Ellery Home Services · 2026
Cutting speed-to-lead from 40 minutes to 48 seconds
Before
- 41 minMedian speed-to-lead
- 19%Lead-to-estimate rate
- 0%After-hours leads answered
After
- 48 secMedian speed-to-lead
- 27%Lead-to-estimate rate
- +42%Booked estimates
The challenge
Ellery ran four crews across Tampa Bay and spent heavily on local service ads. The leads arrived, around 300 a month, but the office manager was fielding them between dispatch calls. Median response time was 41 minutes, and anything after 5pm waited until the next morning. By then most homeowners had already booked whoever answered first.
The approach
Fixed the foundation before automating anything
The existing account had an unauthenticated sending domain and no A2P 10DLC registration, so roughly a third of outbound texts were being silently filtered. We registered the brand and campaign, authenticated DNS with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, and validated deliverability before building a single workflow.
Missed-call text-back in under 30 seconds
Every unanswered call now triggers an immediate SMS offering a booking link. This one workflow recovered more revenue than everything else combined. Those calls were already paid for. They were simply going unanswered.
Estimate follow-up that runs until a decision
Quotes previously went out and were never chased. We built a seven-touch sequence across SMS and email that runs until the homeowner books, declines, or explicitly opts out, with the crew notified the moment someone re-engages.
Review requests wired to job completion
When a job is marked complete in the pipeline, a review request fires two hours later. Google reviews went from 61 to 240 in five months, which fed back into local ranking and lowered cost per lead.
The outcome
Within one quarter, booked estimates rose 42% on flat ad spend. The office manager stopped triaging leads entirely. The system handles first response and escalates only when someone replies. Ellery has since added two crews.
We had GoHighLevel for eight months and used maybe a tenth of it. Speed-to-lead went from about forty minutes to under a minute, and our booked estimate rate moved more in one quarter than in the previous two years.