The 2026 Contractor Marketing Report: What We Learned From 250+ Land Clearing and Excavation Contractors
I hope you enjoy reading this blog post.
Author: Brady Carlson | Co-Founder of Dirt2Dollars
Published Date: July 31, 2026
We have run paid advertising campaigns for over 250 land clearing, forestry mulching, excavation, and tree service contractors. Those campaigns have produced more than one hundred million dollars in on-site estimates.
Nobody publishes real numbers in this industry. Everybody publishes opinions. So we pulled ours.
This is what the data says about how contractors actually get work in 2026, where the money leaks out, and what separates the operators who scale from the ones who stay stuck.
Finding 1: Speed to contact is the single biggest variable
Nothing else we measured comes close. Not ad creative. Not budget. Not market size.
When a property owner submits an inquiry, they are shopping. They are going to talk to whoever gets to them first, and the drop-off after the first few minutes is severe. An inquiry contacted inside five minutes and an inquiry contacted four hours later are not the same asset. They are barely the same category.
This is why we built an in-house call center instead of an automated text sequence. Real person, real conversation, within minutes. Every contractor who tries to handle follow-up themselves runs into the same wall: you cannot answer the phone while you are running a machine.
[CONFIRM: insert your actual average speed-to-contact and the contact-rate delta between under 5 min and over 1 hour]
Finding 2: Appointments and leads are not the same product
A raw inquiry is a name and a phone number. A qualified on-site appointment is a confirmed time on your calendar with a property owner who has a real project, a real timeline, and the authority to say yes.
The gap between those two things is where most contractor marketing budgets die. Contractors buy inquiry volume, get excited about the number, then discover that turning inquiries into scheduled estimates is a full-time job they do not have time for.
Across our client base, the contractors who close well are the ones evaluating cost per closed job, not cost per inquiry. If your total marketing cost per closed job is under ten to fifteen percent of average job value, the system is working. Above twenty percent, something is broken upstream.
[CONFIRM: insert your aggregate inquiry-to-booked-appointment conversion rate and average appointments-to-close ratio]
Finding 3: Optimization takes about two to three weeks, and most quitters quit right before it
Every campaign starts blind. The first ten to fifteen days are data collection. The system does not yet know which property owners in your specific county convert, which creative they respond to, or which qualifying questions predict a close.
Then it snaps into place. One client watched cost per inquiry drop from two hundred dollars to forty five dollars in ten days once there was enough data to optimize against. That is not unusual. That is the normal shape of the curve.
The contractors who get poor results are disproportionately the ones who pulled the plug in week two. They paid for the expensive learning phase and then quit before collecting on it.
Finding 4: Winter is underpriced, and almost nobody exploits it
Contractor marketing spend collapses in the off season. Everybody pulls back at the same time. Which means the cost of reaching a property owner drops at exactly the moment competition disappears.
Property owners do not stop planning projects in January. They stop getting called back. The contractor still running ads in February is the only one answering.
One of our clients booked twenty seven thousand dollars in forestry mulching work in thirteen days at roughly fifty percent margins during a period most operators had gone quiet. A young contractor in our program stayed booked solid through what should have been his slowest stretch of the year.
[CONFIRM: insert your month-over-month cost-per-appointment index showing the winter dip]
Finding 5: Revenue concentration is the most common way good contractors get hurt
This one surprised us with how often it shows up in commercial work.
A contractor lands one large general contractor or one big developer. Revenue goes vertical. We have watched operators go from forty thousand a month to five hundred thousand a month on the back of a single relationship.
Then the receivables stack up. One contractor was carrying over nine hundred thousand dollars in outstanding invoices from a single client. He was profitable on paper and could not make payroll.
The pattern is consistent. Concentration feels like success right up to the moment it becomes the entire risk profile of the business. The operators who survive it are the ones who kept a residential pipeline running the whole time as a hedge, even when it looked like a distraction.
Finding 6: Closing on site beats sending a proposal, by a wide margin
Contractors who price the job at the property and ask for the decision before they leave close dramatically better than contractors who walk the site, drive home, and email a bid that night.
The mechanics are obvious once you see it. On site, you are the expert who just walked their land and understands their problem. Twenty four hours later, you are a number in an inbox next to two other numbers.
This is the highest leverage change a contractor can make and it costs nothing. Adam, one of our clients, started closing on the spot instead of sending proposals and it changed his business. Click here to see case study of Adam.
[CONFIRM: insert close-rate comparison for on-site close vs emailed proposal from your client data]
Finding 7: Capacity limits are real and scheduling discipline protects them
A contractor who books six estimates in one day runs none of them well. Drive time in this industry is brutal, jobs run long, and a rushed estimate is a lost estimate.
We cap appointments at two per day for most clients and build three hour buffers between them. Contractors push back on this constantly. They want volume. The data says volume without buffer produces no-shows, late arrivals, and blown estimates.
The guarantee our flagship program carries is thirty qualified on-site appointments over the term. One client attended thirty six of thirty eight booked against it. The overdelivery only works because the schedule is built to be attended.
What the top performers do differently
We looked at the contractors producing the strongest results and the pattern is boring, which is usually a sign it is real.
They answer or return contact fast. They run estimates during business hours instead of squeezing them into evenings. They price and close on site. They keep a residential pipeline alive even when commercial work is booming. They stay in market during the off season. And they treat marketing as a system they run continuously, not a faucet they turn on when the schedule gets thin.
Brian closed five jobs in his first week using this approach. Dave and Tyson closed over forty five jobs in three months. Chris Collins of Chris Collins Clearing landed a seven acre job off a single appointment. See case study of Chris. Anthony went from nearly shutting his doors to a twelve point four million dollar site prep contract. See case study of Anthony.
Methodology
This report draws on campaign performance across more than 250 land clearing, forestry mulching, excavation, and tree service contractors, and over one hundred million dollars in on-site estimates delivered to those contractors.
Client-level figures are shared with permission. Aggregate figures are drawn from campaign and call center records. We will publish this annually.
What to do with this
If you take one thing from the whole report, take speed to contact. Fix that before you spend another dollar on advertising. Everything else compounds on top of it.
If you want to see what these numbers look like specifically for your market and your service radius, book a call and we will pull them.
Book a Demo Call: https://link.toolboxx.co/widget/bookings/intro-blogs
Brady Carlson
Co-Founder, Dirt2Dollars
About the Author
Brady Carlson is the co-founder of Dirt2Dollars, the leading marketing agency for land clearing and excavation contractors. Dirt2Dollars has helped over 250 contractors nationwide grow their businesses through exclusive lead generation, in-house appointment setting, and dedicated customer success management. Learn more at https://dirt2dollars.com/
