I came to talk about social media. What we laid out on Wednesday is a lot bigger than that. This is the order I would work it in, what each piece does for the others, and the few things I need from you before anything gets built.
Prepared for Todd, Colin and Mike. For the three of you, not for forwarding.
The role you were hiring for was social media. By the time we stood up, my notes had seven pieces on them, and most of them are the kind a person does once by hand and then never has time to do again. Written down, they connect.
Nothing you buy for marketing can prove itself until a lead can be followed to its ending.
You paid for social and cancelled it because it was not worth it. Maybe it was not. Nobody in the building could say, because there was nothing to say it on. That is the first thing I would fix, and it is the reason I am willing to be measured the same way.
So the order below is not "most exciting first." It is: see what happens to every lead, put a scorecard in front of every manager every week, and then feed that scorecard with reviews, pages and content that can be counted.
Three are winning where they stand. One is a different problem.
Read live from the search results, not estimated. They will drift, which is the point of tracking them weekly.
Begin with the projects that do not touch your existing system or setup. Everything in the first phase runs on your website, your Google profiles, your phones and a database of your own. None of it waits on the Cyncly decision, and all of it is still useful whichever way that decision goes.
Every lead, from every form and every source, lands in one place instead of an inbox. Mike's check stays, as one tap: real or not. The right manager sees it on his phone in seconds and assigns it with one tap, because matching the lead to the right salesperson is judgement, and that judgement stays exactly where it is today. The rep has it moments later. Every step is timestamped, so for the first time there is a record of what happened, per store, per rep, per source.
Nobody on the sales floor enters anything. That is the design rule, because every system you have tried died at the point where a salesperson had to type. The rep answers a text with one word when a lead closes or goes cold, and later your own system fills that in on its own.
Why first: it is Mike's project, and it is the piece of the co-op's program you turned down because it meant sending your sales numbers to New Hampshire. This one never leaves your building.
Leads in and how fast they were picked up, the customer's 1 to 5 on each crew, the review count and rating at each store, and the contest standings, pulled together and emailed to every manager, Colin and Todd once a week. Common complaints summarised. Standout quotes named. One page, every Monday.
Why second: it is small, fast, depends on nothing else, and it is the thing everyone in the company will actually look at.
An hour or two after the job closes, the customer gets a text: "Mike and his crew finished your vinyl plank today. How did they do, 1 to 5? Just reply with a number." That answer lands on the installer's record and, if it is a 1, 2 or 3, on the store manager's phone within a minute so he can call the same day. Then everyone, whatever they answered and whether they answered at all, gets a second text with one tap to that store's Google page. One reminder a few days later, then it stops.
Why this shape: you asked for two things, more reviews and real feedback on the crews. This gets both from one customer at the cost of one number and one tap, and the Google ask is identical for everyone, which is the rule. It needs a real cell number for every job, so the measure and the paperwork start asking for one, and the numbers you already have get sorted into cell and landline on my end.
Job closes, installer gets a text asking for before and afters, replies with the photos the same way he texts his wife. Two or three quick questions in the same thread if you want them. No app. On my end the photos get tagged to the job and the town, cleaned up, and routed to the pages, the posts and the review ask.
Why here: this is the content supply for everything below it, and it is the reason the town pages and the posts will look like you and not like a stock library.
Redo the four that exist and build the top ten towns we pick together, starting with the ones where you already have job photos. Each page is written for its town, built for search and for AI search, and carries a real job from that town, the installer's name, and a way to reach you from the page. Templeton is the model. Batches after that ordered by population, drive time from the nearest store, and recent jobs.
On testing: a single small-town page will never see enough traffic to test on its own. Fifty of them will. We test across the set, half one way and half the other, and read the total.
Three posts a week across the four markets, in four voices, because Spirit Lake is a lake-house market and Urbandale is a metro suburb and they should not be reading the same thing. About your stores, your crews and your towns, never a national sale you are not running. Fed by the crew photos. Every post approved by Mike before it goes anywhere until it is dialed in, then as much or as little approval as you want.
Mike sent the examples, and he already sorted them the right way. The job photos and product posts are the baseline and that is what runs on schedule. The personal, funny, people-in-the-store reels are the ones you love and those come from your own people with a phone, and they feed straight in. Nobody is going to fake that with software, and I would not try.
Why last in phase one: it is the piece that could not prove itself before. Now it lands on the same scorecard as everything else, and it runs alongside what the co-op still drops on your calendar rather than on top of it.
A text and an email a couple of days after an estimate, again the next week, again a few weeks later, each one naming the actual product they were quoted. Anything that comes back alive lands in front of the salesperson who quoted it.
In phase one somebody taps a button when a job closes. In phase two the job closing in your system sends the text on its own.
The fastest money in the building is money already owed. A payment link and a reminder sequence on outstanding balances can start small and by hand, and prove the lift before anything is wired into your system. Cards for deposits, bank transfer for balances, and every account in your name.
A published number and a chat on the site where an assistant answers, qualifies and books the free estimate, then drops it into the same follow-up. The value is at nine on a Saturday night when every other store is closed too.
Your phones are the store. Nothing here touches them until we know exactly what you have and what it costs, and the first step needs no change at all.
Once we know what WIN provides, what it costs and whether there is a term, the options open up: one texting inbox per store instead of personal phones, a text back on every missed call, sales calls recorded and scored the way the training calls are, and possibly your numbers on a service you control, with today's phones kept as the fallback while it proves itself.
None of that gets decided now. It gets decided when the bill is on the table.
Click to call from the quote. Every call and text logged against the job on its own. The crew text and the review text fire from the job closing, not from somebody remembering. Real calls scored, not practice ones.
This is the piece the co-op's tools and the CRMs kept trying to sell you, and it never stuck because it sat outside the system your people use all day. Built into the one you own, it is just how the phone works.
A job closing is the event that drives everything. One text to the installer turns into proof on a town page, a post in the right market, a 1 to 5 on the crew, a Google review, and a line on next Monday's scorecard.
Swipe sideways to see the whole loop.
The Cyncly decision and the build decision are the same decision.
I have read the subscription proposal Colin sent. Nothing in it has a date, and there is nothing signed, so nothing on paper forces a decision. The only clock is the new system Cyncly is rolling out this fall, which requires the subscription.
Your software has a real, documented way for outside systems to talk to it, and what it will let us do is tied to the edition you subscribe to. The sheet prints that access only at the top edition, not the one you were quoted. Your database also sits on your own servers, which may open a second, read-only path that does not depend on any of that. I will confirm both before I promise anything.
Three things I want from Cyncly in writing before anyone decides: how long they will support what you run today, whether the quoted edition is hosted by them or by you, and who publishes the daily product and pricing feed. Getting those answers is worth doing whether or not you build anything with me.
None of them are homework.
Everything that is about your business is yours, during and after. That means the content, the photos, the copy on every page, your customer and lead data, your domains, your Google profiles, your social accounts, and the pages themselves. If we stop working together, all of it stays with you, and I hand over anything you do not already control. You are never in a position where leaving costs you your own material.
What I keep is the engine that produces it: the software, the automations, the prompts and the templates I bring with me and reuse across everything I build. You have full use of it while we are working together. It is not yours to keep, for the same reason a marketing hire's experience walks out with them when they leave.
Bring the rest of the list. Some of what you were going to hire for is not on this page yet, and that is on purpose. I would rather hear it than guess at it. The Templeton page is below if you want to see what a finished town page looks like against the four that exist.
See the Templeton pageDave Pedelty
me@davidpedelty.com