Nobody fails a greenfield launch on launch day. They fail it ninety days earlier, when the lease got signed but the sign never went up, so the video verification had nothing to film, so the profile that should have spent the spring banking reviews was still invisible the day the first truck rolled.
This greenfield marketing checklist is the working document for owners who already made the decision. The decision itself, whether a new market is worth opening at all and why it will cost a multiple of what your home market costs, lives in the companion piece on the honest economics of greenfield expansion. Read that first. Then print this, tape it to the wall, and tick the boxes in order.
Two notes on how to read it. The time anchors count backward from launch day, because most of this work has lead times that do not care about your enthusiasm. And the checklist assumes the most common version of this move: a new metro inside your own state, an hour or two down the road, built from scratch under your existing brand, run as a satellite of the operation you already have.
The entry bar is lower than most owners think. A tech, a truck, a supply house nearby, and a sublet you can put a sign on. How hard you go from there is your dial. Crossing state lines adds licensing and registration work that deserves its own article. Buying your way in does too.
Phase 0: the honest go/no-go check
Before any of the work, six questions. If you answer no to any of them, you are not in this checklist yet. You are back in the companion piece, deciding whether to do this at all. The gate is not paperwork. It is the difference between an owner who expanded and an owner who funded a slow bleed in a second city for a year.
□ Confirm your home market is not still leaving easy money on the table.
Adding a trade for the customers who already trust you is cheaper growth than a cold market full of strangers. If that lever is unpulled, pull it first.
□ Confirm home-market profit can carry the new market’s start without touching home-market spend.
The scrappy entry is cheap. What breaks expanding companies is raiding the budget that keeps home leads coming.
□ Confirm you can fund marketing at double your home-market percentage or more, and not flinch when month 3 looks ugly.
A new market starts at zero on the reviews, rankings, and repeat base that quietly subsidize your home spend.
□ Confirm one person owns the new market’s number, even if they own it from home base.
□ Confirm you ran the build-versus-buy comparison and chose on purpose.
Buying an incumbent is a different checklist. If you chose build, keep reading.
□ Confirm your home market runs for two weeks without you in the building.
Phase 1: market selection due diligence (90 to 120 days out)
Greenfield disasters are avoided here. The work in this phase produces artifacts, not opinions. Every item below should end in a number, a screenshot, or a document you can put in front of your CFO. The reasoning behind these checks is argued in full in the companion piece; this is where you produce the answers.
□ Pull household count, median income, and housing-stock age, side by side with your home market’s numbers.
Your home market is the one benchmark you can trust; you already know what those households produce. All three figures live in the Census ACS tables: ten minutes on data.census.gov, or one prompt to Claude with both city names.
□ Screenshot the LSA stack, map pack, and top three organic results for your core “[trade] [city]” terms.
□ Record review counts for the top five incumbents.
Incumbents at 800+ reviews are a years-long problem, not a budget line. Decide if conquesting their brand terms is part of the entry plan or a later move.
□ Note the offers the top incumbents run online.
You will be the new guy. Your launch offer has to clear theirs.
□ Calculate drive time from home base in revenue per truck-hour, not miles.
□ Decide on paper: service-area extension or separate operation.
Phoenix to Tucson is 115 miles. That is a second operation with its own dispatch geometry, not an extension.
□ Pick the office location against the map.
A $500 sublet in the right zip beats a warehouse in the wrong one. The address you choose becomes your GBP, your LSA service area, and your map presence for years.
□ Test the local hiring market: post one tech role, measure response for two weeks.
Same state does not mean same labor pool. An hour down the road can be a different hiring planet.
□ List the city and county registrations the new market requires.
Plenty of municipalities want their own business license or tax registration even from in-state companies. Twenty minutes on the city site now beats a stop-work letter in week two.
□ Build the cost-of-entry estimate for year one: the scrappy floor and the go-hard ceiling.
One tech and a sublet, or five trucks and a shop. Price both. Going hard or going home is your call, but price it before the market prices it for you.
□ Date the estimate, sign it, and file it where you will find it at month 12.
Phase 2: local setup (60 to 90 days out)
The footprint is the critical path in this phase, because verification needs something to film and the reviews you are about to start banking need somewhere to land. Every item here gates something downstream.
□ Sign the space: sublet, shop, or warehouse, sized to your commitment.
It does not need to be staffed. It cannot be a Regus or any virtual address; Google suspends those.
□ Get exterior sign rights in writing before the lease signs.
No sign, no video verification, no launch date. This one clause is the whole ballgame on a cheap sublet.
