The after hours path
An answering service that takes a message for a customer standing in water. The message is read at 8am and the job is gone.
Water damage restoration
Marketing for restoration companies. One flat monthly fee.
The highest intent search demand of any trade on this site, and the one where the phone decides everything.
The problem that belongs to restoration
The phone. A lead that rings out at 2am is a lead you paid for and did not get, and this is the trade where that happens most, because your customer is standing in water and will call the next company inside ninety seconds.
We would rather name that on this page than after you have signed, because it is the thing that will make or break the account. There is no bid strategy that fixes an unanswered phone at 2am. If the answering question does not have a real answer, more budget just buys more missed calls at a higher price.
The other half is that the person calling you is usually not the person paying. The insurance process sits between the job and the money, and it stretches the time between a lead and anything you can bank on.
Before any of that
The calls you are already missing
Restoration is the clearest case on this list. The call comes at two in the morning, the caller is standing in water, and the job goes to whoever answers. Not whoever is best, and not whoever is cheapest. Whoever answers.
The front desk answers at two in the morning. It does not try to book a flood for Tuesday: emergency wording stops it dead and gets a person on the phone, which is the only correct behavior at that hour.
$500 to set it up, $500 a month. No contract and no advertising, so it costs nothing to find out whether that is your actual problem.
Incoming call
Wednesday, 2:47am
There's water coming through the kitchen ceiling. It's running down the wall.
You've reached Basin Restoration. I'm an AI assistant and this call is recorded. Is the water still coming in right now?
Yes. I've got a bucket under it but it's getting worse.
I'm not going to book this. I'm getting you a person right now. Stay on the line.
Connecting you to the on call tech. If we drop, he has your number and he's calling you straight back.
Sent to a person, 11 seconds inNo booking attemptedOn call tech dialled
An example of how a call goes, not a recording of a real customer.
The arithmetic
We are not going to put a national average job value on this page. The figures that circulate come from consumer cost guides rather than industry data.
There is also a widely quoted figure for the average homeowner water damage insurance claim, roughly four times the job values those guides give. We could not trace it past a restoration industry blog quoting insurance data, so it is not on this page either.
The number the audit runs on is your own revenue per paid job over the last twelve months, taken from your invoices rather than a cost guide. Source: your books. If that number does not exist yet, producing it is the first useful thing we would do, before a single bid changes.
What we would run, and why
Google Search, and close to nothing else. Nobody browses for water damage restoration. They search, at a bad hour, and they call the first company that answers. Every dollar of the budget belongs to the moment of the search and the minute after it.
Which means the build here is weighted differently. Call tracking, call routing, and the after hours path get more attention than the ad copy does, and that is the right trade in this trade.
How we would read a restoration account
We would refuse to launch until the after hours answering question has a real answer, and put that in writing before you paid a first month.
That is not a formality. We have pulled an emergency response headline off a landing page before launch for exactly this reason, because promising a response the business could not actually make was worse than promising nothing at all.
The build is weighted differently here as a result. Call tracking, call routing and the after hours path get more attention than the ad copy does, because that is where the money is won and lost in this trade.
What we would want you to explain to us on the call: what actually happens to a call at 2am today, end to end, including who picks up and how long the truck takes. We would rather ask than guess.
What is usually broken
Observations, not accusations. Most of these are true in most of the businesses we have looked at.
Calls not tracked at all
The single most important conversion in the trade, invisible to the platform buying the traffic.
A landing page written for daylight
A form above the fold and the phone number in the footer, for a customer who is never going to fill in a form.
Ads running in hours nobody covers
Paying full price for 2am clicks with no 2am answer behind them.
The model, short
One flat monthly fee of $3,500 a month, plus $2,500 of ad spend on your own card, direct to the ad platforms. You fund ad spend on your own card, direct to the ad platforms. We never touch your money. 6 month minimum, billed monthly, and everything is in your name from day one.
The full mechanicOr start lower
The front desk is $500 to set it up, $500 a month. It buys no advertising, has no term, and answers the calls you are already getting. Most businesses should start there and only add the campaigns once the phone is covered.
The audit is free, 5 business days from your application, and it is for the marketing package rather than the front desk.
How the front desk worksTell us what your last 90 days looked like and we will tell you whether we would take it on.