Alright alright, it's time to start posting on Twitter again. I still feel weird calling it X. Name's Rob, based here in St. Cloud, Florida, which is just outside of Orlando. Running a marketing agency, scaling past six figures MRR. We only work with remodelers and ADU builders. Below-average golfer yet. I pay to play every week. Married with two kids and juggling agency life and family life. I use my Traeger way too much, and my wife is tired of the "smokey flavor."

Lifting taught me more about running a business than most books did. Show up when you don't feel like it, and add a little more than last time. That's basically the whole game. Nbd.

Hiring somebody doesn't give you time back right away. It takes time first. A lot of owners quit before they reach the other side of that and write it off as a bad hire.

Low and slow is the trick with brisket and with a business. Rush the temp and you ruin it. Nobody believes that until they've ruined a couple.

Reviews are just proof you did what you said you'd do. Do the work right and they stack up on their own. Try to shortcut them and everybody can tell.

Motivation is overrated. Some of my best work happened on days I didn't feel like doing anything. You don't rise to the mood. You fall back on the habit.

This is awesome.

If I'm a GC right now, I'm not chasing custom homes. I'm building ADUs. Smaller ticket, cleaner scope, 22% margin, and nobody in my market is advertising for them yet.

What's a business book that actually changed how you run things, not just one you finished and shelved? I've read a hundred. Maybe four stuck.

The point of building the thing is so the thing serves the life, not the other way around. Easy to forget on a Sunday night with the laptop still open.

Now that’s a good opening line. Why yes, yes I am having a good life.

A general contractor out west told me his county dropped ADU setbacks from twenty or thirty feet down to five. Then he said the thing that actually matters. He doesn't know how many people know what's allowed now versus what wasn't allowed before. Read that again. The law changed. The homeowners are still working off the old rules. The demand is already there. Nobody told them it's legal. Go pull your own county code. There's a category of job sitting in your market that your neighbors think is illegal.

Told a contractor about a performance fee the other day. Six percent. He was driving to a jobsite he'd never been to. "On the net or gross?" Four words, about four seconds after I finished the sentence. He found the one word in there that changes what he actually pays. Every agency deck I've seen treats these guys like the math is the hard part. Like they need a funnel diagram. The math is the easy part. They bid jobs for a living. Price your offer like the guy on the other end runs numbers for a living. Because he does.

A builder in Dallas told me his ADU leads spike in December and January. I figured weather, or maybe tax refunds. He said no. People see their family over the holidays and they're like, damn, my dad's getting old. That's the trigger. A dinner where somebody watches his father take the stairs one step at a time. So if your budget drops in December because things feel quiet, you've got it backwards. Your buyer is sitting at a table in six weeks doing math on what happens when his parents can't live alone. Run through the holidays.

If I were a general contractor starting an ADU business today, here's what I'd do. Pick one zip code/city. Not three. One. Shoot one 60-second video on the actual lot of your first project. Phone camera. No b-roll. Walk through why that homeowner chose an ADU over an addition. Spend $50 a day on Meta ads for 30 days with that video. Not boosted posts. Actual campaigns with a lead form. Build 3 pre-approved floor plans. 600 sq ft, 800 sq ft, 1,000 sq ft. Price them so a homeowner knows the number in 2 minutes, not 2 weeks. Answer every call inside 5 minutes. The permit-stall contractors lose 60% of their leads at this step. Stop. Don't add a fourth floor plan. Don't open a second market. Don't launch a podcast. Do 10 of those jobs. Then expand. Most GCs trying to add ADUs are building 15 options for 3 zip codes with no system to answer the phone. That's why they stall at $200K in ADU revenue and quit.

A homeowner asking three questions is not a tire kicker. He's about to spend $80,000 of his own money.

Ran $3,738 on Meta ads for an ADU builder last month. 149 leads. One closed $150K. He emailed us "we love the leads." That's all we need. The thing nobody tells ADU builders: a single $150K close pays for the entire year of marketing. You don't need a flood. You need a system.

Watched this across 12 builder accounts in the last 90 days. The ones who answer the phone inside 5 minutes close 3x the ones who answer the next day. Same lead source. Same ad spend. Same market. Speed to lead is the hidden margin in residential construction. Not price. Not reviews. Speed.

"Our last agency didn't do anything for us." Translation: nobody picked up the leads.

If I were starting a residential remodeling company in 2026, here's what I'd do. I'd pick one trade. Baths. Not kitchens, not whole-home. Baths. I'd shoot before/after of every single job on my phone. 30 jobs in year one = 30 pieces of free marketing I own forever. I'd run $75/day on Meta ads inside a 15-mile radius of my shop. One market. One trade. One offer. I'd charge 15% more than my competitors and tell every lead why in the first 2 minutes of the call. I'd answer every call myself for the first 18 months. I'd skip Angi, HomeAdvisor, and every pay-per-lead site. Not because they're evil. Because they teach you nothing. I'd keep every number in a notebook. CPL. Close rate. Average ticket. Repeat customer rate. By month 24 I'd know what my unit economics actually are. That's when you scale. Not before.

Did a sales call this morning with a builder doing $4M in custom homes. He asked me why some of his ADU leads from Facebook went nowhere. I asked him who answers his phone. He said his project manager, when he's free. That was the whole call. The ads were working. The system was broken at the human. Most residential marketing problems aren't marketing problems.