Lethbridge HVAC. Built from the ground up by Mike and his wife in 2014. Five or six guys on the trucks today, Mike wants 14-15 in a few years, 25 max. Reach is Lethbridge plus an hour every direction. Word-of-mouth city, networking events, Facebook posts, donations, hockey. Twenty-eight HVAC outfits in town, hard to find techs, just brought a guy over from New Jersey to fill a seat.
"Word of mouth city. You either get well-known or word goes around that you suck."
Furnace, A/C, ducts, water heaters, fireplaces, indoor air. Plus the 24/7 emergency line that turns a no-heat night in February into a same-day fix.
Mike was direct. Tried radio five years ago, dead. Got burned by a marketer charging $300/lead where two were wet and one was a dead-air call. Will not pay upfront on hope. Will pay for results. Wants to double the team but can already see the ceiling on word-of-mouth alone.
Mike has been burned. The bar to earn trust is a marketer who shows the work first, ties pricing to outcomes, and lets him judge the calls coming in. We bring the channels, you measure the calls. If the phone rings more, we both stay. If it does not, we both move on.
Lethbridge is 100K-ish people. The reputation moat is real, and Breathe Easy already has it. The gap is that the same reputation does not extend to the people who do not yet know Mike. They Google. They ask ChatGPT. They scroll Facebook. Right now Breathe Easy is faint to invisible on all three.
5-6 guys today. The bottleneck is not demand, it is finding techs (28 outfits in town, brought one from New Jersey). Marketing's job is steady-state demand visible to the techs you are recruiting AND the homeowners they will be serving. A name that shows up everywhere in Southern Alberta makes both jobs easier.
Mike asked for results-tied work, not retainer-on-faith. Each move stands alone. Start with one, measure the calls, scale or stop. No long contracts, no $300-leads-from-strangers.
30-day pilot. We build, we run, you watch the calls. Tracked numbers show every booked job. Mike pays for the demand that shows up, not for the privilege of running the test. Quickest answer to "does paid work in Lethbridge for HVAC right now."
SEO compounds. It is the cheapest channel long-term. We tighten the site, build per-service pages, fix the Google Business Profile, and seed reviews. Slower than ads to start, but every month the cost-per-call drops while ads stay flat. Pairs naturally with Move 1.
AI search is where word-of-mouth is heading. Early movers get cited. We seed the structured data, authority content, and review signals that AI engines pull from. Most of the 28 HVAC outfits in town do not know this game is on yet.
Mike's preferred channel: text first, call after. Tomas will follow up to set a Google Meet to walk through which move starts.