□ Order the sign the day the lease signs. Install it the day it arrives.
□ Pull the city and county registrations from the Phase 1 list.
□ Add the new address to your liability and workers’ comp policies.
LSA verification wants proof of coverage at the new address. Same policy works; the address has to be on it.
□ Open accounts at the local supply houses.
Will-call proximity matters more than unit price in month one. A tech driving an hour for a capacitor is a job lost.
□ Allocate trucks from the existing fleet. Book wrap dates for any that are not wrapped.
□ Build the new market’s dispatch zones in ServiceTitan. A separate business unit makes the reporting easier.
Either way, the new market reports alone. Blended numbers are how launches hide their failures.
Phase 3: digital foundation (60 to 90 days out)
Digital carries the launch because digital is the layer that flexes. One tech means small budgets; every truck you add means a knob you turn up, not a channel you rebuild. But the foundation runs on Google’s clock, not yours, and the build order matters: the page first, then the citations that point at it, then the profile. Each one is what gets the next approved.
□ Build the location landing page first: unique service-area copy, with the new name, address, and phone on it.
No copied home-market pages. Every citation you build next routes here and has to match it.
□ Add LocalBusiness schema for the new location.
□ Build the citations: name, address, phone identical everywhere, every listing pointing at the new page.
Yelp, BBB, Apple, Bing, Nextdoor, the data aggregators.
□ Create the Google Business Profile once the sign is up and the citations are indexing.
Expect to film the building, the signage, and proof you run the place. Review takes up to five business days, per Google’s verification documentation. Do not edit the name, address, or category while it is pending; edits restart the wait.
□ Point review requests for any territory job at the new profile.
□ Temporarily reroute a share of home-base review requests there too.
The target is 100 reviews before opening day. A share, not all: review frequency and recency are ranking factors, and home cannot stall while the new profile fills.
□ Submit the Local Services Ads application at least 60 days out.
Google puts the average at three to four weeks once your documents are in, and the Verified badge process gates most of it on documentation. Set the service area to the zips from Phase 1, not a radius.
□ Build the new market’s campaigns and listing profiles with their own budgets.
Google, Yelp, the rest. Separate budgets are what let you fund the market as its own P&L and throttle spend to the board.
□ Provision tracking numbers for the new market’s channels.
Phase 4: staffing the satellite (60 to 90 days out)
This is not a hiring spree. Run the market as a satellite of the home operation for as long as you can: same call center, same dispatch, same back office. Every dollar that does not go to overhead goes to marketing, and marketing is what a zero-review market starves without.
□ Put tech one in the territory: a volunteer from the home roster or one local hire.
Tech one sets the culture of the market. Pick accordingly.
□ Fill tech one’s board before adding tech two.
When he is booking out, add the next truck. Capacity grows on proof, not projections.
□ Route territory calls through the call center you already have.
□ Dispatch from home base.
□ Set the weekly meeting now: drive in or remote in, same five numbers every week.
□ Run the LSA background checks: one time, the owner and the techs based at this location.
Most clear in days. The slow ones take weeks, and approval waits on every one of them.
□ Set the expectation at hire: yard sign asks, door hangers, and door knocks are part of the job.
There will be days lighter than home market. Nobody gets sent home. They learn to hunt.
Phase 5: pre-launch marketing assets (30 to 60 days out)
Cheap, local, and human beats polished and expensive in a market where nobody knows you. Everything here is built to say one thing in different formats: we are new here, and we intend to earn it.
□ Write the new-mover letter: a tune-up offer with a real pitch.
They are new to the neighborhood. So are you. Say it plainly; it lands.
□ Shoot video at local landmarks with a tech and a truck.
No studio, no stock. A recognizable corner of their town and a new-in-town tune-up rate is the whole production.
□ Build the Facebook ad around that video: the new-guy rate, here to earn your business.
□ Print yard signs. Stock enough for every job in the first 90 days.
□ Print door hangers tied to job-site routes, not generic offers.
□ Print referral cards for the trucks.
Goodwill peaks at the handshake. The card is how it travels.
□ Print the tech-arrival piece: who is coming, what to expect, how to reach us.
□ Write and load service-area pages for surrounding towns, each with unique copy and meta.
□ Send the launch press release to local outlets and the chamber.
Phase 6: launch week
Launch week is execution, not ceremony. The marketing is already built; this week is about real jobs moving through it. Every job is two gets installed this week or it never gets installed, and two is the floor.
