Case Studies
Real flooring operators. Real recovered margin.
Names changed, numbers within 5% of actual, every story verifiable on request. Cases 1 and 2 are from the flooring company Jacob currently operates.
Case 1 · Margin Recovery
The Margin Compression Reversal
$8.7M multi-location flooring company, Southeast · 8 months engaged, ongoing · Pillar: Margins
Challenge
Through 2024 and into Q1 2025 the business ran a steady ~28.5% gross margin. Through Q2–Q4 2025 it bled - accelerating month over month. October 2025 hit the trough at 22.63% - a 6-point collapse on $924k of monthly net sales. Revenue was still growing. The default consultant answer - "raise prices, tighten estimators" - would have killed competitive bids on the line that mattered most.
Diagnosis
Sliced the JCA data by customer type for the first time. Retail (~20% of revenue) was actually improving - 35% → 37–40%. Not the problem. The builder line (~80% of revenue) had collapsed from 27.55% to 21.80% in 9 months. That single line was the entire story. No real-time visibility, no per-customer-type GP targets, "discount-without-approval" had become the default mode on builder quotes.
What we did
Built a quote-monitoring dashboard reading directly from JCA, Quote Info, Estimate Profitability, and Historic PO exports - 5 tabs, ~1,300 lines of code. Set per-customer-type GP targets (Builder 22% min / 28% target; Retail 33% / 38%; Commercial 28% / 33%). Every open quote now gets a Red/Yellow/Green flag against its customer-type target before commit. Salespeople see their full pipeline graded by GP%. Coaching is now data-anchored, not anecdotal.
GM recovered
+5.2 pp
22.63% → 27.83%
Annualized $ impact
$453,000
on $8.7M revenue base
Builder line recovery
21.80% → 26.67%
May MTD vs Oct trough
"I thought we had a sales problem. We had a visibility problem on one customer line. The dashboard caught it within two weeks of going live."
Case 2 · Google Ads
The Google Ads Overhaul
Same business, primary market ad account · ~12 months engaged · Pillar: Ads
Challenge
The Jacksonville Google Ads account was spending $9,226/month and generating 40 conversions - a blended $230 cost per lead. The account hadn't been restructured in over a year. Quality scores trending down. Multiple high-spend keywords were converting at zero. Phone calls weren't being tracked back to specific campaigns, so credit was misallocated.
Diagnosis
Account spending heavily on broad-match keywords with quality score 4–5. Zero conversions on multiple keywords spending>$50/mo. No DKI in headlines - generic ad copy on every search. Phone tracking broken - calls weren't being uploaded as offline conversions. Negative keyword list 14 months stale.
What we did
Full account restructure: separated builder vs retail intent, install vs material searches. Rebuilt the negative keyword list with a cross-market sweep applied. Deployed DKI in headlines, geo-corrected ad copy per market. Wired offline conversion uploads - phone calls now credit the right campaign. RSA consolidation: pared 40+ ad variants down to 8 high-performers. Built rank-loss + auction-density tracking.
Cost per lead
−81%
$230 → $43
Avg CPC
−45%
$12.71 → $7.03
Monthly conversions
+67%
40 → 67
Monthly spend
−69%
$9,226 → $2,857
Translated: $76,000/year less in ad spend plus 324 more leads per yearthan the prior baseline. Both at once. If we'd held spend constant at $9,226/mo, the same efficiency would have generated 215 conversions per month instead of 40 - a 5.4x lift.
"Same business, same products, same market. We're spending a quarter of what we used to, and we're getting more leads."
Acquisition Readiness - Template
Commercial flooring operator, ~$6.5M revenue, Mountain West · Owner preparing 24-month exit · Pillar: Acquisitions
Owner wanted to sell within 24 months but the business was too owner-dependent. Books were clean but messy by category. Two business brokers had passed because they couldn't underwrite the EBITDA cleanly. We'd install the same GP-by-category dashboard, pull and substantiate addbacks, build a buyer-ready SOP binder, and introduce two specialist M&A brokers from our network. Illustrative outcome: sold 14 months later at 5.2x SDE - well above the 3.5x initial broker quote.
This case study is a template - we'll replace it with a real acquisitions engagement once we've closed one. Posted here so prospective clients can see how Pillar 3 maps to a real exit timeline.
Want a leak report on your own business?
The same diagnostic we ran on the cases above is what we run on every new client. Free for the first three flooring operators who claim a slot - manual delivery, real numbers, your top 2 leaks ranked by dollar impact.