Why a marketing agency started a garage door company

In 2023, Dr. Kebar and I were looking at the contractor marketing landscape and kept running into the same uncomfortable question: why did every agency pitch sound identical? Same promises about leads, same dashboards, same thin case studies, same guarantee language. The tactics were recycled, the reports were performative, and almost nobody could explain the difference between a 5% conversion rate and an 8% conversion rate in any meaningful way for the contractor writing the check.

We spent a lot of time reading agency websites. We interviewed contractors who had been through three or four agencies in five years. A pattern emerged: the agencies that did the best job had founders with deep operating experience in a specific vertical. The agencies that burned out their clients the fastest had founders whose only credential was that they had run ads for other agencies. The structural problem was not bad intent. It was missing context. An agency owner who has never dispatched a crew, handled an angry review, or counted cash at the end of a slow week cannot feel what their playbooks do to a real business.

Around the same time I was sitting with the uncomfortable question above, Dr. Kebar was finishing her PhD in Marketing. Her doctoral research had spent years on a single question: why do most small businesses fail within their first two years, and which operational and marketing patterns predict which ones survive? She had mapped failure across dozens of dimensions — lead acquisition discipline, customer retention, pricing consistency, financial hygiene, review velocity, response time, local brand signals, and a long tail of operational details most agencies never look at.

Her thesis was not a theoretical exercise. She had pored through case after case of small businesses that had failed, looking for the patterns that repeated. And she had mapped the countermeasures — the decisions made by the small businesses that survived the two-year window and went on to compound. By the time she defended, she had a falsifiable model of what predicts small business survival, tested against hundreds of real cases.

On top of the academic work, Dr. Kebar spent two years working at Google and currently works at Meta. That is not a decorative line on a resume. It is two of the biggest companies on earth trusting her to work inside their advertising platforms, which means every tactic she ships to a Reimagine client is informed by perspective that most generalist agencies will never access. The contractor hiring Reimagine is effectively hiring platform-insider expertise at small business pricing. We wrote that out plainly because it is the most important thing most contractors are missing when they compare agencies on price alone.

When we started talking about what Reimagine should become, the connection was obvious. Generalist agencies were selling tactics without a theory of why those tactics should work, and without any inside view of the platforms they were spending client money on. Dr. Kebar had both. A marketing agency built on her thesis, grounded in her platform experience, and tested against a real business would be a fundamentally different product from anything already on the market. That is not a marketing claim. It is the actual operational premise of Reimagine.

We had two options. Option one was to hire people who had operated contractor businesses and let them inform our strategies. That is the sensible path most agencies take when they want to specialize. The problem is that hired experts become one-way inputs: they share war stories, but they do not run the operational loop that creates the stories. The loop matters more than the stories. The loop is what produces the intuition a great agency lives by.

Option two was to start a contractor business ourselves and run it with the same seriousness we would expect our clients to bring. No half-commitment. No vanity side project. A real operating business with Andre as the owner-operator, real insurance, real permits, real customer-facing phone number, and real liability. Option two was obviously harder. It was also the only option that would give us the operational loop we wanted.

We chose option two. We chose garage doors specifically because the vertical has clear fundamentals, reasonable startup capital requirements, and a well-defined service area where a newcomer could win without needing to outspend regional giants. Polk County, Florida was the launch market because it was large enough to have real competition in every service category but small enough to let a disciplined newcomer carve out territory month by month.

The first 90 days of Rocket looked exactly like the first 90 days of any new contractor business. We answered the phone personally. We quoted jobs at the kitchen table. We priced spring kits by calling the supplier. We asked every customer for a review by hand. We learned, painfully, that some customers will pay cash and then call back next week disputing a line item. We learned which suppliers had reliable inventory and which had tickets sitting on backorder. We learned what it felt like to watch a lead form submission come in at 9pm on a Saturday and have to decide whether to reply that night or wait until Monday.

What made Rocket different from other new contractor businesses was that every decision was also an experiment. Every ad variant was a test. Every Google Business Profile post format was a data point. Every review response template was A/B tested against a control. We were not running a contractor business with marketing on the side. We were running a marketing research operation that happened to have a full-service garage door business inside it.

By month three, we had a clear picture of which tactics were actually moving the needle on revenue and which tactics were agency theater dressed up as strategy. Some of the most commonly recommended contractor marketing tactics turned out to be worthless on our numbers. A few of the most under-used tactics turned out to be wildly effective. We kept detailed notes because we knew that everything we learned here would eventually become Reimagine's product.

By the end of year one, Rocket had grown from zero to a category leader in Polk County garage doors. Organic traffic had crossed 9,500 monthly visitors. The Google Business Profile was producing 38 calls per week at peak. The review count had crossed 220 with a sustained 4.9 star average. ChatGPT and Perplexity were citing Rocket by name for Polk County garage door queries. And we had a playbook that no other contractor agency was running because no other agency had the internal lab to validate it.

That playbook is what Reimagine sells today. Every tactic has been tested on Rocket's real customers, real ad spend, and real phone lines before it ever ships to a client account. When something stops working on Rocket, we stop selling it to clients the same month. When something new starts working on Rocket, we add it to the standard engagement before any generalist agency knows it exists.

This is not a marketing claim. It is an operational fact. Rocket is live. The phones still ring. The reviews still come in. The ad accounts still run. Anyone who wants to verify the claim can read the reviews, call the number, book an estimate. We built Reimagine on top of a contractor because we believe that is the only honest way to sell contractor marketing, and every month of running both businesses convinces us further that we were right.

If you hire Reimagine, you are not buying a marketing agency. You are buying access to a continuously updated research loop. The playbook you get on day one is the playbook that worked for Rocket last month, adapted to your vertical and your metro. The playbook you get in month six will include the things we learned between month one and month six. The playbook you get in year two will include an entirely different set of tactics than the playbook we sold in year one, because the AI and search landscape keeps moving and our lab keeps testing.

You are also buying territory protection. We take only one contractor per vertical per metro. Your competitor cannot hire us as long as you are active. That is non-negotiable and contractual. The reason is simple: if we worked with multiple contractors in the same vertical and metro, our playbook advantage would become a liability for every client. We would be selling the same tactics into the same auction against each other. Nobody would win.

And you are buying access to Andre and Dr. Kebar directly. Discovery calls are handled by Andre personally. Strategy is set by Dr. Kebar based on research and data, not intuition. You do not end up with a junior account manager who just finished a certification course. This is the opposite of how agencies scale, and it is the reason we cap our client roster at a number most agencies would consider too small to be viable. We prefer fewer clients and deeper work.