I sat down with Dan Leibrandt on the Local Marketing Secrets podcast for a long, candid conversation about how I went from running a side hustle in college to building a seven-figure agency, exiting at 23, and rebuilding into CoatingLaunch — the agency that now dominates concrete coating marketing. If you run a home service business and you want to understand how Facebook ads, ChatGPT, and a few unfair learning shortcuts compound into real money, this episode is for you.
Watch the full episode
What you’ll learn in this episode
- The mindset shift that lets a 21-year-old outperform contractors with 30 years of experience
- Why I copy what people two levels above me are doing — and how to find those people
- How I use ChatGPT every single day to compress decades of business knowledge into hours
- The exact math you should run on every lead source: cost per lead, cost per appointment, cost per booked job
- What a “killer” Facebook ad actually looks like in 2025 (and why most home service ads waste money)
- Why transparent pricing is the next major shift in HVAC and home services
- How brand familiarity quietly doubles your ad conversion rates
Chapter timestamps
- 0:00 — Intro and how I built a respected voice in home service marketing
- 5:00 — Becoming the go-to agency for concrete coatings
- 10:00 — Learning from operators 10x bigger than your current goal
- 15:00 — Why ChatGPT became a daily habit (and what I ask it)
- 20:00 — The lead-to-appointment math every owner needs to track
- 25:00 — What a killer ad looks like: offers, video, and proof
- 30:00 — Transparent pricing is the next shift in HVAC
- 35:00 — Conversion rate optimization for service company websites
- 40:00 — How brand recognition compounds with paid ads
- 45:00 — Using AI to free up time and reinvest it in growth
How a 21-year-old becomes the go-to agency in a category
Dan opened the episode asking how someone my age ends up running an agency that contractors with decades of experience pay attention to. The honest answer is that I picked a tight category — concrete coatings — and went deeper than anyone else was willing to go. I didn’t try to be the agency for “home services” in general. I picked one trade and made sure that when a coating contractor showed up at an industry event, saw an ad online, or asked another contractor who handled their marketing, my name came up. That repetition is what builds the kind of authority that lets a young operator skip ahead of people with much more experience.
The lesson here isn’t that you have to be in concrete coatings. It’s that being a generalist in a noisy market is the slowest possible path. Pick a category small enough that you can dominate it inside a year, and stop trying to be everything to everyone.
The mentor shortcut: copy people two levels above you
One of the most useful frameworks I shared with Dan is what I call the “two-level rule.” If you’re running a $500k roofing company, don’t take advice from someone running a $700k roofing company — you’re roughly the same. Find the operator running a $5 million roofing company in another state, and study them. Understand their systems, their pricing, their hiring, their marketing channels. Reverse engineer what they do and apply it to your business.
Most owners get stuck because they only learn from peers. Peers are useful for camaraderie. They’re not useful for compression. If you want to skip five years of trial and error, you have to learn from people who have already done what you’re trying to do — and you have to be willing to ask questions that feel uncomfortable.
ChatGPT as a daily operating system
I told Dan that ChatGPT is not a productivity gimmick for me — it’s a daily operating system. When a group of guys is talking about a business problem in someone’s living room, I’m quietly pulling out my phone and asking the model a question that takes the conversation an hour deeper. When I have a meeting coming up, I dump everything I know about the company into a thread and ask for the three questions I should be asking. When I want to understand a new industry, I ask for the five biggest players, their differentiation, and the typical economics of the category.
The contractors who win the next decade aren’t going to be the ones who avoid AI. They’re going to be the ones who use it ten times a day to compress decades of context into minutes. If you’re not in that habit yet, force yourself to use it once an hour for a week. It will become reflexive.
The lead math every owner has to know
About twenty minutes in, Dan pushed me on the metrics that matter, and I gave him the version I give every contractor who hires us. You cannot just measure leads. Leads are not money. You have to track three numbers: how many leads came in, how many of those turned into booked appointments, and how many of those appointments closed. If you spent $10,000 on Facebook ads and got 100 leads, that’s a hundred-dollar lead, which sounds fine — but if only 20 turned into appointments and 5 closed, you paid $2,000 to acquire each customer. That might be profitable or might be catastrophic depending on your average ticket and lifetime value.
This is where most home service businesses fail at marketing. They look at cost per lead and stop there. The agencies that take advantage of them love that. The owners who win force every channel to report cost per booked appointment and cost per closed job.
What a killer Facebook ad actually looks like
Dan asked for a concrete example of an ad that’s working right now. The honest answer is that the ads winning in 2026 share three traits: a strong specific offer, video that shows the work being done, and proof in the form of real customer footage. A killer concrete coating ad isn’t a clever script. It’s a 30-second video of an actual garage transformation, with the homeowner saying on camera that it took one day and looks better than they expected. The hook in the first three seconds is usually the offer — “schedule before May 31 and get $500 off” or “free epoxy floor estimate this weekend.”
Static photo ads still work, but in 2026 video is dominating because the platforms reward it. If your agency is running text-and-photo creative in your category and your competitors are running video, you’re going to lose.
Transparent pricing is the next HVAC shift
Around the 30-minute mark we got into HVAC specifically, and I told Dan that transparent pricing on a company website is the move I expect to take over the industry in the next two years. Most HVAC companies still hide their pricing behind “request a quote” forms because the legacy model was to send a tech to the home and pressure-sell. That model is dying. Consumers expect to see a ballpark number before they pick up the phone, and the HVAC companies that put real prices on their websites are winning conversion rates that the rest of the category can’t match.
This is why we built HVAC Quote.ai with Dennis Yu — to give contractors a fast, transparent quoting layer that converts website visitors into booked appointments instead of leaving them stuck in a quote-request black hole.
Brand recognition is the silent multiplier on every ad you run
Toward the end, Dan asked a sharp question: how much does brand really matter for a home service business? My answer is that brand is the silent multiplier on every ad dollar you spend. If a homeowner has seen your name three times before they see your ad — in their neighborhood Facebook group, on a yard sign, in a Google search — your ad converts at 6 or 7 percent instead of the category average of 3 or 4. That doubling of conversion rate is the difference between a profitable ad account and an unprofitable one.
The mistake most contractors make is treating brand and direct response as separate strategies. They’re the same strategy, executed across different surfaces. Get content out everywhere — short-form video, podcast appearances, neighborhood mailers, content on your website — and your paid ads start working twice as hard.
Use AI to free up time and reinvest it
We closed the conversation with the same advice I’d give any owner trying to scale: use AI to free up the time you currently spend on tasks a junior assistant could do, then reinvest that time into the two activities that actually grow a business — talking to customers and recruiting talent. AI won’t grow your company by itself. But the hours it gives back can.
About the host: Dan Leibrandt
Dan Leibrandt hosts the Local Marketing Secrets podcast, where he interviews operators and agency owners about what’s actually working to grow local service businesses. He’s one of the most consistent voices in the home service marketing space and the show is a great place to find practical, no-fluff conversations with operators who are in the trenches.
Want help applying any of this to your business?
If you run a home service company — concrete coatings, HVAC, fencing, painting — and you want a marketing operation that actually produces booked appointments instead of vanity metrics, I’d be happy to talk. You can reach me through the Professional Network page or by tagging me on social. And if you haven’t yet watched my conversation with Dennis Yu on Dollar-a-Day for Contractors, that’s the next thing to put on your list — it’s the playbook I lean on for almost every client we work with.
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