Marketing Due Diligence on a Home Services Roll-Up: The Checklist QoE Misses

Quality of earnings tells you the revenue is real. It does not tell you whether the revenue is repeatable once the seller hands over the keys. That gap is where marketing due diligence lives, and in home services roll-ups it is where the ugliest post-close surprises come from.

The checklist below covers six areas that standard diligence rarely touches: lead source concentration, ad account ownership, call tracking landmines, review durability, seller-dependent demand, and agency contract terms. For each one there is a specific document request, a description of what a red flag looks like, and a realistic range for what the problem costs to fix after close. The consistent theme: every item on this list is cheap to check before close and expensive to discover after.

Timing note: this work takes one to two weeks alongside QoE, and most of it is document review plus a two-hour session inside the target's ad and analytics accounts. It fits inside any normal diligence window.

Lead source concentration risk

The single most predictive number in home services marketing diligence is the share of leads coming from the largest single channel.

Ask for: 12 to 24 months of leads by source, monthly, from the target's CRM or call tracking platform, not from a summary slide. Also ask for booked jobs by source, because lead counts and revenue counts often tell different stories.

What a red flag looks like: Take a hypothetical $9M revenue HVAC target generating 1,100 leads a month. The source report shows 640 of them, 58 percent, coming from Google Local Services Ads. That platform can reprice, re-rank, or suspend an account with no negotiation and little warning. A single-channel share above 40 to 50 percent means the business is renting its demand from one landlord. The same logic applies when the dominant source is one lead aggregator, one referring contractor, or one legacy directory deal.

Concentration in owned channels reads differently. If 55 percent of leads are repeat customers and referrals tracked to a real service agreement base, that is durability, not risk. The question is always who controls the faucet.

What it costs to fix: Diversifying a concentrated lead mix post-close typically takes 6 to 12 months and $40K to $120K of incremental annual spend while new channels ramp, because you are building the second channel while still paying full freight on the first. Underwrite that, or price it.

Who owns the ad accounts, and for how long

Ad account history is an asset with no line on the balance sheet. Google and Meta accounts accumulate conversion data and quality signals that materially affect what each click costs. If the agency owns the accounts, the target is selling you a marketing engine it does not possess.

Ask for: Screen-share access to Google Ads, Meta, and Local Services Ads with the billing and admin screens visible. Confirm which entity owns each account, how long each has run, and whether the target's own email addresses hold admin rights.

What a red flag looks like: Say the target spends $30K a month on Google Ads and the account sits inside the agency's manager account, created by the agency four years ago, with no client admin listed. Terminate that agency and the four years of history stays behind. A rebuilt account typically runs a 10 to 25 percent cost-per-lead premium for 2 to 4 months while it relearns. On $30K a month, a 15 percent premium for three months is roughly $13,500 of pure friction, plus the leads not bought at the inflated cost.

What it costs to fix: If caught pre-close, the fix is a condition: accounts transfer to company ownership before signing, which usually costs nothing but a few emails. Post-close, budget one quarter of degraded paid performance, typically 10 to 25 percent worse economics, plus staff or consultant time to rebuild.

Tracking numbers and call attribution landmines

In home services, the phone is the cash register, and tracking numbers are the wiring behind it. This is the least glamorous item on the list and the one that produces the most operational pain when it goes wrong.

Ask for: A complete inventory of tracking phone numbers, who owns the call tracking account, and a map of where each number is published: website, Google Business Profiles, directories, vehicle wraps, mailers with long shelf lives.

What a red flag looks like: Picture a target with 18 tracking numbers, all provisioned inside the agency's CallRail account, with three of those numbers sitting as the primary phone number on Google Business Profiles. Two landmines are buried there. First, if the agency relationship ends, numbers that customers have saved in their contacts can be reclaimed and go dead. Second, tracking numbers used inconsistently across listings may have polluted the name-address-phone consistency that local rankings depend on. A related landmine: if a whole reporting history runs through the agency's account, your diligence baseline for lead volume walks out the door with them.

What it costs to fix: Porting numbers the company controls costs almost nothing. Untangling agency-owned numbers post-close typically takes 4 to 8 weeks, and if numbers cannot be recovered, citation cleanup and listing corrections usually run $5K to $15K in vendor fees plus a temporary dip in inbound calls that is hard to measure precisely, which is exactly the problem.

