Most of the leads a home service company gets in Los Angeles do not come from the marketing budget. They come from the truck, the technician, the last customer and the company next door. The first eight tactics below cost almost nothing and are done by the crew in the field; the last four are what I add on the accounts I run. None of them requires a new website, although a fast one makes every one of them work harder.
1. Put the van in the picture
Every time a technician stops somewhere on their own business, lunch, gas, a parts store, they park the van in front of the entrance, take a photo of the place with the van in the frame, and leave that business a normal Google review with the photo attached. The photo lives on that business's Google Maps listing and is seen by everyone who searches for it. Once a month, a small contest: the tech with the most photos gets lunch on the company.
One rule keeps this clean: the review has to be genuine and about the place. Google removes reviews that are promotional or that come from people who never visited, and a stack of removed reviews can hurt the account that left them.
2. Publish reels with collaborators
Every Instagram reel goes out through "Invite collaborator", up to five accounts: a parts supplier, a partner plumber, a property manager, a happy commercial customer. The reel appears in all of their feeds at the same time, with their followers, not only yours. On Facebook, tag the people and pages in the video and accept every incoming collaboration invite. A company with 400 followers and four collaborators reaches more homeowners than a company with 4,000 followers posting alone.
3. Reactivate your past customers by SMS
A repair company with ten years of jobs has a list of thousands of households that already trust it and already have its number. Once a season, one text with one concrete offer: a fall heating check, a spring AC tune-up, "$25 off for returning customers". The link goes to an offer page on your site, so every request is counted.
Two things make this legal and effective in the US: text only customers who gave you their number for service and agreed to hear from you (the TCPA is strict about marketing texts and the fines are per message), and include a one-word opt-out in every text. Any SMS tool built for service companies handles both; most CRMs have one built in.
4. Five stars from the doorstep, and every review on air
The technician says at the start of the visit: "I want to give you five-star service today. If anything is not right, tell me and I'll fix it." That sentence does two things: it sets the standard, and it moves any complaint to the moment it can still be fixed, instead of into a review.
After the repair, the tech asks for a short video review on their phone, thirty seconds, in the customer's kitchen. Every new five-star review becomes a social post from one Canva template; video reviews go on the website and into the ads. Ask for permission to publish on the spot, and never offer a discount for a review: both Google and the FTC treat paid reviews as fake.
5. Personal profiles, not only the company page
People follow people, not logos. The owner and the technicians post their work from their own accounts: the job of the day, the before and after, the odd part they found in a dryer. A working norm is 25 to 50 new local connections a day per person: neighbors, local groups, answers in neighborhood discussions. Five people with personal profiles reach five times more households than one company page with the same content.
6. Turn on the categories your competitors skip in Local Services Ads
Most HVAC companies do not bother with duct cleaning in Local Services Ads: small ticket, not worth the truck. That is exactly why the category is cheap. Duct cleaning is a way into the house: the technician on site sees the fifteen-year-old furnace and the leaking condensate line, and sells the repair and the maintenance plan. The same logic applies to dryer vent cleaning for appliance companies and to garbage disposal replacement for plumbers. Here is how LSA differs from regular Google Ads.
7. Partners, including competitors one step to the side
Find five to ten companies nearby that do adjacent work: plumbers, electricians, HVAC installers who do not repair appliances, realtors, property managers, home inspectors, handymen. Coffee once, then a WhatsApp group, then referrals both ways. The most generous lead sources are the businesses one step to the side of your own trade: they see the problem you solve every day and cannot solve it themselves. Put the referral fee in writing, even if it is a gift card, so nobody has to wonder.
8. "Ask me about HVAC" T-shirts
The crew wears the shirt off duty: the gas station, the gym, the school pickup line, the DMV. People ask. The rule that makes it work: do not hand out a business card. Take the person's name and number, and call them yourself the next day. A card ends up in a drawer; a call ends up on the schedule.
Those eight are the field. The next four are what I add from the office side, and they multiply the first eight.
9. Answer "how much" on your website
Before a homeowner calls, they search for the price. In my September check of 780 Los Angeles contractor sites, only one in ten had a page that answers "how much does it cost". A cost page with honest ranges ("AC repair in Los Angeles: $150 to $1,200 depending on the part") ranks for the exact searches your ads pay for, and it pre-qualifies the caller: the ones who call after reading the range are ready to book.
10. Speed to lead: answer in a minute, text back every missed call
A lead answered within a minute books far more often than one answered in an hour, and after a day it is usually gone to whoever answered first. Two settings fix most of it: calls ring on two phones at once, and every missed call gets an automatic text within a minute ("This is Mike from Sunset HVAC, sorry I missed you, what's going on with the unit?"). Local Services Ads also rank you by responsiveness, so this one pays twice.
11. Yard signs, door hangers and Nextdoor on every job
A job site is an ad for the whole street. A yard sign with the phone number for the duration of the job, a door hanger on the ten nearest houses ("We're working at your neighbor's this week; here's what a tune-up costs"), and, when the job is done, a request to the customer to recommend you on Nextdoor. In Los Angeles neighborhoods Nextdoor recommendations are read the way Yelp was read ten years ago, and they cost nothing.
12. Maintenance memberships
An annual plan, two visits a year, priority scheduling, a discount on repairs. For the customer it is peace of mind; for you it is recurring revenue, a reason to text (tactic 3) and a technician in the house twice a year, seeing what needs replacing before it fails. Companies with a few hundred members stop worrying about slow months.
Where to start
Do not start all twelve. Pick three: the doorstep sentence (4), one partner coffee a week (7), and the missed-call text (10). They cost nothing, they start tomorrow, and they are measurable. Then add the website "how much" page and the SMS reactivation once the tracking is in place, so you can see what each one produced. If you want the tracking set up and the numbers reported every month, that is what my sprints are for.
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