The $8K/month growth lever hiding in plain sight

October 17, 2025

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The $8K/month growth lever hiding in plain sight

I’ve been experimenting with something that might just change how I think about growing a service business.

My new acquisition target—a shower door installation company—is swamped with leads. Great problem, right? Except there’s a catch:

They can’t hire installers fast enough.
And the phone? It only gets answered between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., Monday to Friday.

Classic “good business, bad bandwidth” problem.

The logical fix would be:
→ Hire more installers.
→ Hire someone to answer the phones.

But what if that’s the wrong answer?

💡 The Thought Experiment

Instead of throwing payroll at the problem, I asked:

“What if the real opportunity isn’t staffing up—but building the front end of demand so well that it pays for itself?”

Think about companies like Angie’s List or HomeAdvisor. They don’t install a single thing. They just generate high-intent leads—and sell them.

In the shower-door world, with an average job around $2,500, each lead might be worth $50–$100.

If we could generate even 10–20 leads per week in Metro Detroit, that’s $500–$2,000/week, or up to $8K/month, without adding a single employee.

That’s not fantasy math. That’s an alternate business model.

🧪 The Experiment

To test this idea safely, I picked a different industry: orthodontics.
Why? Because it’s local, high-margin, and competitive—just like home services.

Here’s what I did:

  1. Built an SEO-optimized site — www.metrodetroitorthodontist.com
    (It’s still indexing but already pulling in leads.)

  2. Reached out to a handful of orthodontists to see if they’d buy the leads.
    ✅ They would.

  3. Set up an AI phone agent to take calls.
    ☎️ It gets calls daily—but most hang up before finishing the conversation.

  4. Next step: testing a text-based AI agent instead—because people trust text more than voice when they’re shopping.

All of this is to answer one question:

“Can a local trades business create a new income stream by generating and reselling leads in its own niche?”

So far, it’s looking promising.

🔧 Actionable Takeaways

Here is what I learned through this process:

  1. Think like a marketer, not just an operator. You might be sitting on a lead-gen goldmine.

  2. Automate the front end first. Missed calls = missed money. AI or human, capture every inquiry.

  3. Validate before hiring. Prove the demand system works before scaling labor to fulfill it.

  4. Run a “shadow test.” Pick a parallel industry (like I did with orthodontics) to test your lead-gen model safely.

🧭 Final Thought

Sometimes the answer isn’t “hire more.”
It’s “build smarter.”

The biggest leverage point in small business isn’t more people—it’s better systems for capturing and converting demand.