How Contractors Are Replacing Angi, HomeAdvisor and Thumbtack With One Page. Without Google Ads.

Stop buying leads until you've watched this. Because the next lead you pay seventy dollars for is being sold to four other contractors right now, at this second, and the fastest one to the phone gets a shot. Not the best one. The fastest. And the platform gets paid whether anybody books or not.

In the next half hour I'm going to show you what contractors are doing instead. It isn't Google Ads. It isn't an agency. It's one page. And before I show you the page, I have to show you what the platforms are actually selling you, because it isn't leads.

This is how contractors are replacing Angi, HomeAdvisor and Thumbtack with one page. Without Google Ads.

If you're watching this, you run a home-service company and you're angry. Not mildly annoyed. Angry. You've paid for the same homeowner five other companies paid for. You've called a lead back in ninety seconds and lost it. You've had the rep call to suggest a bigger budget. And you've kept paying, because the day you stop, you're not sure the phone still rings.

My goal for the next half hour is simple. I want you to leave with a plan and a date on it. Not a feeling. A plan. Build the private road, run it next to the platforms, watch the weekly report, and on a date you pick, decide what the lead budget should be. With numbers, instead of a rep on the phone.

You won't have to run Google Ads. You won't have to hire an agency or write content. You won't have to change your website or add a tool your office has to babysit. And you won't have to turn anything off on day one.

Here's what you get if you stay to the end. One. What the platforms actually sell, and who they sell it to. Two. The one page that gets homeowners to you without the toll, and why you don't have to build it. Three. The ninety-day run-both plan, and the weekly report you'll use to decide. And at the end, how to see, in about two minutes, who the assistants send homeowners to in your town right now. Say I'm in, out loud. It works.

One rule. I teach for the first twenty-five minutes, no pitching. At the end I'll show you how we build the road for you, and you can close the tab then if you want. Fair?

My name is Gus Skarlis. I've built software for twenty-five years. I grew up around family businesses. Automotive, home improvement, manufacturing. I've owned businesses online and off, and in the offline ones I paid the toll. Every month, for years. I know exactly what the lead line looks like on a Friday.

Today I build the thing an AI assistant reads when somebody asks it who to call. So I've been on both sides of this. I've paid the platforms, and I've built the road around them. But it wasn't always like this.

I've done a lot right. I've also bumped the budget every time the rep called. I raced four other guys to the phone for years and called it lead gen. And once, I turned the platforms off cold, with nothing built to replace them, and panicked when the phone went quiet. That last one is why this webinar has a plan in it and not just a speech. None of it was your fault.

After doing this for a long time, three things became obvious. One. The homeowners the platforms sell you were already looking for you. Two. Getting off the platforms takes one page, not a marketing department. Three. You don't turn anything off cold. You run both, and you decide with the numbers. Those three are the whole webinar.

Quick one before we start. Tonight, search your own company name. Not your trade. Your name. Count how many lead platforms show up in the results, above or beside your own site. Every one of those is a toll booth built on a road that was already leading to you. Hold onto that number.

But before I show you the road, you need to understand what you've been paying for. Because it isn't leads, and it isn't your fault.

Let's start with the things people say to you. At the office. I called it back in ninety seconds. She'd already booked someone.

From the rep. Competition's heavy in your zip. Want me to bump the budget so you get first crack?

And at the kitchen table. So we spent four thousand on leads this month, and booked how many?

While the company across town gets called by name... you may feel like you're paying for a lead five other guys also paid for. Or like the budget only goes up and the leads never get better. Or afraid to turn it off, because the phone might stop. Wouldn't you agree that being afraid to stop paying someone is a strange place for a company that's good at the work? Which one's you? Hold that thought.

Here's what you've probably tried to get off the toll road. Google Ads. You bought the click, and still raced for the call. SEO. Page one, and the phone didn't move. You fired one platform and joined another, which is the same toll booth with a different logo. You asked for reviews and got some, scattered across six sites. A new website. Nobody sees it.

Don't feel bad about any of that. Every move was reasonable in a world where the platforms were the only road into town. That world is ending. And there's a villain in this story. It isn't you.

