the Partnership Program
Where is your marketing money actually going?
If you’ve read the book, you know the question it keeps asking. Not “how do I get more leads?” but “where does the money stop before it reaches me?” Answering it every week means following each dollar of spend to a call, each call to an estimate, and each estimate to a job.
The Partnership Program is for the owner who now knows that question matters and would rather not be the one answering it every Monday.
The one question that should leave your desk
“Is our marketing working, and what do we do next?”
Most owners answer it with whatever report is in front of them. We answer it from the calls, the pipeline and the jobs that closed, and then we act on it.
Following the money, step by step
- 1
Each dollar of spend
Every dollar is tied to the campaign, search or channel that spent it. When a dollar keeps going out and nothing comes back, it gets moved or cut. Nobody is paid more for leaving it running.
- 2
Each call
Every inbound call is tracked back to what made the phone ring. Then it’s sorted: a real inquiry worth having, a price-shopper, or a wrong number.
- 3
An estimate
The calls worth having become estimates, and each one carries a value. The ones going quiet show up while there’s still time to follow up, not months later.
- 4
A job
A closed sale is traced back to the dollar that started it. That’s the score: not clicks, not leads, but the work that actually landed. And it decides where the next dollar goes.
What we run, end to end
- 1
Demand
paid search, paid social, local search, SEO and your website.
- 2
What happens next
call handling, lead qualification and routing.
- 3
The score
pipeline and revenue tracked from the first contact to the closed sale.
- 4
The decisions
where budget moves, what gets cut, and which bottleneck gets worked on next.
- 5
The Hub
where your office team sees clients and prospects in one place.
- 6
One named senior person
accountable for the relationship, from the first week on.
Why it’s worth trusting us with this
Working with green-industry businesses since 2018.
That first year, before any AI, we tagged and audited client calls by hand, one call at a time.
The same year, we analyzed nearly 13,000 green-industry companies.
More than 110,000 inbound calls tracked since 2023.
More than 22,000 opportunities tracked since 2023, worth an estimated $25 million in projects.
What being a partner means
A transaction is fixed: a price, a scope, a monthly invoice. A partnership moves, because the market does. Search changes, platforms change, what worked last spring stops working, and the work changes with it.
So it runs both ways. You know your company, your crews, your customers and your limits. We know where the money goes and what it brings back. Material changes come to you in plain English before anything changes course.
We work with a small number of companies on purpose, and we choose them as carefully as they choose us. That keeps the work owned by people who know your company, not spread thin across hundreds.
Before we start, we check for conflicts by the actual services and customers. Direct competition is declined. Partial overlap goes ahead only with your informed consent.
You set the course. We work the controls.
You decide
- the growth target
- the services and customers you want
- your capacity
- the lines you won’t cross
We
- make the day-to-day decisions inside that course
- bring material changes to you in plain English
What we need from your side
The work runs on real information, so a few things come from your side:
- access to your sales data, your CRM or job software, and your phone and ad accounts;
- the owner’s call on the few decisions that only the owner can make, when they come up.
Your price, over time
Technology moves fast, so the work we did last year is worth a little less every year. We answer that by doing more each year, not by charging more. Clients who stay keep their price, even through inflation. Some of our clients have paid the same price for over 5 years.
Sometimes a tool costs money to run for your company, and when it does, you see that cost on its own line. The price for the work itself holds. That’s how we thank the companies that stay.
How it’s priced
Our fee is a share of the revenue from your new customers, and it’s never more than your cap in any month.
The caps.
Larger companies pay a smaller share, with a higher cap:
- 3% of new-customer revenue, capped at $2,000 a month
- 1.5%, capped at $3,000 a month
- 0.75%, capped at $4,000 a month
- 0.35%, capped at $5,000 a month
Which one fits is set from your company’s own books when we start, not from a form. The cap is a ceiling: onboarding can set yours lower, never higher. It’s your worst-case month, in writing.
What a year usually looks like.
Established partners usually reach the cap in season; slow months cost less. There’s no monthly minimum, so in a quiet month the bill falls with sales.
What counts as a new customer.
