Greg Banig

I have spent nearly thirty years figuring out how companies find customers. Most of that time, the customer was a homeowner about to spend a lot of money on their house.

It started in 1997 with direct mail and customer segmentation, before any of this was called lead generation. By 2000 I had my first home services clients. By 2012 I was building the digital marketing department at LeafFilter, now Leaf Home, watching a regional company turn into a national brand across four consecutive years of 318%, 65%, 32% and 47% year-over-year growth.

After that came seven years running my own consultancy, working across nearly every home services vertical there is — roofing, windows, plumbing, remodeling, pest, lawn. Then a private-equity-backed repipe platform, where an expanded SEO program drove 34% year-over-year lead growth and a site rebuild lifted booked appointments 64%.

Different companies, different trades, different decades. And underneath all of it, the same pattern, so consistent I stopped being able to unsee it.

The homeowner is always the last person to find out what anything costs.

That is not an accident or an oversight. It is the model. The economics of home improvement run on the in-home appointment — get a trained salesperson in the living room, present the price there, close it there. Everything upstream of that moment exists to produce it. The ad, the landing page, the call center script, the appointment-setting incentive. All of it is engineered to move someone from curiosity to a scheduled visit without ever answering the question they actually asked.

Which is: what does this cost?

I know how that machine works because I spent my career building it. I have written the ads, run the call centers, designed the funnels, and optimized the cost per appointment. I am good at it, and I do not think it is inherently dishonest — a good contractor genuinely cannot quote a roof sight-unseen, and an in-home visit is often the only way to price a job properly.

But there is a real difference between "we need to see it to quote it" and "we would rather you not know the range before we are sitting at your kitchen table." I have watched enough homeowners get blindsided by a number to know which one is happening most of the time.

What Abode is for

Abode publishes the cost information first.

What a project typically runs. What moves it from the low end of the range to the high end. Which add-ons are legitimate, and which appear on the invoice because nobody asked in advance. What to ask a contractor before signing, and what a fair contract looks like.

If you want quotes, you can get them here. If you only want to know what you are looking at before anyone calls you, you can get that too — without handing over a phone number.

I am not a contractor and I will not pretend otherwise. I have never hung a gutter or repiped a house. What I have is twenty-five years on the company side, watching how these jobs get scoped, priced and sold — and a fairly specific understanding of what homeowners are not being told, because for most of my career I was on the other side of that table.

The short version

Certifications

• Google Ads — Search, Display, Measurement, AI-Powered Performance
• Google Analytics
• Google Conversion Optimization

Contact

Greg Banig — Founder, Abode Home Services
Hudson, Ohio
gregbanig.com

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