Paid Traffic, Managed.
No Markup.
Google and Meta ads that land on pages built to convert, tracked back to jobs won rather than forms filled.
You pay the platforms directly, on your card, on your account. We charge $1,000 a month plus 20% of spend and we never touch the money. Minimum $3,000 a month in ad spend, below that we will tell you not to bother.
Next available build start date is Sept. 28, 2026
Ads on a broken pipeline is just faster spending
Paid traffic is the only channel where you can turn a dial and get more people. That is also why it is the fastest way to lose money.
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A contact form that fails silently
Now it fails on traffic you paid for. Every inquiry that never arrives cost you a click first.
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A five-second page load
Now it costs $8 a click. People who leave before the page paints were always leaving. They just bill you on the way out now.
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A lead that sits unread until Monday
Now it sits unread having cost money to acquire. Paid leads decay faster than any other kind, because they clicked three ads, not one.
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So the pipeline gets built first
Tracking verified, then traffic turned on. That is why ads are part of the Growth Engine rather than a standalone service.
We will not run ads into a site that cannot convert them. Not as a policy. As arithmetic. You would be paying us to help you lose money faster.
Audit your own ad account this week. Free.
Five checks, about an hour, on the account you are running right now. If you are spending $3,000 a month, the first one alone typically finds $400 to $900 of waste. We are not being generous. We just think you should know before you talk to anyone, including us.
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Open the search terms report The big one
Not keywords. Search terms, the actual things people typed before they clicked. Most business owners have never opened it, and it is where the money leaks.
- Google Ads, then Campaigns, then Insights and reports, then Search terms.
- Set the date range to the last 90 days. Sort by cost, highest first.
- Read the top 50 out loud. Genuinely out loud. It makes the bad ones obvious.
- Anything that is not a person who could hire you gets added as a negative keyword.
You are looking for the classics: jobs, salary, how to, DIY, free, cheap, competitor names, cities you do not serve, and the wrong service entirely. A roofer paying $14 a click for roofing jobs near me is paying to be applied to.
Typical finding20% to 40% of spend on terms that could never become a customer
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Check that conversion tracking is actually firing
Tools, then Conversions. Look at the status column. If anything says No recent conversions or Inactive on a campaign that is spending, your account has been optimizing blind, possibly for months.
Then check what is being counted. If a page view of /thank-you/ is a conversion, and so is clicking the phone number, and so is scrolling 50%, your cost-per-conversion is fiction.
Typical findingBroken tracking, or conversions counting things that are not leads
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See where the ads actually land
Click your own ads. Pay for the click, it is worth the $12.
If an ad for emergency AC repair lands on your homepage, you are asking a person in a hot house to go find the right page. Most will not. Every ad group should land on a page about that one thing, with the phone number visible without scrolling.
Typical findingEverything pointing at the homepage
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Check whether you are paying for your own name
Search your business name. If your own ad appears above your own organic listing and nobody else is bidding on you, you may be paying for clicks you were getting free.
Worth knowing: this one is genuinely arguable. If a competitor is bidding on your name, defending it is usually correct. Look before you decide, rather than assuming either way.
Typical findingA few hundred a month either wasted or well spent. Check which.
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Call your own ad, at 7pm on a Saturday The one that decides it
Then fill in the form on the landing page from your phone, on cell data, and time how long until someone responds.
This is the check nobody runs. The best-optimized account in Oakland County loses to the competitor who answers first. If your answer is Monday, fix that before you spend another dollar on traffic.
Typical findingThe ads are not the problem
Why we would hand you that. Because most accounts we look at do not need an agency. They need those five things fixed and then six months of leaving it alone. If that is you, do it and keep your money. The businesses that run the audit, fix what they find, and still want to scale are exactly who the Growth Engine is built for.
How to tell if your agency is marking up your spend
Most business owners do not know this is checkable. It is, in about five minutes, and the answer matters more than the management fee.
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Check 01
Whose card is the platform charging?
What it should beYour account, your card, your billing. The agency takes manager access. Any shop worth hiring agrees without a pause.
The tellYou pay the agency a single number and they handle the ads. Google bills their card, they bill you, and the gap is theirs. Not always dishonest, but if nobody told you, that is your answer.