Review profile durability by location

Reviews drive map pack rankings, Local Services Ads placement, and close rates. A big review count on the CIM cover page can hide a fragile profile underneath.

Ask for: Review counts, average ratings, and review dates by location, exportable from the profiles themselves. Also ask how reviews are solicited, in writing.

What a red flag looks like: Say the target advertises 2,400 Google reviews across five locations. Pull the distribution and 1,700 of them belong to the original flagship, while the two newest locations hold 60 and 85. Then check recency: 70 percent of all reviews are more than three years old, and monthly velocity has fallen from 45 to 8. Rankings follow recency and velocity, not just totals, so that profile is coasting on a depreciating asset. Separately, ask directly whether the company filters customers before asking for reviews, sending only happy customers to Google. Google's policies prohibit that practice, and profiles built on it carry removal risk you would be buying.

What it costs to fix: Rebuilding review velocity is cheap in dollars, typically $200 to $500 a month per location in tooling, but takes 2 to 4 quarters of operational discipline before rankings respond. A profile with gating risk is harder to price; treat any sudden loss of a few hundred reviews as a real scenario in the downside case.

Seller-dependent demand and founder brand equity

Some targets are not really brands. They are one person's reputation with trucks. QoE will not distinguish revenue attached to the business from revenue attached to the founder, because the invoices look identical.

Ask for: The founder's actual role in demand generation, mapped honestly: whose cell number is on the website, who attends the builder association meetings, whose name is on the door, who property managers call directly. Then ask for revenue by relationship for the top 20 referral sources.

What a red flag looks like: Take a hypothetical $7M plumbing target called Dave Kowalski Plumbing. Dave's face is on the billboards, his cell is the after-hours line, and the general contractor relationships that feed 30 percent of revenue are personal to him. Run the arithmetic: if referral and relationship revenue is $2.1M and Dave's departure puts even half of it in play over two years, roughly $1M of revenue sits on his handshake. A founder-named brand also complicates any future consolidation, because the equity you are buying is partly equity in a person who is leaving.

What it costs to fix: Structure, not marketing spend, does most of the work: an earnout tied to referral retention, a 12 to 18 month transition period with defined introductions, and early investment in a company-owned relationship program. Where the founder's name must eventually come off the brand, plan a 12 to 24 month endorsed transition rather than a cutover, and expect a measurable lead dip, typically 10 to 20 percent in the founder's strongest segments during the handoff year.

Agency contract terms and data portability

The agency agreement is usually the only marketing document lawyers actually read in diligence, and they read it for liability, not for operability.

Ask for: Every active marketing vendor agreement, plus the last three months of invoices, and a direct answer to one question: if this relationship ended tomorrow, what walks out the door?

What a red flag looks like: The composite version reads like this. A target pays its agency $12K a month in fees against $25K a month in media. The contract auto-renews annually with a 90-day termination notice, claims agency ownership of "all work product, accounts, and data," and bills media as a bundled number with no pass-through visibility. A typical undisclosed markup runs 10 to 20 percent of media, which here would be $30K to $60K a year that the target believes is working spend. Every one of those clauses is standard in small-agency paper and every one is negotiable, but only before you need something from them.

What it costs to fix: Pre-close, fixing this costs a redlined contract or a planned transition. Post-close, a hostile separation typically costs one to two quarters of disrupted reporting and paid performance, plus whatever the account and number recovery items above add. Budget $25K to $75K all-in for a messy divorce on a target this size.

The short version

Six requests, sent with the QoE list, answer most of this: leads by source for 24 months, live access to ad accounts, the tracking number inventory, review exports by location, the founder demand map, and every vendor contract. A competent operator can turn that into findings in about two weeks.

The economics are lopsided. The diligence work costs a low five-figure amount inside a process already costing far more. The items it catches, rebuilt ad accounts, dead tracking numbers, decaying review profiles, a founder walking out with a third of demand, typically cost mid five to low six figures to remediate after close, and some of the damage never fully reverses. Most of these findings do not kill deals. They reprice them, restructure the earnout, or simply hand the operating team a day-one work plan instead of a month-five surprise.