Every new customer from the start date counts, not only the ones traced to a campaign, because from that day we’re responsible for how the whole company brings in new work. Existing customers don’t count, and that list is agreed and signed before we start. The same goes if you buy another company: once we have its customer list, its customers count as existing too.
Why every new customer counts.
We work hard to bring in the kind of customers who refer others, and a referred customer still checks your reviews and your website, calls your phones and gets the follow-up we run. Customers who would have come anyway, from the goodwill you’ve already built, count too, and you also get the benefit of everything we’ve already learned, so it evens out.
It starts with the Accelerator, usually.
Nothing can be measured until the systems are built and running. A one-time fee of up to $5,000 sets up those systems and the onboarding, scaled to how much of it your company needs. It isn’t refundable. All of it is credited against your first partnership payments, so the setup is paid back to you as the work starts producing.
Your plan is yours to keep.
If the business grows past the cap, nothing changes unless you want it to. Moving to a bigger plan is only ever your choice, and it buys more of our priority.
For qualifying companies under $500k a year: $1,000 a month, flat.
This one is by selection. It’s for owners who are already raising the standard of service in an underserved territory, and the standard of the jobs they offer the people who work there.
We work closely with those companies, with the same playbook we run for our largest clients and one aim: growth past $500k, as fast as is healthy.
We see it as the start of a long relationship, and a way to put what we’ve learned back where a territory feels it most.
That’s the whole model. Above that first tier, our pay rises only when your new-customer revenue does, and it stops rising at a number you agreed in advance.
What a year looked like for one partner. $1.73 million in new sales over 12 months. Partnership payments came to $20,691, which is 1.2% of those sales. In 9 of the 12 months, the $2,000 cap was the bill.
How we’re paid, and what we never take
We are never paid a percentage of your ad spend, so we have every reason to cut spending that isn’t working. Everything is agreed in writing before we begin: the fee structure, what counts as a new sale, the cap and the scope. Nothing changes quietly.
The Navigator’s Oath
1No stake in your ad spend.
We do not take a percentage of media spend. We recommend reducing, stopping, or moving spend whenever the evidence supports it.
2Truth over comfort.
We tell you the real number, including when our own work is not producing or when we got something wrong. A polished dashboard never outranks reality.
3Terms agreed in writing.
Your fee structure, performance calculation, caps, scope, and responsibilities are written before work begins. Nothing changes quietly.
4Your accounts and your data.
Business accounts and assets remain in your name wherever possible. Your business data is yours and exportable.
5No kickbacks, markup or hidden conflicts.
We disclose any financial relationship that could affect a recommendation and do not quietly mark up third-party costs.
6No platform gaslighting.
We do not let a platform award itself credit for revenue it did not produce. Closed customers and real value are the score.
7You set the course. We work the controls.
You own the company’s direction. We operate within it and bring material changes to you before changing course.
8Active conflict checks.
We evaluate overlapping markets by actual services and customers. Direct competition is declined; partial overlap proceeds only with informed consent.
9No client upsell treadmill.
The operating stack and member resources required for the agreed relationship are included. We do not turn an active partnership into constant product pitching.
10A named senior owns the relationship.
The accountable senior is identified in the engagement. Your relationship is not quietly handed to an unseen junior after the sale.
If the partnership ends. We build in your own accounts wherever we can, and the minimum term is agreed in writing before we start. If we stop working together, we run a real handover: the essential forms, calls and lead routing move to a simpler setup in your own accounts, and we check they work before we step away. What only exists while we run it, like the Hub, ends with the partnership.
The next step is a short application
By application only. It covers the shape of your company, how your marketing runs today and why you’d want a partner now. Each one gets read, and the reply says the right way to begin. Usually that’s the Accelerator first. No deck and no pitch.
Who this works for
an owner-led green-industry company with a real base already built, an owner who wants the revenue engine run rather than managed from their desk, and a team willing to share real sales data.
What changes
the marketing question that used to sit on your desk every morning isn’t yours to carry anymore. You look at a number you can believe, and you spend your time on the team, the customers and the company.
Need the foundations built first? See the Accelerator.