Here's what nobody says out loud. A lead platform is an arbitrage business. A homeowner fills in one form. The platform sells that one form to three, five, eight contractors, each of whom pays. One form, eight invoices. The homeowner has no idea. And the contractors race to the phone for a job that only one of them can win. I call it Lead Arbitrage, because that's exactly what it is.

I'm not going to tell you it's a conspiracy. It's simpler than that. The business model is the shared lead. It works better for the platform the more contractors pay for each form, so the incentives all point one way. And the regulators have noticed. There have been settlements over how leads were described to contractors. You don't need to take my word for it. It's public. Here's how it shows up in your day. Ninety seconds. Already booked. You paid for that.

Most owners fight it with three moves. I did too. Move one, be the fastest to the phone. Somebody in the office lives on the lead app. Move two, bump the budget for first crack, which just means you pay more for the same race. Move three, keep paying, because stopping is scarier than paying. The cost is a lead line that only goes up, and a company that's afraid of its own phone.

You've probably heard that the platforms are where the homeowners are, so you have to be there. Here's the fact that changes it. The homeowners aren't on the platforms. They're on the road to you, and the platform built a toll booth on it. The real issue is what I call the Toll Booth.

Think about a town where every road in has a toll booth, and the same company owns all of them. The homeowner sets out to find a plumber, hits a booth, pays with their phone number, and the booth sells that number to everyone. You can pay the toll forever. Or you can build your own road. A page at its own address that the assistants and the search engines send homeowners down, with no booth on it and your number at the end.

Now, some people say, my Google Business Profile is my own road. It's a good start, and you should keep it. But look at the search results tonight. The platforms sit on top of it, above it, beside it, and the assistants read it as one source among many. It's a road with a booth at the end. It helps. It doesn't fix it.

The fix has a name too. The Private Road. One page, at an address you don't own, built from what your customers said, that the search engines index and the assistants read. Your phone number on it, and nobody else's. When the homeowner comes down that road, there's no booth, no form, and nobody else got the call.

Let me tell you where I learned this. One month, in my own offline business, I decided to actually ask. Every lead the platform sent that month, when we reached the homeowner, we asked one question. How did you find us. And one of them said, I searched for you. By name. Your company. And the form came up, so I filled it in.

I sat with that for a while. A homeowner had looked for us, specifically, by name. The platform had caught her on the way in, taken her number, and sold it to us. And to four other companies. We paid the toll to reach a customer who was already driving to our door. And then we raced four strangers for her.

So we kept asking. Not everyone had searched us by name. But a lot more than I expected had searched the trade in our town and been intercepted on the way to somebody. The platform wasn't finding customers. It was standing in the road.

That's when it landed. The platforms don't make customers. They intercept the ones who were already on the road, and sell them to everyone. Own the page they land on, and there's no one to intercept them.

So I built one. A page at its own address with every review the company had earned and the phone number on it. First version, nice page. The search engines picked it up eventually. The assistants ignored it. That broke. What fixed it was structure. The page written the way machines read. Consistent name, consistent number, every review as data. Registered everywhere the models look, refreshed every month. And the number and the form on it, so the road ended at our phone.

And one more piece, which turned out to matter most for the owner who wants out. A weekly report. Which calls and forms came down the private road. Because you don't turn off a toll road on faith. You turn it off when you can see your own road carrying the traffic.

I'll be straight about proof. We build these for heating and air companies, plumbers, roofers, chimney companies, and you can inspect a live one. The clearest thing I can show you is a check. A roofer in Memphis with over a thousand five-star reviews. Asked by name, three assistants knew him twelve times out of twelve. Asked who should I call for a roof in Memphis, he came up three times out of twelve. The customers were on the road. The road didn't lead to him.

Results vary. Nothing I show you today is a guarantee of what you'll see.

I found this by asking a month of homeowners how they found us. You get to cheat. For the next fifteen minutes I'll show you the three shifts that get you off the toll road, starting with the biggest one.

Secret number one. They were already looking for you.