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Check 02
Can you log into Google Ads yourself, right now?
What it should beYour own login at ads.google.com. Tools, then Billing, then Summary shows exactly what Google charged, by month. Compare it to what you were invoiced.
The tellA dashboard they built, and no way to see the platform figure. If your invoice says $5,000 and Google says $3,800, you now know both the markup and something more important about who you are working with.
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Check 03
Is your account inside their manager account, or is it yours?
What it should beAsk: if I leave, do I keep the account and its history? Get it in writing. A manager account with access to yours is completely normal.
The tellThe account itself created under theirs. Then the campaign history, the conversion data and a year of machine learning leave when you do. Starting a mature account over is a real cost nobody quotes you.
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Check 04
What is the fee, expressed as a number?
What it should be20% of spend is clear. $1,000 plus 20% is clear. Fee and media split on the invoice, every month.
The tellManaged advertising services, $4,500. You cannot tell how much of that reached Google. If a shop will not separate their fee from your media spend, that is the whole review.
Ours, plainly. You pay Google and Meta directly, on your card, on accounts in your name. We take manager access. We charge $1,000 a month plus 20% of what you spend, on a separate invoice, and we have never touched a dollar of media. If you leave, the account and every bit of its history stay with you.
When you should not run ads
We turn down ad work most months. Here is when, so you can check before you call.
You cannot spend $3,000 a month
Below that, our fee is a bigger share of your budget than the results justify, and the platforms need volume to learn. You would get more from putting the same money into Foundation and building the organic base first. This is why our published minimum exists, and it is the most common reason we say no.
You cannot handle more work
Ads are a volume dial. Turning it up when your calendar is full produces missed calls and one-star reviews, which cost more than the leads were worth. Hire first.
Nobody answers the phone within five minutes
Paid leads decay faster than any other kind. They clicked three ads, not one. If your realistic response time is later today, fix that before you spend. It is free and it will do more than a better campaign.
You do not know what a customer is worth
Without an average job value and a close rate, nobody can tell you whether a $180 cost-per-lead is excellent or catastrophic. It is one afternoon of arithmetic and it has to happen before, not after.
You want to test it for a month
Google’s algorithm needs roughly 30 conversions to learn a campaign. On most local budgets that is six to eight weeks before the data means anything. A one-month test measures the learning period, not the channel, and then people conclude ads do not work.
What you are actually paying us for
Anyone can build a campaign. Two things separate an account that scales from one that plateaus, and both are unglamorous.
We feed the platforms outcomes, not form fills
A form was submitted
- Google gets very good at finding people who fill in forms
- Tire-kickers fill in forms
- Students fill in forms
- Bots fill in forms
- Cost per lead looks excellent and the phone stays quiet
This click became a $12,400 job
- Google optimizes for people who become $12,400 jobs
- Every lead carries an ID from click through to close
- The CRM records what actually happened to it
- Offline conversions go back to Google and Meta with real values
- Same budget, entirely different traffic
That plumbing is what the Growth Engine builds, and it is the reason ads are not sold separately here. Almost nobody local does it.
We also kill things faster than most.
Reading the search terms report every week, adding negatives, pausing what is not working before it has spent another month proving it. Most accounts fail from neglect, not from strategy.
What is included
- Google Search and Performance Max, plus Meta where the audience is actually there
- Dedicated landing pages built for the ad group, not a homepage with a headline swapped
- Call tracking with a number per campaign, so a phone lead carries a source like a form does
- Offline conversion import, jobs won, with values, fed back to the platforms
- Weekly search term review and negative keyword maintenance
- Monthly reporting on leads, cost per lead, and revenue, not impressions
- 6 to 16 support hours a month, scaling with spend
What it costs
Ads run on the Growth Engine, $12,000 build, then $1,000 a month plus 20% of spend. The build is the pipeline the ads need in order to be worth running.
- $3,000 spend53%
- $5,00040%
- $10,00030%
- $15,00027%
- $20,00025%
This is the number that should decide it, and the one nobody shows you. At the $3,000 minimum our fee is over half your budget again, which is exactly why $3,000 is a floor and not a target. The economics get sensible from $5,000 and genuinely good above $10,000.
