On Saturday, August 1st, my business turns 19.
I’ve spent longer than that in this industry. Working for a contractor in college came first, then the home builders association years.
By the time I hung out my own shingle in 2007, I’d already spent a decade in rooms full of builders, listening to them describe the same problems.
That’s the part I can’t unsee. I know what a change order does to a schedule, and I know what a homeowner sounds like when they’ve lost confidence in a builder or remodeling firm. It’s why I don’t sell marketing that looks busy and does nothing, and why I’ll tell a firm the truth about their website even when it could cost me the engagement.
Plenty has changed since 2007. What hasn’t changed is almost everything that actually works.
The assets that still do the work
1. A website you own. MySpace, Google+, Vine, a dozen directory sites that were going to change everything. They came and went. Your site is still one of two assets nobody can take away from you or reprice on a Tuesday.
2. WordPress. It launched in 2003 and still runs roughly a third of the web. Every “WordPress is dead” prediction has now outlived the blog it was published on.
3. Project stories. One of the best-performing pieces of content a builder or remodeler can publish … in 2007, and still today. Problem, process, outcome, photographs, and location.
4. Photography. The cameras got better and dramatically cheaper. The fact that bad photos will sink a beautiful project has not budged an inch.
5. Email. Newsletters outperformed everything in 2007, and they outperform everything now. No algorithm sits between you and the inbox, and the list belongs to you (your email list is the second digital asset you own).
6. Testimonials and proof. The format migrated from a page on your website to Google reviews, but the underlying need never moved. Homeowners want to hear it from someone who isn’t you.
The buyer
7. Homeowners research long before they call. They used to save bookmarks on their internet browser and read for three weeks. Now they ask AI. The behavior is identical, though. They show up to your first meeting having already made a lot of their decisions.
8. They’re looking for reasons to trust you, not reasons to hire you. That’s a different problem than most firms think they’re solving, and it changes what you should be publishing.
9. The questions haven’t changed. What will it cost? How long will it take? Will you disappear on me halfway through? This is true for every market and price point.
10. And most firms still won’t answer them publicly. Nineteen years of watching good industry folks refuse to put a single number anywhere on their website, then wonder why their leads aren’t qualified.
11. Long sales cycles require long nurturing. A remodel takes months from first search to signed contract. A custom home can take a year or more. Nobody has ever found the shortcut. The firms that stay in touch during those months win.
12. Referrals are the best lead source … right up until they aren’t. Every builder who’s ever told me “we get all our work from word of mouth” eventually had a slow year. Word of mouth is a wonderful result. It is not a marketing plan.
The discipline
13. Consistency beats brilliance. The firm that showed up every month for three years beats the one that showed up twice with something spectacular.
14. Sharing what you know doesn’t cost you the job; it wins you the job. Builders and remodelers have been afraid of this for nineteen years and have been wrong about it for nineteen years.
15. Thought leadership requires an actual thought. Restating what everyone in your market already believes isn’t leadership. It’s an echo.
16. Getting your voice in front of other people’s audiences. We called it public relations in 2007. Now it’s podcast guesting and contributed articles. Same move, different letterhead.
17. SEO is a floor, not a ceiling. SEO copywriting was already a real industry by the time I opened my doors. I bought my first SEO course in 2009, and ever since, being findable has been the price of admission rather than a strategy. Being chosen is a separate problem.
18. Marketing gets cut first in a downturn. I watched it happen in 2008, again in March-April 2020, and again in 2024 when remodeling spending actually contracted for the first time since 2010. It was a mistake every single time, and the firms that held the line came out of each one with a bigger share of a smaller market.
19. Bootstrapping works. Nineteen years of evidence that a modest budget spent consistently will beat a large budget spent in a panic. I built my business on a newsletter, building connections, industry knowledge, and a whole lot of work. Want to see my very first newsletter? Look below (thank you, Eric K. for preserving this issue for 19 years!)
So what did change?
The delivery mechanism.
Homeowners used to open ten tabs and sort it out themselves. Now a lot of them ask one question and get one answer with three firms named in it. Yours is either in that answer, or it isn’t.
That’s the real shift. Homeowners are doing less looking and more asking, which means the work of earning their trust happens earlier, before they ever know your name.
The nineteen things above are how you end up in that answer. They were the right work in 2007 for one set of reasons. They’re the right work now because when a machine goes looking for evidence that you’re worth recommending, it has to find something.
Nineteen years in, that’s still the whole job. Be worth recommending, then make sure it’s findable.