The tool. You buy software and operate it. It answers the phone well. It does not manage your profile, rebuild your site, run your ads, or bring back last year’s customer, and it will happily sell the same thing to the company down the road.
The agency. You buy a channel: SEO, or ads, or mail, usually one at a time, priced as labor. When the contract ends the work stops, and the other three pillars were never anybody’s job.
The engine. One company runs all four pillars, answers the phone, works the follow up, watches the numbers, and shows you the work. One company per category, per ZIP code.
Questions worth asking any of them
- Who answers the phone at 6pm?
- Who follows up the estimates that did not close?
- Who asks your last 200 customers for a review this month?
- When the competitor down the street buys the same tool, what do I still have?