Most owners believe they need the platforms because that's where the homeowners are. I believed it too. But think about how a homeowner ends up on a lead form. Nobody wakes up wanting to fill in a form. They search for a plumber. Or they ask their phone. The form is what the platform put in the road. The homeowner was on the road to a plumber before the platform ever showed up.

And here's what's changing. More and more, the homeowner doesn't search at all. They ask the assistant on their phone. Who should I call for a furnace that won't start. The assistant doesn't hand back ten links and a form. It hands back a name. One, maybe three. There's no form on that road, so there's no booth. The homeowner just calls the name. The only question is whose.

So how does the assistant pick a name? It names the business it can read, not the one that paid. It trusts what strangers wrote about you more than what you wrote about yourself. It needs one consistent source it can quote, not six scattered ones. And it learns. Whoever it can read today becomes whoever it trusts tomorrow. None of that has a toll booth on it.

So here's the new belief. The homeowners were already looking for you. Own the page the road ends at, and there's nobody left to pay. If that just clicked, say makes sense. That's the one big shift.

Which leaves the objection. Fine, but owning a road sounds like a marketing department. SEO, content, a whole new website. I don't have one of those. That's secret number two.

Secret number two. One page. Not a marketing department.

Most owners believe getting off the platforms means becoming a marketer. Hire a writer. Learn SEO. Rebuild the site every three years. Feed a content calendar. I believed it, I paid for it, and it never rang. Because all of that is written for a person scrolling a page of links. The assistant isn't scrolling. It's reading. And what it reads for is small.

Here's what the private road is made of. One page, at one address. Your reviews as data the assistant can quote, in your customers' words, not yours. Your name and number, consistent, everywhere on the page. Registered where the models look, and refreshed so it never goes stale. And your phone and your form on it, so the road ends at you. That's it. No blog. No keywords. Nothing to post on Tuesday.

And who builds it. Not you, not your office manager, not a nephew. You give us the business name. We find every review you've earned, on every site it lives on. We build the page, structured the way the machines read, at its own address, with your number on it. Live in about 48 hours. Nothing changes on your website, your office, or your process. The only thing that changes is that there's a road now.

The first road I built by hand took weeks, because I was learning what the assistants wanted as I went. The second took days. By the time it was software, it was hours, and none of them belonged to the owner. That's what twenty-five years of building software is for. The thing an agency bills by the hour, we automate.

So the new belief. Getting off the platforms doesn't take a marketing department. It takes one page the assistants can read, built and maintained by somebody else. You don't build the road. You own it.

That handles the how. Which leaves the fear. The real one. If I turn the platforms off, the phone stops. That's secret number three, and it's the one with the plan in it.

Secret number three. Run both. Then decide.

Most owners believe the day they turn the platforms off, the phone stops. And if you turn them off cold, with nothing built, they're right. I did that once. It's the panic I told you about. So the answer isn't to be brave. The answer is to never be in that position.

Here's the plan. Week one, the road is live. You keep the platforms exactly as they are. Don't touch them. Weeks two through twelve, you watch the weekly report. Calls and forms coming down the private road, right next to the platform leads you're still paying for. Day ninety, you sit down with twelve weeks of numbers and decide the lead budget. Cut it, keep it, or move it. Your call, in writing, with nobody on the phone telling you to bump anything.

And watch what each one does over those ninety days. The toll road stays the same, or gets more expensive. Same shared leads, same race. The private road appreciates. More reviews land on it every month. The assistants trust it a little more every month. It compounds. By day ninety you're not comparing a feeling to a fear. You're comparing two lines on a report.

Here's the pattern I've watched. The owner signs up angry, on a Friday. Monday the road is live. For a few weeks the report shows a trickle next to the platform leads, and he wonders if it's working. Then the assistants start naming him, and the trickle isn't a trickle. By day ninety he cuts the platform budget in half, not to zero, because the report told him where the calls were coming from. Results vary, and I'll never tell you that's a promise. But that's the shape of it, and it's the shape because of the report, not because of courage.

And that's why this is a race. These assistants learn. Whoever they can read today becomes whoever they trust tomorrow, and whoever they keep naming after that. A road that's been open for a year outweighs one that opened last week. Nothing stops the company down the road from building theirs first. Whoever in your town goes first gets the head start, and the head start is the whole advantage.

