Case study
“When I spent more money, I didn't make more money.”
Everything was working perfectly... until it wasn't.
Chris Sayson builds custom interior doors in Austin with his father and his brother. Laser-measured, built to order, and installed in a single day.
Visit One Day Doors & Closets of AustinIt worked at first.
Then it stopped moving.
They bought into the dealer network in 2024 for the reason most people buy into one. A proven product, a system somebody else already worked out, and a business that eventually runs without you standing in the middle of it.
Loyal customers, strong reviews, and a marketing spend perfectly aligned with sales return. Then it stalled, and the business he'd bought to eventually run itself was running him instead.
When it came time to start really boosting revenue, everyone told him to just spend more money on advertising. But he'd already tried that. He'd watched it not work. He just couldn't say why.
Chris remembered James and Keenan from work they did together over a decade ago. When he heard about Grow512 it was clear that this was a team that could help him find the answers he was looking for.
We started with an hour.
The hour is where we always start. It covers the customer side of the business. How people find them, how a lead gets handled, how the job gets tracked, how they get paid, how those customers come back.
The answer wasn't in the hour. So we went digging.
- 1
We got into their CRM.
The dealer network runs its own system. We pulled 90 days of lead and call data out of it and traced every lead from the moment it came in to the first time anybody touched it.
- 2
We listened to the calls.
Not a sample. Enough recordings to hear the pattern, then we read the transcripts against them.
- 3
We checked the phones.
Which calls got answered, which got missed, what happened after hours, and how long a missed call waited for somebody to call back.
- 4
We walked the pipeline.
Lead, inspection, estimate, measure, production, install. Every handoff was manual. Nobody was assigned to new leads, and nothing followed up automatically when one went quiet.
- 5
We compared the playbook to the phone.
What corporate says happens, against what actually happens when a homeowner raises their hand.
It was never a lead problem.
The leads were fine, and the money was buying them efficiently.
The problem was what happened after a lead came in. The set rate was stuck at a disappointing 25%... and more leads just lowered the set rate further. Not the desired outcome!
Three out of every four people who raised their hand never made it onto a calendar.
It was a speed problem.
Here's what 90 days of data said.
8%
of leads got touched within the first hour
24%
sat untouched for a full day or more
51%
of calls during business hours went unanswered
87%
of after-hours calls went unanswered
The homeowners who already knew One Day Doors would wait because they already knew the quality of the service. But what about the rest? They're shopping around, comparing a custom, laser-measured door to a cheap off-the-shelf door from Home Depot. By the time anybody called them back, they'd already moved on.
So more spend just bought more leads to lose. And the more leads came in, the further behind the phones fell.
Bigger number, lower set rate, no more revenue. He was paying to fill a bucket nobody had fixed.
Every road out was closed.
The fix was somebody on the phones who could call every lead back before they moved on. Every way to get that person was a dead end.
Door 1
Commission-only setter
He'd already tried one, paying per appointment set. Pay for volume and volume is what you get.
Door 2
An AI tool
Automating it would work on the people who already knew what they wanted. It would do nothing for the ones still shopping around.
Door 3
A 1099
Works fine for a field rep, who sets their own schedule. A setter doesn't get that. The customer sets the schedule. The call comes when the call comes.
Door 4
A W-2
A setter worth hiring starts around $50,000 base. Add benefits, payroll tax, tooling, and a desk to sit at. $75,000 all in.
Four doors, all closed.
A wall behind a wall.
Our own trained setter on their phones.
Working inside their own system, managed and held to numbers by us. A real human on our payroll. An operator with a script, a standard, and somebody watching the results.
Then we wrote a twelve-month roadmap that put the bottleneck first and sequenced everything behind it, so he'd stop spending against a leak.
Hire a W-2 setter
$75,000
a year, loaded
What he did instead
$48,000
a year, flat
First month.
85%
of leads answered inside 10 minutes
98%
answered inside the first hour
45%
set rate in month one, against a 40% target
50%+
sustained every month since
Nothing about his marketing changed. He hit every roadmap milestone through the first quarter, on schedule.
In their first month with our system they closed their second highest revenue number ever. Chris has even started sending other operators our way, which is the best endorsement anybody can give.
Where it's headed
Now that the leak is fixed, more ad spend finally brings in proportionally more revenue.
We're well into the roadmap, building repeatable systems so he can grow his sales team to match his pipeline. Now it's about seeing how far we can push that lever, and adding the automations and systems that keep raising the number.
One Day Doors & Closets of Austin
8868 Research Blvd, Ste 110, Austin, TX 78758
Chris' story is probably a lot like your story.
Most owners hit a wall at some point and can't figure out why. Usually it isn't the thing everyone keeps telling them it is. We find out why, and then we fix it for you.
So what's your wall?
Come visit our office on the square in Georgetown and let James and Keenan buy you lunch. If you can't make it out our way, we'll come to you. It's an hour, it's free, and you'll walk out with a couple of things you can go fix yourself whether you ever hire us or not.