These guides are for owners who sell large jobs or repeat commercial work and want to make better marketing decisions, with or without an agency. Each one tackles a single problem in depth, uses worked numbers you can replace with your own, and ends with a short checklist.
-
How much can you afford to pay for a lead on a big job?
Your maximum cost per lead comes from four numbers you already have: average contract value, gross margin, close rate and the share of margin you will spend to win a job. This guide works through them.
-
Building a project portfolio that sells
A portfolio sells when each project tells a short, specific story a buyer can picture themselves in. This guide shows how to capture that story on every job without slowing the crew down.
-
Selling to plant and facility managers in Vaughan's employment areas
Commercial buyers rarely respond to homeowner-style marketing. They want a vendor who is easy to approve, reliable on the first job and easy to keep. This guide shows how to become that vendor.
Pricing a lead for big-ticket work
How much can you afford to pay for a lead on a big job? is the guide to start with. It shows how to calculate the most you can pay for a serious enquiry, using your average contract value, gross margin and close rate.
It explains why a $400 lead can be cheap for a custom builder and ruinous for a handyman, how to account for a sales cycle that lasts months, and how to split your budget between project types of different value. It also covers the questions to ask any agency about cost per lead, and the warning signs that a campaign is buying the wrong enquiries.
Read this if you have ever wondered whether your ad spend is too high, too low or simply aimed at the wrong jobs.
Selling to plant and facility managers
Selling to plant and facility managers in Vaughan's employment areas is for service firms whose customers are businesses, not households. It walks through how commercial buyers find, check and approve vendors, and what each person in the buying group cares about.
You will learn how to build a target account list, what belongs on a vendor-ready web page, how to approach a first conversation without being a pest, and how to turn one job into an ongoing account. It also covers Canada's anti-spam legislation at a high level, with a link to the official source, because outreach by email is where many firms go wrong.
Read this if you have a commercial or industrial side to your business, or want one.
Building a project portfolio that sells
Building a project portfolio that sells is for builders, renovators and specialty contractors. It explains how to document finished jobs so they actually persuade a careful buyer, rather than sitting in a gallery nobody reads.
It covers what to photograph and when, the short written story every project page needs, how to talk about budget ranges without scaring people off, how to get owner permission, and how to use the same material in search, ads and follow-up. There is a simple template you can hand to a site lead.
Read this if your website shows photos but not proof, or if buyers keep asking for references you struggle to provide.
Who writes them
Ali Sedighi, MBA, writes and reviews every guide, drawing on 17+ years in digital marketing and the methods behind our published HVAC results. Where a guide mentions a law, a regulator or a City plan, it links to the official page, and the date at the top tells you when it was last checked. If something has changed since then, the official source wins.
How to use these guides
Each guide can be read on its own, but they work best in this order:
- Start with the lead-cost guide to set your budget and your ceiling.
- Read the portfolio guide if most of your buyers are homeowners, or the facility-manager guide if they are businesses.
- Apply one change at a time and measure it for at least a couple of months before judging it.
If you want help applying them, our services page explains how we put these ideas into practice, and pricing shows what it costs. We are a marketing and consulting service, not a contractor; the guides are about winning and keeping work, never about how to do the work itself. You can also call, text or email with a question about any guide.
Frequently asked questions
Are these guides free to use?
Yes. Read them, share them with your office manager and use the worksheets. There is nothing to sign up for.
Do the guides apply outside Vaughan?
Mostly yes. The examples use Vaughan communities and employment areas, but the arithmetic and processes work for any contractor selling large or commercial jobs.
Will you add more guides?
We add guides when we can write something genuinely useful and specific. We would rather have three good guides than thirty thin ones.