Bill BrownFounder of ServiceTitan Hacks community (9k+ pros) | INC 5000 Contractor | Helping contractors win with AI & Automation

Proven Way To Grow Repeat Sales

29 Aug 2025

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A short talk describing how focusing on customer lifetime value and retention drove business growth. The speaker uses years of their own company data to quantify value: average customer worth after the first appointment was about $3,000, the second appointment yielded ~30% more, and ~90% of a customer's lifetime value occurs within two years. The speaker emphasizes long-term thinking, tracking customer acquisition cost, and the importance of retention tactics such as emails, direct mail, and maintenance agreements.

Questions this video answers

About $3,000.

Approximately 30% above the first appointment value.

About 90%.

You talk about that customer lifetime value. And that's something that many, many businesses use. So one thing that I did in my company, when I get a new customer, because I had years and years of data, what are they worth after the first appointment, they were worth on average it was like $3,000. And that was heavily weighted by system replacements. Well, what are they worth on the second appointment? Well, now it was another 30% above that. What about a year and a half? What about two years? And I found that 90% of the customer's lifetime come within two years. So now I was starting to look at customer acquisition cost. How much money did it take for me to get in that home and establish a relationship? That's a very long term thinking because that isn't what puts food on the table tomorrow. I was fortunate before I looked at all that to be pretty focused on retention. I did send out emails to customers. I did send out direct mail. We did a lot of maintenance agreements without doing that. We wouldn't have made it without the maintenance agreements.