What pressure washing marketing actually costs

By Robert Blyth, ThinkCreativ.ai

Most exterior cleaning companies spend somewhere between five and ten percent of revenue on marketing, and the ones growing fastest sit at the top of that range or above it during their build phase. But the percentage is the wrong place to start. The right place is your average job value and your close rate, because those two numbers decide what you can afford to pay for a lead.

Work backwards from job value, not forwards from budget

Take your average job value and your gross margin. If a typical job is eight hundred dollars and your margin on it is sixty percent, you have roughly four hundred and eighty dollars of gross profit to work with.

Now take your close rate on quoted leads. If you close one in three, then three leads produce one job. If you are willing to spend a quarter of gross profit on acquisition, you can afford about one hundred and twenty dollars per job, which is forty dollars per lead.

That number is your ceiling, and it tells you immediately which channels are viable. It also shows why raising your close rate is usually cheaper than lowering your cost per lead. Going from one in three to one in two lifts what you can afford per lead by fifty percent without touching the ad account.

Stop managing cost per lead

Cost per lead is the number every ad platform reports and the number that misleads owners most. A channel producing thirty dollar leads that close at one in ten is worse than a channel producing eighty dollar leads that close at one in two.

The number that matters is cost per booked job, and after that, cost per booked job weighted by job value. A source that brings roof cleaning enquiries at double the cost per lead is usually the better source, because the ticket is several times larger.

Tracking this requires knowing which lead became which job, which is a CRM problem. Without it you are optimising on the wrong metric no matter how carefully you watch the dashboards.

What the money usually goes to

The mistake we see most often is spending heavily on the first line while ignoring the third and fourth. Ads into a business with no follow up and a thin review profile is the most expensive way to grow, because every dollar has to overcome a conversion problem that a hundred dollars of tooling would have fixed.

• Paid ads, typically the largest line, and the one most sensitive to season and offer
• Website and local SEO, which is front loaded and then close to permanent
• CRM and automation tooling, small in dollars and disproportionate in effect
• Review generation, effectively free once automated, and one of the highest returns available
• Creative production, photos and before and afters, which decays and needs refreshing
• Agency or in house management time, which is real cost whether or not it appears on an invoice

Seasonality changes the arithmetic

In seasonal markets, ad costs climb sharply once the season is visible. Gutter cleaning in late October and holiday lighting in late November are the two clearest examples, but pollen season in the Southeast behaves the same way.

Spending earlier, when intent is lower but costs are much lower, and capturing those people onto a list rather than trying to close them immediately, is usually better economics than bidding into the peak.

It also means the flat monthly budget most companies run is rarely optimal. Weighting spend toward the shoulder of your season and leaning on your database during the peak tends to produce more booked work for the same annual total.

A reasonable starting point

For an established exterior cleaning company doing consistent volume, five to eight percent of revenue on marketing is a defensible baseline, weighted toward the start of your season.

For a company trying to grow deliberately, ten to fifteen percent for a defined build period is normal, provided the follow up and review systems are in place first so the spend is not leaking.

For a company with no CRM, no automated follow up and under fifty reviews, the right first spend is not ads at all. It is fixing the conversion path, which usually costs less than one month of ad budget and lifts the return on everything that comes after.