Context
Intercity chauffeur trips across the US: New York to Washington, Portland to Seattle, Las Vegas to Los Angeles. California carried roughly 80% of the orders.
No brand, no website, no advertising, no process for handling an enquiry. We started from nothing.
Diagnosis
A $46 lead looks expensive if you hold it against one booking, and that’s exactly the arithmetic that keeps businesses like this small.
The minimum reservation was three hours at $125 an hour. Clients booked two to five times a month. They stayed two to three years. Nobody was buying a ride.
Demand was real and occasionally intense, during the shutdown, with airports running unpredictably, intercity ground transport became the reliable option.
But demand arriving at a company with no brand and no CRM leaks straight back out. Reach was never the gap. There was nothing for reach to land on.
Decisions
- Built the brand, the site, and the analytics before scaling spend, because paying $46 for a lead that lands nowhere is the expensive version of this mistake
- Split the states into separate ad sets instead of one blended campaign, so California’s dominance stayed visible instead of averaged away
- Set the acquisition target against client lifetime, not first booking
- Trained the client’s team on the CRM instead of running their sales for them
Results
234 booking leads at $45.97, on $10,756.98 of spend at a $132 daily budget.
The business went from nothing to a working commercial setup: identity, website, paid acquisition, analytics, and a CRM process its own staff could run without me.
Then the owner sold the company and moved into another sector. The system worked; he just got a better offer.