Customer Profile No. 01
Hitting a moving target from a moving platform
Hoffmann Brothers' Justin Schmidt on what makes marketing in the trades so hard, and how he adapts with AI agents built on SearchLight data.
Justin Schmidt has been in the trades for one year. Before that, he spent 17 years in tech, including a stretch managing $120 million a year in Facebook and Google spend. Today he is Senior Director of Performance Marketing at Hoffmann Brothers, a four-brand home services company serving St. Louis and Nashville.
He has a line for what the job is like: "Marketing in the trades is hitting a moving target from a moving platform, in a high wind, rain, low visibility environment."
From tech to the trades
Justin's tech career split between high-scale B2C performance and affiliate marketing, and B2B product marketing, enterprise sales, and demand gen. He missed the B2C side, and he missed being close to the outcome.
"I wanted to get back into B2C, and I've always been really interested in doing marketing for something where I can go touch the result."
In software, he says, you rarely get that. In the trades, it's a house call away.
"I can go visit a customer's house and literally see the air conditioner that was installed, or I can feel the warmth of the now working furnace when I walk in the door."
The move came together fast. A friend who used to work at Hoffmann Brothers mentioned Justin to Chris Hoffmann. "So I had a coffee with Chris Hoffmann, and two weeks later I was signing an offer letter."
Improve life in every home
Hoffmann Brothers' mission is to improve life in every home. For Justin, that isn't a slogan. It starts with the call board.
"Every net-new call we put on the call board is an opportunity to literally do exactly that."
Every dispatch is a field professional fixing something that isn't working, or installing something that brings part of a home up to what the homeowner expects. Marketing's job is to make that possible: drive new business and bring home protection plan members and prior customers back.
"That's the thrill of the job, if you will. Improving life in every home means exactly what it says."
He sees it outside work, too. Hoffmann Brothers sponsors youth soccer across St. Louis and Nashville. "We're on tens of thousands of soccer jerseys, and I see Hoffmann Brothers logos on kids' soccer jerseys all the time."
A logistical miracle
Justin's first 30 to 60 days were a crash course in what makes home services hard.
"The first 30, 60 days for me was a real crash course in how much of a logistical miracle it actually is that the right field professional shows up at the right house at the right time with the right stuff on the truck."
Software marketers, he says, tend to underrate this. A SaaS product can onboard another customer at almost no extra cost. An ecommerce brand can check its stock. A home services company can only sell the hours its people have.
"You can't service a home if you don't have the human to service the home."
Weather matters too. "If it's four straight days of 65-degree weather in February, I'm not going to get a lot of calls for broken furnaces."
That's also why he thinks the trades are a great place for strong marketers. The gap between launching a campaign and collecting revenue is about as short as it gets outside ecommerce.
"The best thing you can do in your career is go somewhere where the work you do actually changes the outcomes. This is an opportunity to actually see the impact of your work, and to see it in the community in which you live."
Three things every morning
With that much moving at once, Justin starts each day with the same check. "Every single day I wake up and I look at three things."
- Rolling ROAS and marketing efficiency ratio for individual campaigns and sources, and for the overall marketing mix
- Where the business finished yesterday against budget
- Utilization over the next 3, 5, and 10 days, for each business unit in each brand
"That quickly gives me the Eisenhower Matrix, if you will, of what do I need to focus on today."
The channel mix behind those numbers is shifting. Top-of-funnel home services searches now land in AI Overviews. High-intent searches go the other way: Google throws every ad unit it has to offer at that search.
"Electrician near me is as high intent of a query as you could possibly imagine. The modern SERP for a home services down-funnel query looks like the back of a CVS receipt."
Organic calls are harder to get than ever, so paid matters more, and marketing has to explain its levers to operations leaders who just need more calls. Shared data is what makes those conversations work.
"Being able to have good data on the performance of the marketing efforts really is an equalizer in these conversations."
How Justin builds on the SearchLight API
Dashboards answer the questions everyone asks. Justin's questions are specific to his business, so he stopped working through the dashboard and went straight to the data. He built his own MCP server on the SearchLight API so his team's Claude agents can query SearchLight directly.
"I built my own MCP server specifically so I could plug SearchLight into some of the agent flows that we have in Claude."
"Being able to pull reporting that's a little more specific use case than simply creating another performance report, downloading it in Excel, filtering all things. If I want to know a specific answer about something, it's a lot easier to be able to get that via the API than monkey around in the interface."
The setup is used across his marketing team and operations leadership. Two uses stand out.
1. Finding members who leak back to Google
Justin also built an MCP server for his field service CRM. With both connected to the same agent, he can ask questions neither system answers alone, like what share of the customers Google brought in were already home protection plan members.
"It is heartbreaking when you see a member go back to Google for electrician near me."
2. A daily bid and budget agent
Every day, an agent pulls Google financial performance as reported by SearchLight, alongside bid and budget simulator data from the Google Ads API and each campaign's bid history. It estimates the marginal return on additional booked jobs at different bid and budget levels, checks that against booking capacity, and recommends changes.
Steadying the platform
None of this makes the target hold still. A warm week in February will still slow furnace calls, and a stomach bug will still empty a department's schedule. What Justin's agents change is how fast marketing and operations get the same answer, and how much they trust it.
"We now have a common ground, easy to digest understanding of what the marketing mix looks like and what levers are actually available to pull."
For a marketer who came to the trades to touch the result, that's the payoff. A better answer becomes another call on the board, and another home where something works again.
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