Dirt2Dollars Alternatives: An Honest Breakdown of Your Options
I hope you enjoy reading this blog post.
Author: Brady Carlson | Co-Founder of Dirt2Dollars
Published Date: July 30, 2026
If you are looking at Dirt2Dollars, you are looking at other options too. You should be.
So here is the honest version. These are your five real choices for getting land clearing and excavation work, what each one actually costs you, and when each one is the right call. Including the times when we are the wrong answer.
Option 1: Lead marketplaces
These are the big directory platforms where homeowners submit a request and the platform sells that request to multiple contractors at once.
When it works: You are brand new, you have no marketing budget, and you need something in the pipeline this week. The barrier to entry is close to zero.
What it costs you: Speed and margin. The same inquiry goes to three, four, sometimes five contractors. You are in a race to call first, and then you are in a price war with everyone else who got the same submission. Most contractors we talk to report close rates in the single digits to low teens on marketplace inquiries.
The deeper problem: you never own the customer relationship or the data. You are renting access to demand month to month, and the price of that access goes up over time, not down.
Option 2: A general marketing agency
A local agency that runs ads and does websites for restaurants, dentists, gyms, and whoever else walks in the door.
When it works: You need a website, branding, and general online presence, and you have someone in-house who can handle the sales follow-up.
What it costs you: Learning curve and follow-up. An agency that has never run a land clearing campaign does not know that a five acre lot with mature hardwood is a completely different job than a half acre of brush. They do not know which questions separate a property owner with a permit and a timeline from someone who is just curious about pricing.
The bigger gap is follow-up. Most agencies hand you a spreadsheet of form fills and consider the job done. Nobody calls those people. By the time you get to them that evening, they have already talked to two other contractors.
Option 3: Build it in-house
You hire a media buyer, or you learn ads yourself, and you put someone on the phone to call inquiries.
When it works: You are doing enough volume that a full-time marketing hire pays for itself, and you have the management bandwidth to actually run that person. Realistically that means multiple crews and consistent seven figure revenue.
What it costs you: Time and payroll risk. A competent media buyer is a real salary. So is a caller. And you are the one training them, managing them, and eating the cost while they figure out your market.
The honest version: most contractors who try this end up doing it themselves at nine at night after a full day on the machine. That works for about six weeks and then it stops.
Option 4: Referrals and word of mouth only
This is what almost every contractor starts with, and it is genuinely the highest quality work you will ever get.
When it works: You are established in your area, you do good work, and you are comfortable with the volume you have.
What it costs you: Control. You cannot turn referrals up when you need them. They come when they come. That is fine in July. It is not fine in February when your crew is standing around and the equipment payment is still due on the first.
The contractors who get hurt worst here are the ones who let a single general contractor or one big client become most of their revenue. That relationship feels great right up until it ends, and then you have no pipeline and no marketing system to fall back on.
Option 5: Done-for-you appointment booking, which is what we do
We run the paid advertising, build the landing page, and staff an in-house call center that contacts every inquiry within minutes. Our team qualifies the property owner and books a confirmed on-site appointment directly on your calendar. You show up, walk the property, and close.
When it works: You have the equipment and the crew to take on more work, you can get off the machine to run estimates during the week, and your market has enough population to support consistent demand. You are good at closing face to face and the only thing missing is a full calendar.
What it costs you: You have to actually run the appointments. A booked calendar you cannot attend is worthless. We also require ad spend on top of the program cost, because we are buying real attention in your market, not scraping a database.
When we are the wrong choice: If you have no equipment yet, if you cannot leave the job site to run estimates, if you are in a market too small to support the volume, or if you are looking for someone to close for you. We tell contractors no for all four of those reasons and we will tell you on the first call.
Option 6: Build the system yourself, with our help
There is a middle path between hiring us to run everything and figuring it out alone.
Some operators do not want a done-for-you service. They want to own the machine. They have the ambition and the management capacity to run advertising and appointment setting inside their own company, they just do not want to spend two years and a lot of money learning it the expensive way.
We are opening a done-with-you track for exactly those operators. You get the campaign structures, the qualification scripts, the call center process, and the tracking we use across our own client base, along with direct guidance while you stand it up internally. You build the asset. It stays yours.
When it works: You have the volume to justify owning the function, you have someone you can put on it full time, and you think in terms of building equity rather than buying a service.
What it costs you: Involvement. This is not hands-off. If you want to hand it over and go back to running your machines, take the done-for-you route instead.
This track is limited by design because the guidance is direct. If it sounds like the right shape for your operation, say so on the call and we will tell you whether it fits.
The comparison that actually matters
Every option above has the same real question underneath it: who is doing the follow-up, and how fast?
Marketplaces make you do it and put you in a race. Agencies hand you a list and walk away. In-house means you built the team yourself. Referrals do not have a follow-up problem but they have a volume problem.
Speed to contact is the whole game in this industry. A property owner who fills out a form is going to talk to whoever calls first. Not whoever calls best. Whoever calls first. That is the piece almost every option leaves on you.
What we can point to
Over 250 contractors served and more than one hundred million dollars in on-site estimates delivered.
Brian closed five jobs in his first week. Dave and Tyson closed over forty five jobs in three months. Chris Collins of Chris Collins Clearing landed a seven acre job off one appointment. An excavation client closed one hundred forty thousand dollars in work on thirty five dollars a day of ad spend.
That does not mean we are right for you. It means the model works when the contractor is a fit.
How to decide
Ask yourself three questions.
One. Can I take on more work right now, today, if it showed up? If no, fix capacity first. Marketing on top of a capacity problem just makes you look bad to customers.
Two. Can I get off the machine to run estimates two or three times a week? If no, none of these options work. Not us, not marketplaces, not agencies.
Three. Do I want to own the system or rent access to demand? Marketplaces are rent. Everything else is ownership to some degree.
If you want to know whether your market has the volume to support this before you commit to anything, book a call and we will look at the numbers with you.
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/
