De Pere runs on referrals, and referrals run on answering.

You deal with the person who builds it

There is no sales team and no support queue. When an owner here calls, the person who builds the system picks up. The install happens remotely, so nothing about it depends on the drive.

In a town this size, people already know who to call

De Pere runs on referrals. Somebody in a Facebook group asks who to call for a water heater, and the same four company names come back. If you are one of those four names, most of your marketing is already done. If you are not, you spend the year quoting against people who never had to.

The gap between those two groups is rarely quality of work. It is how many people got asked for a review after a job that went well, and whether the owner remembered to follow up on the estimate they sent two weeks ago. Both of those are jobs that get skipped when you are busy, and both of them can run without you.

Two sides of the river, two different service calls

East of the Fox, the older streets near downtown and around St. Norbert have houses with decades of partial updates layered on top of each other. Those calls are diagnostic, and they are unpredictable, and they come in at bad times.

Southwest, out toward Ledgeview and Lawrence, the subdivisions are newer. Those are planned jobs: finished basements, second bathrooms, AC replacements, deck and garage work. The customer is comparing quotes, not panicking, which means the winner is usually whoever replied first with something concrete.

Those two customers want opposite things from you. You lose both of them by not answering.

What “under five minutes” is worth on a quote request

A homeowner in a new build filling out a contact form at 8:40 on a Tuesday night is not sending it to one company. They are sending it to three, and they are going to hire whoever writes back first with a real answer and a time.

If your reply lands the next morning, you are the third quote in a race that was decided at 8:47. Afterburner writes that first reply for you, in your voice, and then keeps following up until the person responds. It does not sound like a robot and it does not send four messages in an hour.

What gets installed

• Ricochet missed call text-back. A call you cannot take gets answered with a text in seconds instead of a voicemail nobody listens to.
• Web leads and estimates. Web forms get a written reply within minutes, and estimates get followed up on day 2, 5 and 10 until the customer answers.
• Review Requests. Every finished job turns into a review request without you touching it, which is how the four names in that Facebook group change over time.

One install, one bill, nothing new for you to log into. Customers keep calling the number on your truck. The text they get comes from a local number I set up for your business, signed with your company name.

How long it takes and what happens after

Ricochet is set up within a week of the day you say go, and most of that week is waiting on carrier registration rather than on me. It is $297 to set up and $147 a month, month to month, and if it doesn’t text back at least 5 missed calls in your first 30 days, you get the setup fee back. Afterburner, with everything above, is $1,497 to set up and $397 a month, with a 3-month minimum.

Nobody in this trade needs a payment plan explained to them, so plainly: if it does not save you more than it costs in the first season, it was not worth buying, and I would rather tell you that on the phone than after you have paid.

Also serving the towns next door

Ledgeview, Lawrence, Hobart, Wrightstown and Ashwaubenon are all the same drive, and none of it changes the install. If you work De Pere and everything within twenty minutes of it, which most local trades do, the system covers the whole territory without any extra setup.