Roughly a 40% increase, confirmed four months apart.
Replaced a single call with a mandatory call, text, and email cadence.
From the first meeting to a working process, confirmed on the call.
The steady-state length once the format was running (the first session ran longer).
A $5 million crawl space, waterproofing, and foundation repair company was converting 19 leads a week, and the owner figured the market had gone quiet. Before spending more to buy leads, one weekly meeting found what was actually costing him the leads he already had: the office was calling new internet leads once, and moving on if nobody picked up.
Clear Results installed a structured weekly meeting for the marketing and admin team, and that habit surfaced in the very first session. The same conversation solved it, mapping a mandatory 3-touch follow-up system tracked on a scorecard the office couldn't quietly skip. Weekly lead volume climbed from 19 to a new baseline of 26-27, without any change to the marketing budget.
Grant (not his real name) didn't think he had a lead problem. Every week, he reviewed a business that looked, on the surface, like it was running fine. "I feel like I say this every week, but it seems like everything's running smooth, at least at my level that I know of," he told his advisor on one August call. Underneath that, the crews were thinner than they should have been for a company spending real money on marketing.
"The problem is, the freaking leads are not there," Grant said in July. "We're putting in the work. We just ain't seeing it."
The leads were there. On July 6, a scorecard review put the number at 19 for the week, down from a high of 20 the week before and a low of 6 during a particularly rough stretch in June. Nobody was tracking where those leads actually went after the first contact. The office administrator handled intake and outreach in whatever time was left over between other tasks, with no requirement to try twice.
Asked how she followed up with a lead that didn't answer, she was direct about it: "There isn't a process. It's just if I have free time, I can go back and try to reach out to them again." Asked if that attempt happened the same day the lead came in, she wasn't certain: "I couldn't say for sure, but it was probably the same day."
Treating an expensive lead the same as a single unanswered phone call was trapped value inside a home service business that looked healthy everywhere else. It just hadn't been named yet.
A Level 10 (L10) meeting is a structured weekly leadership rhythm, typically built around a fixed agenda: a quick round of good news, a scorecard review, and a longer block reserved for solving the week's single biggest issue. Clear Results installs this format with clients, adapted from the EOS/Traction operating system.
IDS is that problem-solving segment. It stands for Identify, Discuss, Solve: naming the root cause of an issue, discussing it only long enough to confirm what's actually broken, then assigning a concrete action item with a deadline. IDS is built to produce a short conversation that still ends with someone attached to a fix. A normal meeting can run twice as long and still end with the issue only discussed, never solved.
Example: an owner notices bookings are down. During IDS, the team traces the cause to the office calling new leads once and giving up. They confirm the pattern in a few minutes, then assign the office manager to build a mandatory three-touch follow-up system by the following week.
Clear Results installed a weekly L10 for the marketing and administrative side of the business, separate from the leadership team's own weekly rhythm. The rollout started rough: the marketing lead was unfamiliar enough with the format that she interrupted the first session to ask what IDS even meant, and the office administrator objected the moment the new follow-up standard came up.
"I just don't know how realistic it is just for me to be doing that over and over and over for every single lead that reaches out." — The office administrator, on the new follow-up standard
At the end of that first meeting, she rated it a 6 or 7 out of 10. Grant rated it a 7.5.
Two weeks later, the format did what it was built to do.
Working through the math with Grant, Stuart laid out what a single missed lead actually cost: "Every 10 calls, one turns into a lead. That means every 30 calls would likely close a $14,000 client. That's low-hanging fruit on the marketing side." Grant heard it differently than a lecture.
"The whole time you were going through that, I was sitting here thinking this is probably something I should have already done a year ago. But here we are, and we still ain't done it. So we might as well just hit it moving forward." — Grant, on realizing the fix was overdue
That session produced a concrete plan: a mandatory 3-touch standard — a call, a text, and an email — spaced over several days for every inbound lead. The office administrator logged each touch on the weekly scorecard, so a lead marked dead had to show 3 real attempts behind it, not a guess about someone's free time.
By August 10, the process was live and confirmed on the call: "Good news is we have the lead follow-up process wrapped up," the production manager reported. Weekly lead volume was already averaging 21.5 over the prior four weeks. By November, it had settled at a new, durable baseline. "Our leads are up there," Grant said. "They were sitting around 20 to 26 a week, and now they're at 26, 27. That's good news for me." For a home service business trying to improve its close rate on the leads it's already paying for, the change wasn't a better sales pitch. It was making sure every paid lead got pitched more than once.
This isn't unique to crawl space and foundation work. Any trade that spends real money generating a lead and then treats the follow-up as optional leaks value the same way:
Is fixing lead follow-up with a weekly meeting the same as home service coaching? Where a typical home service coaching program hands owners a framework and checks in once a month, this works differently. Clear Results is a strategic advisory firm of experienced operators who embed directly in the business, installing the meeting rhythm, the scorecard, and the accountability structure that make follow-up happen on its own. That's a system doing the work, not a monthly call about the work.
"If I make my office call every lead three times, won't they just quit? They're already stretched thin," a business owner might ask. It's a fair worry, but the opposite tends to happen. Ad-hoc, reactive follow-up is more exhausting than a defined workflow, because the person doing it never knows if they've done enough. A clear three-touch standard — call, text, email — removes that guesswork. If the team genuinely is too thin to carry it, the weekly scorecard proves that with real numbers, not a gut feeling.
What exactly is an IDS session, and how is it different from a quick Monday huddle? A huddle is fine for status updates. It rarely fixes a structural problem, because nobody's required to stay on one issue until it's solved. An IDS session is a dedicated block inside a weekly meeting, built to do exactly that: identify the root cause, discuss it only long enough to confirm it, then assign a concrete action with a deadline. It turns a recurring complaint into a decision, not a repeat conversation.
How many times should we try to reach a lead before marking it dead? Enough times to get a real yes or no, not a guess. In this case, moving from one call to a three-touch standard — call, text, and email, spaced over several days — took weekly lead volume from 19 to 26-27. Someone who filled out a form or called in has a problem to solve. A real follow-up process is often the only thing separating your business from the competitor they end up hiring instead.
How do I check that the office is actually doing three touches without watching their call log every day? A weekly scorecard reviewed inside the meeting does that job. When each of the 3 touches is tracked as its own metric, the team reports their own numbers every week, and a drop shows up in the data before it shows up in booked revenue. That's accountability to a number, not to someone standing over a desk.
Does this only work for a business already running other Clear Results systems? No. This installation started with a meeting for just the marketing and administrative side of the business, separate from the main leadership rhythm already in place. A weekly meeting with a scorecard and an IDS segment can be installed on its own, for a single team, before touching anything else.
"We're already busy and the leads are coming in fine, so why would we need this?" an owner might ask. Volume coming in and volume being worked are two different things. The office in this case had plenty of leads. What it lacked was a reason to try a second time. Check how many of last week's leads got a 2nd or 3rd touch before assuming the pipeline is healthy.
Related: Why Your Meetings Don't Work (And the Format That Does)
Stuart Trier is the Founder and CEO of Clear Results. Over the past 20 years, Stuart has built, bought, and sold 11 companies across the home service, healthcare, and marketing industries. He built his first company from startup to $8M in revenue in 3 years before a successful exit, then built a chain of 28 healthcare clinics and sold the business to a publicly traded company. Following that acquisition, Stuart spent 3 years working alongside the CEO, helping lead the organization through a take-private transaction before participating in a nine-figure exit to a Fortune 10 company. Today, he's the lead investor behind an electrical services platform operating across 3 U.S. states, and has worked directly with owners through 1,800+ strategic advisory sessions.
