For Home-Service Businesses · Plumbing · HVAC · Roofing · Cleaning
The Home Services Marketing Agency Alternative: Hire the Person Instead
Niche agencies charge $2,000-5,000 a month for a slice of a shared team. GetGuru places dedicated, vetted full-time Gurus inside your home-service business — a marketer who owns your local presence, a receptionist who answers every call, or a virtual assistant for contractors who runs the back office — each at a flat $1,275 bi-weekly.
The three leaks in every home-service business
Invisible where homeowners actually look
The map pack, Local Services Ads, and review counts decide who gets called — and keeping them winning is daily work. Agencies check in monthly, split you across forty accounts, and often serve your competitors. The trade with $2-5K/month retainers is theirs, not yours.
Missed calls are silent revenue loss
Home-service businesses miss roughly a quarter to a third of inbound calls — techs are on jobs, the office is slammed, it's after hours. Most callers won't leave a voicemail; they call the next result. You paid marketing money to make that phone ring for someone else.
Owners doing $15/hour work at midnight
Invoicing, scheduling, permits, supplier orders, payroll prep, chasing receivables — the back office eats your evenings and never shows up on an estimate. Every admin hour an owner or lead tech works is an hour not spent quoting, closing, or building crews.
Built for your trade, not "local business" in general
Every trade has its own economics. Your Guru arrives knowing yours — and each trade below has its own dedicated page.
Plumbing
Emergency searches convert in minutes — the map pack, LSAs, and a deep review profile decide who gets the 2 a.m. burst-pipe call. A dedicated marketer keeps all three surfaces winning while building pipeline for repipes and water heaters.
HVAC
Feast-or-famine seasonality is the enemy: peak-season ads at $60+ a click, dead shoulder months, and maintenance plans nobody markets. A dedicated Guru shifts budgets with the weather and sells memberships that smooth the year.
Roofing
Lead sellers charge $100-600 per shared lead and keep the pipeline. A dedicated roofing marketer builds your own — storm-response campaigns ready to launch within hours, exclusive leads, and rankings you keep.
Cleaning
Cleaning business marketing is chronically underserved — agencies chase bigger tickets. A dedicated Guru covers what recurring-revenue cleaning actually needs: local SEO for residential and commercial searches, proposal follow-up on contracts, post-clean review automation, referral programs, and win-back campaigns for lapsed clients.
What a dedicated home-services Guru takes off your plate
Local SEO & Google Business Profile
Map-pack rankings for every city you serve: GBP optimization and posting, service-area pages, citations, and job-photo streams — maintained weekly, not audited quarterly.
Google Ads & Local Services Ads
Search campaigns built around real trade economics — $40-70 clicks, emergency intent, seasonal swings — plus Google Guaranteed management with junk-lead disputes.
Reviews, website & reputation
Automated post-job review requests, response management, and fast service pages with click-to-call and financing — the assets that convert searches into booked jobs.
Reception & dispatch support
A dedicated receptionist Guru answers every call in your company's name, books estimates and service windows into your calendar, dispatches urgents, and follows up on quotes.
Back office & admin
Invoicing and receivables chasing, scheduling, permit paperwork, supplier orders, and CRM hygiene in ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, or Jobber — run by a contractor-savvy virtual assistant.
Tracking & owner-grade reporting
Call tracking per channel, booked-job attribution from your field-service platform, and a weekly report that ties spend to revenue — numbers you'd bet a truck on.
Vendor stack vs. dedicated home-services Guru
Most shops rent three vendors to cover what one full-time person can own.
| Agency + answering service + part-time admin | Dedicated GetGuru hire | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | $2,000-5,000/mo agency + $300-1,500/mo answering + admin wages | $1,275 bi-weekly flat per Guru — about $2,550/month, full-time |
| Attention | Your account is one of dozens at each vendor | One person, roughly 160 hours a month, only your business |
| Trade knowledge | Generic scripts and templates reused across clients | Learns your services, pricing, service area, and software |
| Accountability | Three vendors pointing at each other when leads drop | One name in your Slack who owns the outcome |
| What you own | Agency-held ad accounts, per-minute call logs, turnover risk | Your accounts, your data, your documented processes |
| Commitment | Contracts and minimums at every vendor | Bi-weekly billing, cancel anytime, free replacement |
Vendor pricing reflects typical published ranges for home-services marketing agencies and answering services. Many shops start with one Guru — usually marketing or reception — and add a second once the first pays for itself.
One dedicated Guru per seat. Marketing, reception, or back office.
About $2,550/month all-in per Guru — less than most home-services agency retainers, for a full-time person who works only for you.
- Pay nothing until you hire — the search and shortlist are free
- Hire in 14 days from your discovery call
- Free replacement if it's not working out
- Cancel anytime — bi-weekly billing, no annual contracts
- GetGuru is the employer of record — payroll, health + vision insurance, provident fund handled; you get one clean invoice
“We're a commercial cleaning company — nobody builds marketing for us, and the office was drowning. Our first Guru rebuilt our Google presence and proposal follow-ups; we added a second for scheduling and invoicing six months later. Two full-time people for less than our old agency-plus-answering-service stack, and they actually know our business.”
Anonymised at client request. Details available under NDA on discovery call.
A virtual assistant for contractors, built for how trades actually run
Generic VA companies place generalists who've never heard of a permit runner or a service agreement. Home-service businesses need something narrower — and more senior.
Why generic remote help fails in the trades
A home-service office runs on specifics: emergency calls that must be triaged in seconds, CSR scripts that book instead of quote, dispatch boards in ServiceTitan or Jobber, seasonal demand that whipsaws budgets, homeowners comparing five-figure estimates for weeks. Drop a generalist VA into that and you spend three months teaching the trade — if they stay.
GetGuru vets for the context: Gurus placed with home-service clients are tested on CSR and booking scenarios, local-marketing execution, and field-service software before they ever meet you. Fewer than 8% of applicants make the bench, English is C1/C2, and they work your business hours — including early dispatch windows.
One flat price, employer-of-record simple
Every Guru — marketer, receptionist, or back-office VA — is $1,275 bi-weekly, about $2,550 a month, full-time. GetGuru is the employer of record: payroll, health and vision insurance, and provident fund are handled, and you get one clean invoice with zero compliance exposure.
The risk sits with us, not you: pay nothing until you hire, get a free replacement if it's not working, and cancel anytime on bi-weekly billing. From discovery call to a fully onboarded hire is 14 days.
Home Services Gurus — Frequently Asked Questions
Skip the job boards. Hire your Guru in 14 days.
A 15-minute discovery call — no obligation, no sales pressure. If we’re not the right fit, we’ll say so.
Book your discovery call