Deck Builder Adds $2M In Revenue Each Year ($1M → $3M → $5.2M → $7.6M)

Case Study: Deck Bros, deck building company in Omaha, NE

The Background

In the summer of 2020, Luan Nguyen embarked on a journey to build Deck Bros from the ground up.

He had the skills, the ambition, and the drive to make it happen. The dream was to create something that could grow, bring in serious money, and give him the lifestyle he always wanted.

But when winter came, reality hit him like a ton of bricks. The initial momentum of the summer months was replaced by the harsh truth of seasonality in deck building.

Listen to Luan describing his experience with Contracting Empire and Deck Bros, one of the biggest deck-building companies in Omaha.

Thousands of dollars poured into advertising and direct mailing campaigns seemed to evaporate into thin air with little tangible results.

For Luan, it felt like throwing money into a black hole.

When Luan hit us up in February 2022, he was already feeling the itch with his current marketing crew. He wanted to level up without breaking the bank.

That’s when he reached out to us. We showed him some numbers and were very transparent about where his business was at that moment.

The search volumes for deck-related keywords in Omaha were alarmingly low, signaling a need for a strategic approach tailored to his local market — something his other agency wasn’t doing.

But fast forward to today, and Luan surpassed the $5 million/year mark in 2023, made more than $7.63 million in 2024, and he’s living the dream:

In the end, getting you leads is great – but our vision here at Contracting Empire is to get contractors to win not only in business but in life as well.

The Challenges

Not Enough People Searching for Deck Building

When we took Deck Bros under our wing, we faced a major roadblock: deck-related searches in Omaha were as scarce as shade in a desert. They were 6x times lower compared to those of remodeling services.

For a business, this is like fishing in a pond with few fish – you’re less likely to get a big catch. Low keyword searches indicate limited demand for your services in your area, making it harder to attract new customers and grow your business.

Marketing Budget Wasted Without Results

Imagine building a deck without a solid plan—buying materials, making cuts, but nothing fitting quite right. That’s what marketing felt like for Luan: spending money here and there, hoping it would bring in customers, but ending up with nothing to show for it.

No one likes spending hard-earned money without knowing if it’s paying off, and it’s easy to feel frustrated and helpless when nothing seems to work.

Many contractors face this exact challenge: trying different marketing tactics without a clear plan or understanding of what truly moves the needle.

We knew Luan needed a strategy that would make every dollar count, and we were ready to give him that clarity.

Few to No jobs During Winter

If you’re in an outdoor contracting business like decking, you know that the cold months bring an unwanted slowdown. Winter comes, the temperatures drop, and suddenly the calls stop coming in.

It’s a stressful time for many contractors.

But we knew that seasonality didn’t have to mean unpredictability. By adapting his marketing strategy to counteract the seasonal dips, we helped Luan create steady growth—month after month.

Even when most people weren’t building decks, Luan was still busy, with more clients, more jobs, and more income than the previous year.

The Strategy

The truth is, your business isn’t alone in the market it serves. There are competitors, and their strategies will affect your outcomes. It’s essential to adopt a proactive stance toward dealing with competition.

Our first step was to give Luan a brand image he could be proud of. We’ve built the new logo, business cards, shirts & caps, yard signs, door hangers, and everything else he needed to leave his mark in both the online and offline world.

Building a system that makes you a CEO requires very intentional action. On all aspects of your business: marketing, sales, operations, and production.

Luan was open to building this machine, removing the emotion out of it, and treating it as a real business.

Play Video about Deck Bros business card

We were attacking brand awareness on multiple fronts: building his website while also doing brand work and creating a long-term online strategy to serve the business and set him apart in his local market.

Now, long-term strategies are useless if you run out of money. Our top priority is always to get money in the business and create free flowing cash-flow to pay the bills and reinvest back into marketing.

You make more money, you pay us more for longer – everybody wins.

Then we have this piece that hits all contractors in some form or another. I’m talking about the pride in their craftsmanship and the work they do.

The thing is that if you want to build a multi-million dollar business, you need to develop a particular set of skills and stop romanticizing about the work. You have to treat business like a business.

There’s nothing wrong with having a lifestyle business, one that just pays the bills and gets you a vacation every year. But don’t kid yourself; that’s just a glorified job with extra perks.

You don’t see the CEO of Renewal by Anderson, a billion-dollar company, going out to people’s homes and installing windows.

We created a 3-year plan that would make him the leader in his space. We built an offer that nobody else in his market could compete against, and we played the game.

Now, in 2024, Luan has surpassed $7.6 million in revenue and is on track for even more growth.

The Results

Becoming the Go-To Choice for Homeowners

You know how sometimes you’re facing a question and you need a quick answer, so you pull out your phone and ask Google for relevant information?

Google does everything it can to bring you the best answer in record time, so it showcases what we call a featured snippet. It’s a highlighted search result that gives you the information you want without making you click on a page to get it.

For Deck Bros, we identified a major opportunity based on extensive keyword research: people in Omaha wanted to learn more about Trex deck problems.

We put together a comprehensive blog post that gives you solid information on the topic.

