You're off the tools. So who does the marketing?

There is a stage every contracting business goes through where the owner stops being on the tools and starts running the thing. Estimating, hiring, chasing money, keeping four crews busy.

Marketing is the job that falls through the floor at exactly that moment, because it belonged to nobody in the first place and now the person who used to do it by accident is doing something else.

The four options, honestly

Hire a marketing coordinator. Fifty thousand a year and up, plus the management. At your size that person is not busy full time on marketing, so they end up doing office work, and the marketing goes back to being nobody’s job. It works at ten million. It does not work at two.

Hire an agency. Three to ten thousand a month. You will get a strategy deck, monthly calls, and a content calendar that they cannot fill because filling it requires photos from your jobs, and getting photos out of your field is the thing nobody has ever managed. Six months later you cancel, and you cannot tell anybody what it did.

Do it yourself. You will not. Not because you are lazy but because it is the eleventh priority in a day with time for six, and it is the only one with no deadline attached. Every owner intends to and almost none sustain it past the second busy month.

Have it done for you. Which only works if the person doing it does not have to ask you for anything. That is the whole design problem, and it is solvable now in a way it was not five years ago, because the photos are already in the job management software.

What you are actually buying

Not “brand awareness.” What you should be buying is visible, checkable activity: posts going out on a schedule, on the channels that matter for your trade, built from your own jobs, with numbers underneath that you already have access to – profile views, call clicks and direction requests are all in your own Google Business Profile, and Google documents what each one counts.

If a vendor cannot tell you what went out and where, and cannot point at the same numbers you can read yourself in your own Google account, that is the vendor who will be canceled in month six. The starting point is usually a profile that has not been posted to in months.

The one question worth asking first

Which jobs do you want more of?

Almost nobody has an answer past “more of them.” But a remodeler who says “kitchens over forty thousand, and no more vanity swaps” has just made every marketing decision downstream of that easy: which photos get posted, what the captions say, which jobs get the project-story treatment.

That question is the first thing PostIQ asks, and the answer is what the whole plan gets built from.