The full scale
| Your monthly ad spend | Our fee | Support hours | Fee as % of spend |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paused or seasonal off | $1,000 | 6 | none |
| $3,000, the minimum | $1,600 | 8 | 53% |
| $5,000 | $2,000 | 10 | 40% |
| $10,000 | $3,000 | 12 | 30% |
| $15,000 | $4,000 | 14 | 27% |
| $20,000 | $5,000 | 16 | 25% |
You pay the platforms directly.
Ad spend goes on your card, on your account, and never through us. Our fee is a separate invoice, and we have never touched a dollar of media.
What we will not do
Six things other shops will sell you. Every one of them costs you more than it saves.
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Mark up your ad spend
Not by a dollar. You pay Google and Meta directly and you can check it yourself in five minutes.
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Own your ad account
Manager access, always. If you leave, the account and its entire history stay with you.
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Run ads into a site that cannot convert them
The pipeline gets built and verified first. Otherwise we are helping you lose money faster.
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Take you below $3,000 a month in spend
The math does not work for either of us and we would rather say so now.
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Report impressions, reach or click-through as results
Leads, cost per lead, and revenue. If we cannot tie it to a lead it does not go in the report.
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Promise a cost-per-lead before we have run anything
Anyone quoting you one in a sales meeting is quoting you someone else’s account.
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None of those? Then paid traffic is worth a conversation.
A converting offer, a real budget, and the capacity to answer what comes in.
Where we work
We are in Waterford, Michigan, and most of what we run is for Oakland County and Metro Detroit.
- Auburn Hills
- Birmingham
- Clarkston
- Highland
- Ortonville
- Pontiac
- Rochester
- Royal Oak
- Troy
- Waterford
- White Lake
Outside Michigan?
An ad account does not care where we sit. Distance is not the filter, fit is.
Straight answers
Do I have to buy the Growth Engine to get ads managed?
Yes, and the honest reason is that the ads depend on it. Offline conversion tracking needs a lead to carry an ID from click to close, which needs the CRM, the routing and the attribution the Growth build puts in. Without that we would be running the same generic campaign every other shop runs, and charging you for it.
Can you take over an account I already have?
Usually yes, and it is often better than starting fresh, a mature account carries learning worth real money. We audit it first and tell you honestly whether to keep it or rebuild. Sometimes the honest answer is that the account is fine and you do not need us.
Why is there a minimum spend if you say you have no minimums?
The minimum applies to ad management, not to Growth itself: $3,000 a month if you want us running ads. Below it our fee is more than half your budget again, the platforms do not get enough conversions to learn, and you would do better putting the money into Foundation. If you want Growth for the validation, enrichment and scoring and no ads at all, there is no minimum and the fee is $1,000 a month. Publishing the fee as a percentage of spend is us showing our work rather than asking you to trust it.
How long before ads work?
Data in days, signal in weeks, reliable performance in six to eight. Google needs roughly 30 conversions to learn a campaign, and on a local budget that takes time. Anyone promising you profitable ads in week two is describing a fluke, not a plan.
What is a good cost per lead?
Entirely dependent on what a customer is worth to you. A $200 lead is fantastic for a roofer and ruinous for an oil change. Bring your average job value and close rate and the arithmetic answers itself, and if you do not have those numbers, that is the first thing to fix.
Google or Meta?
Google for demand that already exists, someone typing “furnace repair near me” is buying today. Meta for demand you have to create, and for retargeting people who already visited. Most local service businesses should start with Google and add Meta once search is producing.
What happens if I pause ads for the winter?
Fine, and normal for seasonal businesses. The monthly drops to the $1,000 base, the campaigns stay built, and we turn them back on before your season starts rather than during it. Tell us the month you want to restart and we will work backwards from it.
Do you require a contract?
Month to month with 30 days notice, same as everything else here. If we are not producing you should be able to leave, and you keep the account, the history and the data.
Run the audit first
Do the five checks above on your own account before you talk to anyone. If they fix the problem, keep your money. That is a genuinely good outcome and it costs us nothing to have said so.
If you run them, fix what you find, and still want to scale past what your current setup can carry, that is the call worth having.
+1-248-205-6977 · Mon–Sun, 9am–9pm ET · Waterford, Michigan
- Published pricing
- Month to month, no minimum term
- You own everything
