Channel 02 · The persona economics
Priced like a dispatch problem, because it is one.
Meet the operator this was built for. Call him Mike: twelve locations of plumbing, HVAC, and roofing across one region, roughly $18M in group revenue, still close to the trucks. Labor is his first headache. Marketing is his second — the one he has been meaning to get to for three years.
Mike has three ways to solve per-location marketing. Each is a door. Below, every door is priced line by line for his group, with the assumptions printed on the sheet where you can argue with them. If your group is five locations or thirty, the shape holds — run your own numbers through the same rows.
The agency retainer
The default answer. A competent local agency quotes content and social per location, because per location is how they staff it. What arrives is largely one creative program with the town name swapped, on a two-to-three-week cycle, with a monthly report written in impressions.
| Line | Rate | Qty | Annual |
|---|---|---|---|
| Content + social retainer, per location | $3,800/mo | 12 loc | $547,200 |
| Owner/ops time in approvals and meetings (≈2 hrs/wk, loaded) | $75/hr | 104 hrs | $7,800 |
| Ad spend to make organic shortfalls invisible (common, rarely itemized) | varies | — | not counted |
| Door 1, counted honestly | ≈ $555,000/yr |
Assumption to argue with: the $3,800 figure. Full-service local agencies quote $2,500–$6,000 per location per month for content-plus-social; $3,800 is mid-pack, not the scary end. At $2,500 the door still costs $360,000 a year.
The in-house build
The “we’ll just hire” answer. It works at two locations. At twelve it is a media department: hiring, gear, vehicles, a manager, and a creative standard that walks out the door every time someone quits. And it still doesn’t solve the hard part — twelve towns’ worth of local substance, every week, in season.
| Line | Rate | Qty | Annual |
|---|---|---|---|
| Videographer/editor, loaded (wages, taxes, benefits, kit share) | $65,000/yr | 12 loc | $780,000 |
| Same build at 5 locations | $65,000/yr | 5 loc | $325,000 |
| Management layer once the team passes ~4 (producer/lead) | $85,000/yr | 1 | not counted |
| Door 2 at group scale | $780,000/yr |
Assumption to argue with: $65,000 loaded. A shooter-editor who can be trusted alone in a customer’s home, with a vehicle and a real camera package, does not cost less than this in 2026 — and a cheaper hire shows up in the footage.
The leak
The door Mike is standing in today. Nobody invoices him for it, which is why it wins. Every week a location’s profiles sit stale and its channel sits dark, some share of “near me” jobs — the highest-intent work in the trades — goes to the competitor who showed up. The leak is not a metaphor; it is unbooked trucks.
| Lost booked jobs, per location | Per location /yr | Group /yr | Against the doors |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 per day | $117,000 | $1,404,000 | 2.5× Door 1 |
| 1 every other day | $58,500 | $702,000 | Still more than Door 1 |
| 1 per week | $23,400 | $280,800 | A quarter-million, quietly |
Assumptions to argue with: the $450 average ticket (low for HVAC replacement, high for a drain call — blended across trades it is conservative) and the loss rate. You cannot observe your own leak directly; that is the nature of the door. What you can observe is whether your locations are present, current, and ringing — which is exactly what channel 04 measures.
The model’s standing
Every figure on this page is a persona model — an illustrative 12-location group with its assumptions printed — built to be validated in discovery against a real operator’s books. None of it is a result LocationCast has produced, a saving it promises, or a number from a client. There are no clients yet. When the pilot produces real numbers, they will be published as the pilot’s numbers, labeled as such, misses included.
And the fourth line on the sheet
What LocationCast charges — structurally, while the pilot runs
The shape of the price
LocationCast is priced as a per-location seat that declines as the group grows — because the honest cost of the twelfth location is pipeline time and machine credits, not another hire. A one-time launch per location (the interview, the facts file, the presenter build, the channels) is real work and is priced as real work; for the founding cohort it is credited against the first season.
The design target is plain: land visibly under Door 1 for the same location count, with a system that produces more, faster, and measured in calls.
Why there is no rate card on this page
Because publishing prices for a system still in pilot would be selling ahead of the evidence — the exact failure this studio’s rules exist to prevent. Founding-cohort terms are shared during the application conversation, locked for twelve months for the three admitted operators, and published as a rate card only after the pilot gate review in January 2027.
If the pilot fails its gate, there will never be a rate card, and this page will say that instead.