So the new belief. You never turn anything off cold. You build the road, you run both, and on a date you pick, you decide with the numbers in your hand.

Let me put all three together in one job, start to finish.

Here's one job. A homeowner asks her phone who to call for a water heater on a Sunday. The assistant reads the private road, and gives one name. She calls the number on the page. It rings in your office. No form, no booth, no other company got that call, because there was no form to sell. And on Friday it shows up on the report, in its own column, next to the platform leads you're still paying for. That's the number you'll use on day ninety.

That's the pattern. Results vary. But that is what replacing the platforms actually looks like. Not a brave phone call to cancel. A report that makes the call for you.

Would you agree that was half an hour well spent? Let's recap. Secret one, the homeowners were already looking for you, and the platforms are standing in the road. Secret two, getting off the platforms takes one page the assistants can read, not a marketing department. Secret three, you never turn anything off cold. You run both, and on day ninety you decide with the numbers.

Now, I can't build your road inside a webinar. So here's what I put together. If you want to see how to get the whole thing done for you, keep watching. This is the part I'd stay for.

You've got two choices. Take what I've shown you and build it alone. Gather every review from every site. Buy a domain. Build the page. Structure it for the machines. Register it. Refresh it every month. Build your own weekly report so you can see the road working. Some of you will, and that's fine. Or let us do it with you, this week, with the pieces I couldn't fit into half an hour.

It's called Your Recommend Site, by PushButton Recommend. Your private road. A review site for your business, at its own address, built from your real reviews, structured so Google, Bing and the AI assistants can read it. With your phone number and your form on it, so every call comes straight down the road to you.

It's for the owner who's done paying the toll and wants a plan instead of a leap. You give us the business name. We build the road.

Here's what's in it. One. Your Recommend Site. Built for you, in your voice, at its own address. Live in about 48 hours. Anywhere else a page like this is a project fee before you've made a call.

Two. Every review you already have, gathered from everywhere it lives, onto one page. New ones added every month, automatically. That's the road appreciating, and it's what a reputation retainer bills you for by the month.

Three. Search and AI indexing. Google, Bing, and the assistants. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot. Registered everywhere the models look, and refreshed. Agencies charge between $200 and $800 a month for that and hand you blog posts. This is the part that opens the road.

Four. Wired-in lead capture. Your phone number and your form on the page. Every call and every form goes straight to you. Nothing is routed through us, nothing is sold to anybody. This is the road with no booth on it. Compare it to a shared lead, fifty to a hundred dollars in most markets, sold to everyone.

Five. Weekly reports. Mentions, citations, recommendations, and which calls came down the road. This is the proof you'll use on day ninety, and it's the part of the stack this webinar is about. Plus monitoring, so the road stays open. And six. Zero change. Nothing on your website, your office, or your process changes. You give us the name. That's the whole job on your end.

And here's how it starts. You give us the business name. Within about 48 hours the road is live. The reviews refresh themselves every month. The report lands every week. You mark day ninety on the calendar. There is no step three.

This is for three kinds of owner. The owner still buying shared leads and done with it. The owner who tried to quit the platforms cold once, panicked, and went back. And the owner with great reviews scattered across six sites that nobody sees together. If you're one of those, this was built for you.

And it's not for everyone. If your phone rings without a lead budget, you don't need this. Close the tab, and I mean that. This is for the owner who's paying the toll and wants a road.

If all this did was cut the lead budget by one shared lead a month, it's paid for itself. If it gave you a number to argue with when the rep calls, would it be worth it? If it put a date on the calendar where you decide, instead of the platform deciding for you, would it be worth it? What's your lead line every month? Two thousand? Four? More?

I had two ways to price this. Like an agency, by the hour, for a few companies. Or like software, because that's what it is. Twenty-five years of building software means the things an agency bills hours for, we automate. So I priced it like software.

