TLDR: Marcus owns a commercial cleaning company in Columbus. He needed 40-50 new sales conversations per month to hit growth targets. He was getting 5. Manual prospecting took 15+ minutes per contact, and he never had time to do it consistently. We built an agent that finds prospects, researches their companies, and drafts personalized emails - 47 contacts processed in 90 seconds. His response rate jumped from 2% to 11%. The system costs about $0.03 per prospect.
6:47 AM in a Parking Lot
Marcus is sitting in his truck outside a medical office building, scrolling LinkedIn before his first site visit of the day.
He's supposed to be finding new prospects. That's what he told himself he'd do every morning this week. Instead, he's copying names into a spreadsheet he'll forget about by Thursday. Again.
This isn't why he started the business.
He's good at cleaning buildings. Good at managing crews. Good at keeping clients happy - 94% retention rate, which he's genuinely proud of. But the pipeline? That's the part that keeps him up at night.
He's tried things:
A lead vendor sold him a list of 500 "verified" facility managers. 60% bounce rate. Zero responses from the ones that didn't bounce.
He hired a part-time BD person. She quit after three months because "there was no system to follow."
He tried "doing LinkedIn" himself. Posted twice. Got nothing. Felt stupid.
The math doesn't work. He needs 40-50 new conversations per month to hit his growth targets. He's getting maybe 8. On a good month.
The Company
23 employees: 18 cleaning staff, 3 supervisors, 1 office manager, and Marcus running everything else.
$1.8M in revenue. Targeting $2.5M.
They handle office buildings, medical facilities, and industrial spaces across Columbus metro and the surrounding counties. The business Marcus bought four years ago from the retiring founder.
Operations are solid. The problem has never been keeping clients. It's finding new ones.
His target customer: facility managers and office managers at companies with 50-500 employees. Buildings big enough to need professional cleaning, small enough that they're not locked into five-year national contracts.
What he'd tried before us:
A "marketing agency" that promised leads. Delivered nothing but invoices for six months.
A ZoomInfo subscription. Too expensive for the data quality, and he couldn't figure out how to use it properly anyway.
Networking events. BNI, chamber mixers, that kind of thing. Time-consuming. Low conversion. He hated the forced small talk.
His office manager occasionally "doing outreach." Which meant sporadic bursts of activity followed by months of nothing.
The core issue: prospecting was always something that happened "when there's time."
There was never time.
The Math of Manual Prospecting
When Marcus or his office manager actually sat down to prospect, here's what it looked like:
Open LinkedIn. Search "facility manager Columbus Ohio." Scroll through results.
Find someone who looks relevant. Click their profile. Check their company size. Is it 50-500 employees? Hard to tell sometimes.
If it looks promising, find the company website. Look for contact info. Usually buried three clicks deep or hidden entirely.
If no email visible, try to guess ([email protected]) or use a finder tool. Which sometimes works. Often doesn't.
Open a new email. Write something. Stare at the screen. Delete it. Write something else that sounds less desperate.
Send. Move to the next name. Try to remember who you already contacted last month.
Time per prospect: 12-18 minutes. That's if you're focused. If you're also answering texts from your site supervisors about a broken vacuum, it's more like 25.
Prospects per hour: 3-5.
Hours available per week: Maybe 3 on the calendar. Realistically 1, because something always comes up.
Prospects generated per week: 5-15.
Conversion to conversation: ~8%.
New conversations per month: 3-5.
He needed 40-50. He was getting one-tenth of that.
The hidden costs went deeper than time:
Inconsistency: Some weeks zero prospecting. Some weeks a panicked burst. No rhythm meant no momentum.
Quality decay: By prospect #8, the emails got lazy. "I noticed your company might need cleaning services..." became the default. He knew it was bad. He sent it anyway because he was tired.
No follow-up system: He'd send an email, never track it, forget who he'd contacted, sometimes email the same person twice months later. Embarrassing.
Opportunity cost: Every hour Marcus spent copying names into spreadsheets was an hour not spent on operations, client relationships, or actually closing the deals he did get.
The bottleneck wasn't effort. It was architecture.
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