Do it yourself when…
- -You’re under roughly $300K a year — your money is better spent on tools, a helper, and doing excellent work that seeds referrals.
- -You genuinely enjoy posting your projects and you’re consistent about it. Consistency beats polish.
- -Your pipeline is already full from word of mouth and you don’t want to grow headcount. Marketing you don’t need is just a bill.
- -You have a family member who’s actually good at this and actually does it. (Actually does it. Every week.)
Hire help when…
- -Leads are the bottleneck between you and the next crew, the next truck, the next revenue tier.
- -You’re losing comparison-shopped jobs to companies whose work is worse but whose web presence is better.
- -Calls are going to voicemail during work hours because everyone is on the tools.
- -The marketing "system" is you posting when you remember, which was February.
What fair looks like
For a done-for-you setup covering web, local SEO, content, and lead handling, monthly retainers in the several-hundred to few-thousand range are the honest market. Under that, you’re getting a template and silence. Way over it, you’d better be getting a full internal marketing department. One flat number with everything included beats a menu of surprise line items, and month-to-month beats contracts — an agency that needs a 12-month lock-in is telling you something about month three.
Red flags, from inside the industry
- -Guaranteed rankings or "page one in 30 days." Nobody controls Google. Walk away.
- -They own your domain, your site, or your Google profile. That’s a hostage situation with invoicing.
- -Reports full of impressions and "engagement" with no line connecting spend to booked jobs.
- -They’ve never set foot on a jobsite and it shows in every word they write for you.
- -Long contracts, vague deliverables, and a salesperson you never hear from again after signing.
Our obvious bias, stated plainly
Trovedge is a marketing agency for trade contractors, so read all of the above knowing that. Our difference is simple to verify: we run our own contracting company on the exact stack we sell, you own everything we build, there are no contracts, and the first conversation is a free teardown where "you don’t need us yet" is a real possible outcome — because a contractor who trusts us in two years beats a retainer we have to apologize for now.