Adam Bensman (YouTube) teaches a four-question audit to identify wasted marketing spend for roofing companies and demonstrates it with concrete numeric examples. He shows how rising marketing costs (driven partly by private equity) can increase customer acquisition cost (CAC) and reduce revenue, then walks through a checklist: (1) Is it trackable? (2) Does it generate quality leads? (3) Are CACs acceptable? (4) Is it consistent and predictable? He urges listing every spend, fixing what’s fixable, cutting what’s not, and reallocating savings to high-performing channels; links to a 2025–2028 roofing market report and a follow-up video on 18 lead sources are provided.
Chapters
You're spending tens of thousands of dollars a month on marketing. How much of it is working undeniably and how much is being flushed down the drain and wasted? Well, you're about to find out in this video because I'm going to be teaching you the same exercise that I used to help two of our members in RSRA save over $100,000 a year. In fact, one of them was $121,000 a year by slashing wasted spend that they didn't otherwise see. Now this is more important than ever before because marketing costs are going up. We're seeing it in pay per click, LSA and meta. This is because private equity is coming in and trying to drown out the little guy. I didn't make this up. I've heard it from the CEOs of Private Equity groups I've talked to personally. In fact, their feedback is one of the elements that went into my brand new 2025-2028 roofing market report. You can get your free copy right now by clicking the link in the description or are going to roofmarketreport.com you will see that marketing costs will continue to go up because private equity can have a capital call, meaning they have virtual endless budgets. If they can prove that they can turn $1,600 into $20,000 and they say, I can do this line, rinse and repeat, can I have some more money now? Independently owned companies don't have that level of essentially infinite funding on demand, like a tap you can just open. So what they're doing is, and I heard this directly from the mouth of private equity CEO saying, listen, I'm just going to drown off the little guy. I can throw more money at it and bring up costs. Which means if you're used to spending, you know what, let's sketch it out. I'm going to show you. Let's show you in a real world example, let's say, and this is true numbers, by the way, this first example is actual numbers from someone I just talked to last week. They're spending $40,000 per month on ads. They're in a very competitive market and that gets them 100 leads per month. Okay, now some of you might be freaking out. Holy smokes. They're getting. It's a $400 per lead. Yes, it is. Now let's make an assumption that 85% of those turn into an appointment. That's an 85% set rate. There's always some garbage leads in there that aren't qualified. They're not in your service area, maybe they're calling about other things that you don't do. We all know that there's no such thing as 100% of leads are qualified. So let's just say 85 turn into appointments. Okay? Of those 85, let's say that we're closing at 30% and I'm going to round down. We have 25. Come on, Pen. 25 sales. Now, if those 25 sales. And I'm just going to use simple math at. Whoa, what do we do there? 25 sales at $20,000 a piece, that will bring me to half million in revenue. Okay. 500,000 in sales for the month. Okay, that's pretty nice number. Now, what we need to figure out is our customer acquisition cost, meaning how much do we have to spend to get a customer? So I can take that $40,000 and divide it by the 25 customers we have, and we are at $1,600. Okay? Now, that $1,600 means, again, as the example I gave you before, every 1600 bucks gets turned into 20,000. For a private equity group, this is a really big win. But what's happening now is these costs go up, which means the same 40,000 that's today. In the future, if we see costs go up even a little bit, let's say that the lead amount changes, and you're going to watch how this math shakes out. So we're spending the same $40,000 per month on ads, but instead of getting 100 leads, we're going to get 80 leads. Why? Because marketing costs have increased a lot. Now, of those 80, we're going to assume only 85 were qualified to book an appointment. So that's 68 appointments. That's our set rate. Okay. Of those 68 appointments, we have the same 30% close rate. We have 20 sales, which now means instead of making 500,000amonth, we are at 400k in sales for the month. Now that 100,000, you know, in sales, that difference is actually costing you $1.2 million per year that. That you are now missing out on. Okay? This is a big, big loss. The other thing that this means, if we're looking at the actual Math, is our $40,000 divided by 20 sales means your customer acquisition cost is now $2,000. That is significant. We went from 1,600 to 2,000. So our costs go up, but it also means that our sales go down. This is a bad relationship to see. So what we need to do is fig are we wasting money? So we can push the right dollars in that are actually making sense. Now let's let the rubber meet the road and I'm going to walk you through it. This is literally the exact exercise I walked our two members through. It was actually during a two day members only workshop I was hosting on marketing. And what we did, and I got it queued up and I share it with you in a second, is I want you to list every single place you're spending money down to, like the advertising on the kitty ball field or TV ads, radio ads, Whether you're spending money on billboards. There's a couple other odd ones I've seen too, like sponsoring weather apps everywhere. You're spending money with the hopes of getting leads. We're going to run through this filter. Here's the filter. You ready for it? It is this. We are going to run down this list. Number one, is it trackable if the answer is yes, Double down if the answer is no. Then we need to say, is it fixable? Can I start tracking it? But there are certain things that you will not be able track. I'm telling you that now. Billboards are hard to track. There is a sneaky way to track it, which basically means if your acquisition costs go down because more people are searching for you organically that we could potentially track. But there's no like direct attribution. What I want to know is if I put in $10,000 or $20,000 into Google Pay per click, I know what I get out that's tracked. So that's the first item on the list. Second, does it generate quality leads? Now this may seem like common sense, but it is amazing to me how many people will continually spend money on these third party aggregators and only 1 in 20 leads this quality. So they're choking their team down with these opportunities to chase these 9 out of 10 not quality leads is a big problem. So we go back to the list. Is it fixable again? Sometimes you can fix things if it's not quality leads. But by asking questions like, how can I better qualify people? Is it my form or my messaging? As an example, I often see people running ads saying like low monthly payments, roof Starting at just $79 a month, you will get people who can't afford roofing and you'll often get lower quality leads when you lead with low prices. So that's what I mean by fixing it. All right, number three on the list. Are customer acquisition costs acceptable? This is a dangerous thought process when people are like, oh, if I just get one or Two deals out of it, I'll break even. Break even is losing. You just saw how I ran the math. Total spend divided by number of customers is your customer acquisition cost. That's the way I calculate it. Other people will include all their overhead. But I'm looking here, how is my marketing working? And I want to isolate my marketing. So if I have a consistent sixteen hundred dollar predictable acquisition costs in your twenty thousand dollars roof, yields you a net profit that's comfortable, then yes. But if not, then again, can I fix it? Yes, then fix it. If not, cut it. And then the final question here, is it consistent and predictable? Is it consistent and predictable? Because there are many methods that are not consistent or predictable. They might be part of. I'll give you an example of a networking group or B and I type group. Those are not consistent. They're not predictable. There's a few people, by the way, they're doing really well on those majority people I speak with aren't. So if you put $1,000 into Facebook, is it predictable and consistent? If the answer is no, cut it. If it's yes, double down. And by asking yourself these four questions and going through it is, if the answer is yes, double down. If the answer is no, cut it within five minutes. And you do this for each and every lead source you could find, up to $100,000, maybe even more to cut. In fact, I had another member of ours that was spending $600,000 a year on ads and found out that he wasn't converting them because the majority were coming in after hours on Saturdays when no one was answering the phone. So that fell into the fixable category. And through fixing it, he was able to get more leads without spending more money. This, my friend, is the secret sauce. Because now you can take that extra 100 grand. Voila. You got a free budget to dump into everything that's working to pour fuel on the fire. Now, you might be wanting to know, well, where should I put it? So jump into this very next video because I break down the 18 different lead sources and the pros and cons of each. Enjoy.
