Introduction
Outdoor living contractors often assume that a slow month means they need more leads. According to Matt Ditzig, founder of Ascendant Digital, the opposite is usually true. The leads are already there. The problem is how long it takes to answer them.
Ditzig was included in a Peekwire roundup of marketing tools for outdoor living contractors alongside LeadTruffle and Pitchit. After confirming his spot on the list, he agreed to answer three questions about what he sees when contractors come to him after losing jobs they thought were already handled.
The Real Problem Is Response Time
When a contractor calls Ditzig after losing leads, the pattern is consistent. "The main problem is they're not responding to incoming leads fast enough. Or they send an initial response and then take too long to follow up after that."
He points to the daily reality of running a crew. "Most owners are on a jobsite during the day and don't have time to get back to leads quickly, so the homeowner goes with whoever replies first."
The consequence is a misdiagnosis. "Then they think they need more leads, when really they just need faster responses and follow up."
This is a common trap in service businesses, where the instinct to increase top-of-funnel volume often masks a leak further down. For a deeper look at how speed-to-lead affects conversion, research on lead response time has shown that contacting a prospect within the first hour dramatically improves the odds of qualifying them.
What Most Facebook Ads Advice Leaves Out
Ditzig is direct about the gap in most marketing advice aimed at contractors. "Almost all the advice is about the ad itself. The creative, the ad spend budget, the copy. Which is fine, but the ad's only job is to get a homeowner to click."
The part that gets skipped is what happens after the click. "They leave out what happens after they click and fill out the form, which is where the money is made. You can have an amazing ad and landing page, but if you're taking hours or days to respond, you're going to lose that job."
For contractors running Facebook ads, this reframes the metric that matters. Click-through rate and cost per lead are inputs. Response time is the variable that determines whether the spend turns into revenue.
The Wrong Order of Operations
When contractors try to fix slow follow-up, Ditzig sees a predictable mistake. "Most contractors think it's a 'leads problem.' So they spend more on ads, door hangers, and yard signs. Everything except responding faster."
Hiring a phone answerer is a partial fix, but it does not close the gap. "Sometimes they'll hire someone to answer phones, but what happens when a lead comes in after hours? Or when that person is on another call or at lunch and forgets to call back?"
The math is simple. "More leads into a slow system just means more wasted leads. Fix your response time first, then scale it."
That sequence matters. Adding volume to a process that already leaks leads just increases the size of the leak. Contractors who want a practical starting point can look at CRM and automation tools that trigger an immediate acknowledgment and route after-hours inquiries, but the tool is secondary to the decision to prioritize response time.
Practical Takeaways
- Measure response time before buying more ads. If leads sit for hours, the bottleneck is not volume.
- Treat the first reply as the start, not the finish. Follow-up after the initial response is where many jobs are lost.
- Plan for after-hours and interruptions. A single phone answerer cannot cover every gap.
- Fix the system, then scale. More leads into a slow process produces more waste, not more revenue.
Ditzig's position is not that advertising is unimportant. It is that the ad's job ends at the click. Everything after that determines whether the contractor gets paid. For outdoor living businesses where homeowners are often comparing multiple quotes, the first company to respond has a structural advantage that no creative refresh can replace.
Contractors who want to evaluate their own follow-up process can start by auditing the time between form submission and first contact, then between first contact and second follow-up. Those two numbers usually explain more about lost jobs than any ad report.