Tristar vs the typical agency.
A quarter of buyers in this category say they are not sure what they are actually paying for. The industry’s net promoter score is zero. That is not a market with a few bad actors in it, that is a market with a structural clarity problem, and it is the easiest thing in the world to compete against.
Buyers cannot tell what they bought.
| What buyers report | Share |
|---|---|
| “I am not sure what I am really paying for” | 25% |
| Describe the category as “confusing and unclear” | 27% |
| Industry net promoter score | 0 |
A net promoter score of zero means that for every client who would recommend their agency, there is one who would warn you off. In a category where reputation is the product, that is remarkable.
And separately, research across 822 B2B buyers found that cost decides the selection only 8% of the time. Reputation and demonstrated expertise decide it. Price gates who gets considered; it is almost never what wins.
Most agencies don’t fail because they’re bad. They fail because they don’t care.
It is usually silence, not performance. We lost a client and it taught us more than any of the ones we kept. The trigger was not a ranking drop or a bad month. They asked what had been done recently, and the answer was not good enough. Work had happened. It had not been reported, and by the time we understood the question was really about trust, the decision was made.
That matches what the industry data shows. Client research across 100,000+ small business accounts found that 62% of clients not expanded within the first three months churned within two years. The first ninety days decide the relationship, and what happens in them is mostly communication.
So the honest lesson is not that other agencies do bad work. Plenty do good work badly explained, and the client cannot tell the difference from the outside. That is a failure of reporting, and it is entirely fixable.
Four commitments, in writing.
You own everything
Site, code, content, logins, ad accounts, profile. Leave whenever and it all goes with you. This exists because holding assets hostage is documented behavior in this industry.
Yours on day oneWe report calls and jobs
Not impressions, not a wall of charts. If a number cannot help you decide something, it does not belong in your report.
Numbers that mean moneyA person, by name
Call the number and John picks up. No ticket queue, no rotating account rep, no pod of people you have never met. Test it before you hire anybody, including us.
One humanMonth to month
No annual lock-in, no early termination fee. We keep the work worth paying for, or you leave.
Leave wheneverAnd our prices are published, all of them. See what things cost without speaking to anybody.
Plenty of good agencies exist, and some are better fits than us.
We are not going to argue that the category is uniformly bad, because it is not and you would be right to distrust anyone who did. Some of the largest firms in home services have clean complaint records and do genuinely excellent work.
Here is where they beat us. If you are doing serious revenue and want a full team, a dedicated strategist and a large paid media operation, a bigger agency is a better fit and you should hire one. If you need someone in your city for in-person meetings and local relationships, hire locally.
Where we fit is the operator those firms decline. Several of the best-regarded agencies in home services publish a client floor, commonly three million dollars in revenue and up. Below that line the market mostly offers template products at ninety-nine dollars a month. The gap in between is deliberately who we serve.
Five questions that sort this out fast.
Use these on us too.
1. If I leave, what exactly do I take with me? Hesitation is the answer.
2. Who will actually do the work, and can I speak to them? Not the salesperson. The person doing it.
3. How are you compensated, and does your fee rise with my budget? The industry standard on ads is 10 to 20 percent of spend, which means they earn more when you spend more.
4. What will my report tell me that I can act on? If the answer is rankings and impressions, ask how those become jobs.
5. What would make you tell me not to hire you? Anybody who cannot name a single scenario is selling rather than diagnosing.
The ones people actually ask.
Why should I trust you after being burned before?
You should not, yet. Trust is not something we can assert on a webpage.
What we can do is make the downside small: month to month, you own everything, prices published, and a free check that shows where you stand whether or not you hire us. If we are no good you lose one month and keep all your assets.
Do you guarantee results?
No, and be careful with anyone who does. There are three slots in the map pack and nobody controls who fills them, so a rankings guarantee is arithmetic that cannot be backed.
Research across 109 peer-reviewed studies found guarantees reliably reduce perceived risk, but no study demonstrated they increase sales. What we guarantee is the work and the reporting, which we control.
How is a one-person operation better than a full team?
Often it is not, and at scale it genuinely is not. Where it wins is that the person you speak to is the person doing the work, so nothing is lost in translation and nobody is protecting an account.
If you need a large team, hire one. We will tell you if that is you.
What happens in the first ninety days?
Measure, fix the foundation, then build. Profile, reviews and technical signals first because they move fastest, then service and location pages.
You get told what was done and what it did, monthly, in language that connects to jobs rather than to metrics.
See exactly where you stand.
Free 30-second check across Google, the map pack and the AI tools. Yours whether or not you ever hire anybody. No sales call.
Check My Business Free →