□ Count the review bank. The target was 100 before opening day.
Short of it? The machine still launches. But every review you banked is a week of LSA position you do not have to buy.
□ Confirm LSA is live, funded, and the Verified badge displays.
□ Activate non-brand search campaigns.
□ Launch the new-guy video ad on Facebook.
□ Drop the first round of new-mover letters.
□ Map and assign the first door-knock route around job one.
□ Hold the “every job is two” tailgate with the techs.
Two is the floor. The next visit is planned before the truck leaves, and a planned next visit compounds past two on its own. Then pick up the neighbor: knock with the free tune-up, sign in the yard, hangers on the next three doors, referral card in the customer’s hand. The cheapest job this market will ever produce is the house next door.
□ Put membership sales in every truck from job one.
The membership is how a stranger becomes a customer on a schedule.
□ Stand up the weekly KPI dashboard: new market only, never blended.
Phase 7: first 30 days
The first month produces noisy data and strong feelings. The cadence below exists so decisions get made on the first and not the second. Home-market reporting is monthly; greenfield reporting is weekly, because the runway is shorter and the mistakes compound faster.
□ Track weekly: leads by source, booked rate, cost per lead, review count, membership rate.
□ Hold the weekly meeting: the number-owner presents, you ask questions.
□ Send a tech door-knocking free tune-ups on every light-board day.
A slow board is not a reason to send anyone home. A tech with a knuckle and a pitch is marketing you already pay for.
□ Throttle the Facebook tune-up ad to the board: up when it is light, down when tech one books out.
□ Confirm every completed job got the job-site five: review ask, yard sign, neighbor knock, referral card, next visit booked.
□ Flag any channel spending real money with zero booked jobs by day 30.
□ Keep the new market off the blended dashboard. It reports alone or the data lies.
Phase 8: day 30, 60, and 90 milestone reviews
Milestones exist to compare the market against the curve, not against the home market. The CAC shape is predictable: peak early, bend slowly. The job at each marker is to confirm trajectory, not to demand home-market numbers from a market that is ninety days old.
Day 30
□ Compare lead volume to plan. Directional is passing; silence is not.
□ Check booked rate against home-market norms.
Same call center, colder leads. A gap here is usually the offer or the handling, not the ads.
□ Count reviews posted against jobs completed. The ratio is the discipline check.
□ Check the membership rate on the first jobs.
Day 60
□ Confirm the review bank kept growing after launch, job for job.
□ Compare cost per lead to the day 30 baseline.
□ Log the first referral. If none by day 60, ask why out loud.
□ Check ticket average against the assumption from Phase 1.
□ Draft the kill list: channels where spend is high and booked jobs are zero.
Day 90
□ Confirm CAC is bending: 10 to 20 percent off peak is on-curve.
□ Confirm LSA position is improving as reviews accumulate.
□ Check for map pack appearances on any long-tail terms.
□ Cut or fix everything on the day 60 kill list. No third chances for expensive dead channels.
□ Hold the day 90 review against the cost-of-entry sheet from Phase 1.
□ Decide on tech two against tech one’s board, not against ambition.
Phase 9: month 6 and month 12 milestone reviews
These are the checkpoints where the market either shows the compounding it was funded to build, or shows you a flat line wearing a hopeful narrative. The benchmarks are directional by design. What they audit is whether the ground game happened, because the numbers below only lag when the work did.
Month 6
□ Compare review count against the top incumbent’s pace, not your own past.
□ Record LSA stack position against the top three incumbents from Phase 1.
□ Confirm CAC is materially below the launch peak.
□ Count the customer database. The file is the asset; size it every quarter.
□ Count the membership percentage. The aim is 30 to 50 percent of customers on a plan.
□ Confirm the first database revenue is registering: repeat work, maintenance bookings.
□ Kill any paid channel that has not moved since day 90. Coddling expensive channels is a tax.
Month 12
□ Check map pack presence for core terms. Long-tail wins stopped counting at month 6.
□ Confirm organic service pages are producing booked jobs, not sessions.
□ Calculate marketing as a percentage of new-market revenue. It should be bending down from the launch peak.
□ Measure repeat-plus-referral share of revenue. This is the compounding made visible.
□ Re-run the cost-of-entry sheet from Phase 1 against actuals. File both versions together.
□ Make the year-one call: scale the market, or hold and let the compounding work.
The home market took fifteen years to earn its easy months. This document does not make the new one fast. It makes it honest, and it remembers what you promised yourself back when the market was still a spreadsheet. That is what the wall is for.
