If you own an HVAC, plumbing, roofing, or pool company in South Florida, here's a test you can run in about four minutes. It costs nothing and it will probably annoy you.

Open your phone. Not your desktop, not incognito on your office computer — your phone, standing somewhere other than your shop. Search your main service plus your city. "Ac repair hialeah." "Emergency plumber coral gables." "Roof leak repair miami."

Look at the three businesses in the map box at the top. Are you one of them?

If you're not, that search is worth nothing to you. Roughly three out of four people pick from those three results and never scroll. At 2pm on a July afternoon with a dead AC and a hot house, nobody is browsing to result number eight. They tap the first one that answers.

Now look at what separates you from the three that got in.

It is usually not your website. It's these, in order:

1. Review count and recency. Look at the top three, then look at yourself. If they have 180 reviews and you have 31, that's the gap. And recency matters as much as volume — 200 reviews where the newest is from 2024 loses to 90 reviews with a dozen from last month. Google reads a stale profile as a business that may not be operating anymore. Most home service companies in Miami collect reviews by accident. The ones ranking collect them on purpose, after every single job.

2. Your categories are wrong. Open your Google Business Profile and check your primary category. I've audited plenty of companies here where an AC company had "Air conditioning contractor" when they should have had "HVAC contractor," or a plumber running "Plumber" as primary but never adding "Drainage service," "Water damage restoration," or "Septic system service" as secondaries. Each missing category is a set of searches you literally cannot appear in. This is a free fix that takes ten minutes and most people never touch it.

3. Photos. Count yours. Then count theirs. Companies ranking in competitive Miami zips are uploading job photos monthly — crews on site, trucks in the driveway, before and afters. Four photos from when you set up the profile is a signal, and it's a bad one.

4. Proximity, which you can't fully control. Google weights how close the searcher is to your registered address. This is why you cannot rank identically in Homestead and Aventura from one location. What you can control is your service area setup and having real pages built for the cities you actually cover, instead of one page that says "We serve all of South Florida."

The uncomfortable one. Fix all of this and get the phone ringing, and if your office doesn't answer during business hours, you've spent money to send customers to your competitor's voicemail-free line. We've watched companies add 40% more calls and book barely more jobs, purely because nobody picked up between 12 and 1. Track your answer rate before you spend a dollar on getting found.

Go run the search. If you're in the top three for your money terms, you don't need anyone — protect it by collecting reviews every week and posting photos every month.

If you're not, you now know the four things standing between you and the calls your competitor is taking today. Fix the categories tonight. That one's free.

We audit a lot of Meta and Google accounts before we agree to take one on. The pattern is boring and consistent: the ads aren't broken, the target is.

A brand comes in doing $80k a month, spending $22k, sitting at a 1.9 blended ROAS, and they're convinced the media buyer is the issue. Then we ask for gross margin. It's 42%. At 42% margin, a 1.9 ROAS is losing money on every incremental order once you count shipping, fulfillment, and returns. Nobody in the account was ever told what ROAS the business actually needed to survive. So the buyer optimized to a number that was never profitable, and everyone blamed the algorithm.

Three things we check before touching a single campaign:

1. The real breakeven ROAS. Take gross margin as a decimal and divide 1 by it. 42% margin means breakeven is roughly 2.4x, not 2.0x. Everything below that is buying revenue with your own cash. If you don't know this number, you cannot evaluate any media buyer, including us.

2. Whether attribution is lying. If platform-reported ROAS and actual bank deposits disagree by more than about 20%, scaling decisions are being made on fiction. Usually it's a broken conversions API setup double-counting, or view-through windows set so wide that organic sales get credited to ads.

3. Whether the offer can carry paid traffic at all. Some products just cannot. A $34 AOV single-product store with 40% margins has about $13 to spend acquiring a customer. That's a nearly impossible CAC on Meta right now unless repeat purchase rate is strong. In that case the fix is the offer — bundles, subscription, higher AOV — not the ad account. We've told brands to go fix their pricing and come back. Some do, and then paid actually works.

The uncomfortable version of this: a good chunk of brands running paid ads should pause, fix margin structure, and restart. An agency that takes their money anyway is selling them a slower failure.

That's why we run an application instead of a checkout button. If the numbers don't support paid acquisition, we say no — it's a worse business for us to take a retainer, fail, and get churned in 90 days.

Run the breakeven math on your own account tonight. If your current ROAS is under that number, you don't need a new media buyer this week. You need a new target.