Because we use a variety of tools to let us know what your target audience wants to read, we were able to make a blog post so valuable that Google decided it deserves to be a featured snippet.

This brought a series of advantages for Deck Bros:

Featured snippets appear above everything else, even ads, meaning homeowners saw Deck Bros first.
Homeowners began to trust Deck Bros as the local expert, turning to them for their projects.
Higher click-through rates led to more homeowners visiting the website, translating into more job inquiries.
Deck Bros started standing out from the competition, becoming the name people recognized and remembered.
When you're the one answering questions, you're the one they call, so Deck Bros moved ahead of the competition.

Confidence to Grow

In the table below we can see the growth in organic traffic for deck bros even in off-season (we’re comparing the same off season months in two different years so you can see the exact growth).

We constantly adapt the strategy to combat offseason effects and help our clients pile up orders half a year ahead.

Instead of slowing down, Deck Bros was filling its calendar, securing projects months in advance, and creating stability for Luan and his crews.

In the world of online marketing, numbers don’t lie. And for Deck Bros, those numbers tell a story of growth. And it’s all because Luan dared to trust in the power of strategic, data–driven marketing.

You need someone in your corner who knows the game inside out, who knows how to turn clicks into cash, and who won’t stop until you’re sitting pretty at the top.

It’s time to level up, break free from the pack, and claim your rightful place among the elite. With us by your side, the sky’s the limit – and we’ll make damn sure you reach it.

Owning Your Market

Our ultimate goal is to help you get more leads and make more money. But more importantly, we want to help you create a business that gives you the freedom and security to make a real difference—to your family, to your community, and to your future.

To make it all happen, we have to get your contracting business to dominate the local search results. No homeowner is going to look for your business on the 2nd page of Google. You have to be among the top results on the first page.

In the image above, you can see how Deck Bros is on the number 1 spot in the local map pack – which is like the digital version of a busy street corner in your neighborhood – for “deck replacement Omaha NE.”

Just like how the most eye-catching storefronts attract the most foot traffic, the top spots in the local map pack draw the most attention from homeowners who want your services.

Marketing is a marathon, and the finish line isn’t just a marker – it’s a gateway to endless possibilities. That’s how we see the journey to the top of the local map pack.

When we first started with Deck Bros, Luan’s business was barely visible. He wasn’t showing up where it mattered, and homeowners just weren’t seeing him.

Fast forward just seven months, and everything changed. Deck Bros went from being nearly invisible to being the first name that popped up when homeowners searched for decking services in Omaha.

This transformation was more than just a map turning green—it was about giving Luan the power to take control of his business.

With every search result, Deck Bros was not only being seen but was becoming the obvious choice. Homeowners trusted what they saw, and that trust turned into leads, jobs, and growth.

This is about more than just rankings and clicks. It’s about what those rankings mean for your business and your life. It’s about more phone calls, more work for your crews, and more money in the bank.

It’s about getting to a place where you’re not worrying about the competition because you ARE the competition.

It’s about building the kind of business that lets you live the life you’ve always dreamed of, knowing that your hard work is paying off and setting you up for even bigger success ahead.

Record-Breaking Leads and Revenue Growth

In this cutthroat world of contracting, it’s all too easy to get lost in the shuffle.

But not with us. We play the long game.

While others might promise quick fixes and overnight success, we’re in it for the long haul.

We work with numbers here and make all our decisions based on what we see. We don’t rely on guesswork or empty promises; every decision we make is grounded in data.

And we made sure Luan was leading, not competing.

Notice how leads are coming in from multiple channels?

That’s the power of a well-rounded marketing strategy.

We’re casting a wide net and putting all these marketing systems together to create a well-oiled machine that will fill your calendars and your bank account.

In 2023, we brought Luan $2.7 million in revenue just from all the organic traffic systems we’ve created for him. This is the true essence of local marketing.

But you need to spend money to make money.

Here’s what Deck Bros did with advertising in 2023…

They invested in Google Ads and Facebook Ads, spending a total of $61,171. Those ads pulled in over $2.5 million in revenue from sold jobs.

That’s the power of targeted advertising done right.

Sure, there’s a bit of a learning curve when it comes to ads. You might not see instant results, and that’s okay. Algorithms need time to work their magic, and data needs time to paint the full picture.

Consistency is key.

We refine our approach. We tweak the campaigns. We track the data.

And the payoff is worth it.

Community Involvement and Offline Impact

Luan knew that thriving in the contracting business wasn’t just about having the best online presence—it was about showing up for his community and making an impact beyond the digital world. He took his passion for growth and extended it into real-life actions that set Deck Bros apart.

He reached out to us for a custom-made digital banner to showcase at one of the local events he sponsored, and also started a podcast!

Luan is the embodiment of what it means to rise above, to be more than just a name, but a trusted partner in his customers’ lives.

And that’s why Luan isn’t just a client.

He’s our biggest fan.

He constantly recommends us to other contractors because he knows, firsthand, the value we bring.

Key Takeaways

When you put all this together, what do you get?

If you want to call the shots, build something extraordinary, and cash in the kind of money that says, “I made it on my own terms,” let’s talk.

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