Picture a plumber in his truck at 7:10 on a Tuesday. Engine running, coffee in the cup holder, phone face-up on the passenger seat. Three new leads since six. One open slot on the board. By nine he’ll call someone like me and ask for more leads.

Les Binet has won more marketing effectiveness awards than anyone I can name. Years ago he worked at a tech startup that grew thirty-fold in nine months. His verdict on that year, in print: chaotic, stressful, and unpleasant.

Thirty-fold. The plumber in the truck would sign for that on a napkin. The man who lived it says slow and steady may be more rewarding.

I run Google Ads for plumbers, HVAC companies, and electricians. That’s the short-term half of marketing: sales activation. The phone rings this week, or it doesn’t, and I can show you which click made it ring. So you’d expect the biggest mistake I see to live inside the ad account. It doesn’t. It happens before anyone logs in. The owner asks for growth, and nobody asks him what kind.

Binet wrote a chapter for a report Intuit Mailchimp published with Evidenza, “How to Grow Your Brand“, and two pages of it ask the questions owners skip. How big do you really want to be? How fast? Do you want to be the biggest, or the best? Volume, or margin? Profits now, or later? And how do you plan to leave?

He writes them for brands. I read them as a work order for an ad account. Each answer changes what I do on Monday morning.

How big

A two-truck plumber who likes being on the tools does not need the whole metro. He needs a tight radius, a short list of the jobs he wants, and the discipline to let the rest ring somewhere else. Run that account like you’re trying to take over the city, and you buy clicks you can’t serve. The phone rings, nobody can get there, the reviews start to slide.

Now the owner who wants twenty trucks: Different account. Every service line, every zip code, and a cost per booked job that looks ugly for a while. Binet explains why on the page before the questions: people buy the names they already know. In a zip code where nobody has heard of you, you pay more per click and you close fewer of them. That’s not a Google problem. That’s what being small costs, and growth is how you stop paying it.

How fast

Fast means buying calls before you have the trucks to answer them. You raise the budget before the schedule is full, you push into new areas before the reviews follow you there, and you live with a worse cost per booked job for a few months while Google’s bidding learns the new area. It only works if someone answers the phone. A doubled budget does nothing for a call that goes to voicemail at 4:30 on a Friday.

Slow is cheaper, and most owners are happier with it. The budget goes up a step when last month’s jobs are booked, done and paid for. Not before. From the outside, slow looks like less fun. From inside the truck, it looks like sleep.

Biggest or best. Volume or margin.

These two questions decide more about my keyword list than anything else.

Want to be the biggest? Then you take the $89 drain call, because that customer buys a water heater in two years and the volume keeps your techs busy in February. You bid broad, you bid on every service, and you judge the account by booked jobs.

Want to be the best, and paid like it? Then stop paying for the $89 call. Bid on the repipe, the system replacement, the panel upgrade. Fewer leads, bigger tickets, and the number I care about shifts from cost per booked job to revenue per dollar of ad spend. Binet says it plainly: for some firms, growth is about charging higher prices, not selling more units. In the trades, that starts in the search terms report. Every query you pay for is a price point you chose.

How soon

An owner with payroll due Friday gets a different account from one who can wait a year for the second visit. If every dollar has to pay back within thirty days, I cut anything that doesn’t close, keep the radius tight, and don’t run experiments. If the owner can wait, we fund the campaigns that bring in first-time customers near break-even, because the money is in the second visit and the maintenance plan. Binet’s page on why size matters comes down to this: bigger businesses get more loyal customers and more to sell them. You buy that patiently or not at all.

How you leave

Few owners ask this one before they ask about leads, and it rewrites everything above.

Will you sell to a bigger company one day? Buyers pay for predictable lead flow and a cost per booked job they can read without you in the room. Build the tracking now. Run the account so a stranger could audit it. Passing the business to your kid? Then the goal is a name the town knows without your face attached to it, and that’s a longer, slower project than any ad budget. Planning a comfortable retirement at your size? Then you may not need more leads. You need a higher price, and the nerve to charge it.

Here is the honest limit of what I do. Google Ads reaches the people searching today, and Binet puts that pool at maybe 5% of the market. It fills up fast. If your ambition is bigger than that pool, the other 95% have to know your name before the water heater fails. That’s brand work, and a different conversation. I’ll stay in my lane. But the lane runs better when you’ve told me where it goes.

Binet says growth is where the fame and the fun are. The same man calls his fastest year chaotic, stressful, and unpleasant. Both are true. You can build an ad account for either. You can’t build it for both.

Back to the truck. Tuesday, 7:10, three leads on the screen. The owner who wants two trucks and his weekends answers one, lets the other two ring somewhere else, and backs out of the driveway. The owner who wants twenty answers all three and spends the drive calling a tech he hasn’t hired yet. Same phone. Same leads. Two different businesses, and only one of them is yours.

Latest posts by Luis and Daniel Castaneda (see all)