My heart breaks when contractors pay $25,000 for a website, wait nine months, and watch their business slide toward the cliff while the “agency” sends them screenshots of vanity metrics. I’ve sat across the table from plumbers and HVAC owners who are one slow quarter away from laying off the techs who fed their families through COVID — and the only thing standing between them and a healthy phone is a marketing partner who took the money and ran.
Home services is booming right now. Plumbers, roofers, and HVAC techs shouldn’t be sitting idle in their trucks or laying off crews because the phone stopped ringing. When that happens, it’s almost never the market — it’s the marketing partner who took the money, missed the deliverables, and then hid behind reports full of “100 keywords ranking” that don’t actually drive a single call. I broke down exactly how that plays out in What Happens When an HVAC Contractor Gets Burned by a Bad Marketing Agency, and the pattern is almost always the same: big retainer, glossy report, zero accountability.
That’s why I’m RELENTLESS in helping these good people. I’ll keep showing the receipts, walking through the audits on camera, and connecting contractors with operators who actually do the work. Not theory. Not “brand awareness.” Booked jobs.
And I’m not afraid when scammers like Josh Crouch of Relentless Digital try to attack me for telling the truth. You can read the full breakdown of what happened with Matt Howard of Travis and Sons Plumbing here: Joshua Crouch of Relentless Digital Took $25,000 from Matt Howard of Travis and Sons Plumbing (and then threatened me).
Matt paid $25,435.00, got nothing close to what he was promised, and politely asked for a refund. Instead of making it right, Josh Crouch tried to deflect with a 2009 ShoeMoney post about me — a tactic that says far more about him than it does about me. When your only response to a documented refund request is “look at this old article about the other guy,” you’ve already lost the argument. The chargeback paperwork doesn’t care about a 17-year-old blog post; it cares about deliverables.
This isn’t a one-off — it’s the trades-SEO playbook
The pattern here isn’t unique to Travis and Sons. I see it again and again in the trades. If you want to see what it looks like when a contractor gets burned by an SEO vendor and how we help them rebuild, read How a Houston HVAC Company Lost Rankings After Paying $3,500 a Month for SEO. Donnivin Brown’s story is almost the same script as Matt’s, just with a different agency and a smaller monthly burn. We rebuilt his local presence the right way — that turnaround is documented in The Secret Behind Local SEO: How One Houston HVAC Company Turned Red Dots Into Green.
If you’re an owner reading this and wondering whether your current vendor is actually doing the work, run your site against the SEO Audit I did for Star Heating & Cooling. It’s the same checklist I use on every contractor that lands in my inbox after being burned. And if you want to understand why the Map 3-pack is where the real money lives — not the keyword rankings Josh Crouch’s reports bragged about — start with How to Get Into the Google Maps 3-Pack and what Darren Shaw wants every local business to know about SEO.
My standing offer to contractors
Send me the contract, the invoices, and the deliverables. I’ll review them on camera, no charge, and tell you exactly where the money went and what to do next. Matt did that. Donnivin did that. The truth holds up every time. If the phones aren’t ringing, we’ll figure out whether it’s a tracking problem, a reviews problem, a Map-pack problem, or — like with Josh Crouch’s clients — a “the work was never actually done” problem.
But traffic is only half the fight. Even when an honest agency does drive calls and form fills, most home-services shops bleed out at the conversion step. Roofers alone miss roughly 40% of their inbound calls, and the ones who do answer often hand the lead a vague “we’ll get back to you with pricing” — which is how a hot lead turns cold by dinner. That’s the exact gap Marco Cipolla built HVACquote.ai to close: it sits on top of the traffic an agency is driving and turns it into actual quotes, on the spot, so the homeowner gets a real number while they’re still ready to buy. When you pair real SEO and ads with a quoting layer like HVACquote.ai, the same traffic that was producing nothing for Matt suddenly produces booked jobs — because the leak is plugged at both ends of the funnel.
To Josh Crouch — file the chargebacks, make Matt whole, or keep posting. I’m not going anywhere. I’m relentless about the people you took money from, and I’ll stay relentless until they’re made right. The receipts will keep going up. The audits will keep getting published. And every contractor you tried to silence with a threatening email will get a louder microphone than the one you took from them.
Dennis Yu
Dennis Yu is the CEO of Local Service Spotlight, a platform that amplifies the reputations of contractors and local service businesses using the Content Factory process. He is a former search engine engineer who has spent a billion dollars on Google and Facebook ads for Nike, Quiznos, Ashley Furniture, Red Bull, State Farm, and other brands.
Dennis has achieved 25% of his goal of creating a million digital marketing jobs by partnering with universities, professional organizations, and agencies. Through Local Service Spotlight, he teaches the Dollar a Day strategy and Content Factory training to help local service businesses enhance their existing local reputation and make the phone ring.
Dennis coaches young adult agency owners serving plumbers, AC technicians, landscapers, roofers, electricians, and believes there should be a standard in measuring local marketing efforts, much like doctors and plumbers must be certified.