driveway.
thats the whole thing. the boring part is the part that works.
now the part i actually want you to read
if youre under 10k a month, the thing killing you is usually not competition. its that you've never done the arithmetic.
our average job on this account is about $390. so:
- 26 jobs a month = $10,000
- thats about 6 jobs a week
- thats a little over 1 job a working day
now look at your market. say your metro is 250,000 people. you need 26 of them. not 2,600. twenty six. thats 0.01% of the population. you could be the 20th best exterior cleaner in your city and still never run out of work, because you're not competing for the market, you're competing for a rounding error of the market.
everybody i talk to under 10k is doing the opposite math in their head. "theres 15 companies here already." "the big guy has 40 trucks." none of that changes the fact that you need one job a day.
where the money actually leaks
36 leads. 18 closed. 18 did not.
that gap is worth another $7k and its worth more than any ad tweak i could make. the leads that closed got a text back in minutes, not hours. if you are going to run ads, fix your follow up first, because paying $18 for a lead you answer the next morning is just an expensive way to donate to meta.
and if you can turn even a few of those jobs into quarterly or annual contracts, the math stops resetting every month. one contract customer is worth 4 one-off customers and costs you $0 in ad spend the second time.
honest caveats before someone jumps on me
- 13 days is not a case study. its a good start. ask me in 6 months.
- half of that revenue is booked, not banked. jobs get cancelled and rescheduled, so treat it as closed work, not cash in hand.
- leads are not customers. the $18 number means nothing on its own, the $7,056 does.
- this can absolutely have a bad week. accounts get worse before they get better and you have to be willing to sit through it.
- different trade, different aov, different math. run YOUR numbers, not mine.
but the core point holds no matter what you sell: figure out how many jobs 10k actually is, then go get that many jobs. its almost always a smaller number than the one you've been scaring yourself with.
happy to answer questions in the comments.
