Who it’s for
Built for the messy middle.
Big enough that marketing spend is real money spread across several vendors. Small enough that nobody’s full-time job is tracking where the jobs came from.
A great fit
- Home service or trades business doing roughly $2M to $15M a year
- Paying three to six marketing vendors every month
- Using a CRM like GoHighLevel, HubSpot, ServiceTitan, Jobber, JobNimbus or AccuLynx
- Tracking some lead sources, but still losing track of where jobs come from
- Someone asks “is the mailer working?” and nobody can answer with a number
Probably not yet
- One or two vendors, or mostly referral work — you already know the answer
- No CRM, or one nobody keeps up to date
- Leads arrive by text to a personal phone and never get written down
- An in-house marketing team that already tracks every dollar
What has to be in place
Short list, and we handle most of it during setup. It is here so there are no surprises.
Leads
A phone number on every lead
This is the one real requirement. Jobs are matched to leads by phone number, so a lead with no number can never be connected to the work it produced. If your CRM captures leads without phone numbers, those jobs show up as revenue Tallybird cannot explain — which we report rather than hide.
Why phone, not email
Because in the trades the phone number is the one field that survives. People call, the office writes it down, and it appears on the job. Emails are optional; the number is not.
Spend
Marketing spend that lives in the books
If vendors are paid from the business account, we can see it. If some are paid personally or in cash, those need adding by hand each month — possible, just worth knowing before you start.
Where spend comes from
QuickBooks, Xero, or a monthly export. Any of the three works; the first two eventually sync on their own.
Margin
A rough gross margin
The verdict compares spend to profit, not revenue, so we need to know roughly what a job earns you. An estimate is fine — you can change it any time and watch the thresholds move. If you track job cost in your CRM we use the real figure instead.
Why it matters
At a 35% margin a vendor needs $2.86 back per dollar to break even. At 45% it needs $2.22. Guessing the margin wrong moves every verdict on the page.
Free vendor audit
Send us a quarter. We’ll send back a verdict.
Last quarter’s marketing spend and lead list is all we need. No call, no connection to anything, no obligation at the end of it.
- 01Every vendor ranked by profit after marketing, not by revenue
- 02Which of them currently cannot be measured at all, and what that spend adds up to
- 03What your real break-even return is at your margin