Think about what the pieces cost apart. A page built for you. A reputation retainer. An AI visibility retainer, which agencies price between $200 and $800 a month. Exclusive leads, when a shared one runs fifty to a hundred dollars each. Add it up and it's an agency bill. I wanted every owner paying the toll to be able to build the road without asking permission from anybody.

Forty nine ninety nine a month. No setup fee. No contract. Cancel whenever you want, from your own dashboard. Compare it to one shared lead, fifty to a hundred dollars, sold to four other guys. Compare it to a month of them, whatever the rep talked you into. Compare it to an SEO retainer. It's less than one tank of gas in one truck, and it's the only line on the report that goes the right direction.

And the guarantee is plain. Try it for fourteen days. If it isn't what I said it was, email us, we refund your first month in full, and we take the site down. No forms, no arguing. Which is more than any platform ever offered you.

Here's what to do. Go to pushbuttonrecommend.com. Start with the free check. Your business name, your city, two minutes. It asks three assistants the eight questions your customers ask, and shows you the names in the answers. Whose road the homeowners are on right now. In writing.

The report is the road map. Eight questions, the way a homeowner in your city actually asks them. Three assistants answer. You see the names. If yours is already in every answer, close the tab, you don't need me. If it isn't, you'll know exactly who the assistants are sending your customers to while you pay the toll.

Then, if you want the road, it's one page and a card. Within about 48 hours it's live with your number on it. Mark day ninety on the calendar. That click is the first step toward the last time a rep tells you to bump the budget.

Now you have two choices. Keep paying the toll. The lead line only goes up, the same homeowner keeps getting sold five ways, and the assistants keep learning whoever they can read, which might be the guy down the road. Or build the road, run both, and decide on day ninety with the numbers. If the road works, great. If it doesn't, you get your money back.

So the real question is this. Is it worth two minutes of your time to check, if this does even half of what I showed you today?

The platforms give you a toll booth, your name next to four others, and a rep with a budget suggestion. This gives you a road you own, your name and your number on it, a weekly report, and a date on the calendar where you decide.

Two owners watched this. One closed the tab. Twelve months on, he's still on the lead app, still racing to the phone, still taking the rep's call. The other one clicked. Ran the check. Built the road. Ran both for ninety days. And on day ninety he cut the platform budget with a report in his hand, and the phone kept ringing, because the road was already carrying the traffic. Same trucks. Same skill. Different road.

I'm nothing special. I paid the toll for years. I quit cold once and panicked. I'm not a marketer and I've never won a race to the phone. But I can build the road, and I can build the report that tells you when it's safe to stop paying. So can you.

Let me take the objections I hear most, and this angle has one big one. I've been burned by every marketing thing. I know. That's why there's no contract, no setup fee, and a fourteen-day money-back guarantee that takes the site down. That's why you don't turn anything off on day one. And that's why the first step is a free check that shows you whose road it is before you spend a dollar.

Fifty bucks a month, what's the catch? The catch is that it's software, not an agency, and not a platform. No rep, no budget suggestions, no hours to bill. The page is built, refreshed and reported by a system I spent years on. That's the whole trick.

I already have reviews on Google. Good. That's the raw material for the road. But Google is one landlord with the platforms parked on top of it, and the assistants read scattered reviews as scattered. The page gathers them into one source with your number on it. Your Google reviews don't go anywhere. They finally get a road.

My office can't take on another thing. It doesn't have to. Nothing changes on your website, your process, or your schedule. If anything, the office gets one thing back. Nobody has to live on the lead app anymore.

Does anyone really ask ChatGPT who to call? Ask your own phone tonight. Whatever names come back are getting calls with no booth in the way. And the homeowner with a flooded basement is asking the same phone. The question isn't whether they ask. It's whose road they're on.

One more time. Your Recommend Site, built for you. Every review gathered, new ones every month. Indexed by Google, Bing and the assistants. Your phone and your form, never shared. Weekly reports. Nothing changes on your end. Forty nine ninety nine a month, fourteen-day money back, no contract. pushbuttonrecommend.com.

Thank you for staying to the end. What I hope for you is simple. That ninety days from now, you're looking at a report instead of taking a rep's call. pushbuttonrecommend.com. Start with the free check. I'll see you there.