A 1969 plumbing company added air conditioning in 2014. The thing that joined them together was never advertised once

Who this is

Cody & Sons has been plumbing in Dallas since 1969. Third generation, two shops now — Dallas and Plano. The heating and cooling side arrived in 2014, which is forty-five years after the plumbing side and is why the two licences in the footer have such different numbers: M-36081 and TACLA57826E.

A company that old in one metro is not short of customers. It is short of a reason for them to call in the years when nothing breaks.

The product that was not a product

The maintenance plan existed. It had a page, it had a price, and essentially all of it was sold by a technician standing in somebody's kitchen at the end of a repair.

That is not a bad channel. It is a channel with a hard ceiling: you can only sell a plan to somebody who already had something go wrong, which means the plan can never grow faster than the failures.

A subscription sold only at the point of repair is not a subscription business. It is an upsell with a monthly invoice attached.

Why this matters more for two trades than one

A plumbing customer who signs up for a plan meets a technician twice a year for reasons that have nothing to do with an emergency. During one of those visits somebody looks at the air conditioning, because they are already in the house and it takes four minutes.

For a company where one trade is fifty-six years old and the other is eleven, that is the cheapest possible introduction. The plan was not a retention product. It was the distribution channel for the newer trade, and nobody had described it that way out loud.

What the search terms said

Almost nobody searches for a maintenance plan. That is the first thing to accept, and it is why the plan had never been advertised: there is no keyword to buy.

What people do search for is the thing the plan prevents, and the season in which they search for it is very specific.

What we argued about

The disagreement was about whether to advertise the plan to people who had never used the company. Our view was no, initially — a subscription from a stranger is a harder sale than a repair from a stranger.

We were half right. Cold plan advertising on search performed badly and we stopped it after five weeks. The same offer to households already in the CRM performed well enough to fund the rest of the work, which is a less impressive finding and a more useful one.

The Plano problem

Two shops, twenty-five miles apart, both advertising into the same middle. Before this work the account had one set of campaigns covering both, which meant Richardson and Addison were being bought twice at the same time by the same company.

Splitting the map cost nothing and returned about a fifth of the waste on its own. It is the least interesting thing in this case and probably the first thing most two-location companies should check.

What this does not prove

• Plan signups grew from a base that was already healthy after fifty-plus years of trading, so the percentage is smaller in absolute terms than it sounds.
• The twelve-month follow-on figure necessarily includes signups from before this work, because twelve months of history is longer than the window we changed anything in.
• Cold search advertising for the plan failed and we ran it for five weeks. That was our call and it was wrong.
• We cannot separate the effect of advertising the plan from the effect of splitting the two locations. They happened in the same quarter in the same account.
• Members buying the second trade is the number this whole case rests on, and it is read from the client's CRM without an audit of how consistently jobs are tagged by trade.

What to take from this

1. Advertise the subscription, not just the repairA plan sold only at the point of failure can never grow faster than your failure rate, which is a ceiling nobody set on purpose.
2. Sell plans to your own list before strangersA subscription asks for trust in advance, and cold search traffic has not given you any yet — in this account it cost more than three times as much per signup.
3. Attach the plan to the search that already existsNobody searches for a maintenance plan, but plenty of people search for the tune-up inside it, and that page can carry both prices.
4. Draw a boundary between your own locationsTwo shops in one campaign bid against each other for the households in the middle, and you pay the difference to the auction.

Questions people ask about this one

Why advertise a maintenance plan when nobody searches for one?

Because the searches that surround it are plentiful. Tune-ups, flushes, inspections and service contract pricing are all searched, and every one of them is a job that sits inside the plan. The page those searches land on can show the one-off price and the plan price together, which is not a trick — it is the comparison the person was about to do themselves.

Is a maintenance plan worth it for a company that is already busy?

It is worth more, not less, because the value is not the plan fee. It is two scheduled visits a year to a household that would otherwise only call when something fails. For a company selling two trades it is also the cheapest way to introduce the second one, since the technician is already in the house.

Should the plan be sold to people who have never used you?

In this account, no. Cold search traffic cost over three times as much per signup as the company's own list and we stopped after five weeks. That may be specific to a fifty-year-old brand with a large customer base to mail — a newer company with no list has to start somewhere — but the sequence is the same either way: your own customers first.

How do two locations end up competing with each other?

By default. One set of campaigns covering both shops will enter the same auction for a household in the middle, and the platform has no way of knowing the two bidders are the same company. The fix is a boundary drawn on drive time from each address, with the overlap assigned deliberately to one side.