About Gridwork Marketing

Built for Contractors. Run by Someone Who Gets It.

Gridwork Marketing is a focused SEO and digital marketing agency based in Western North Carolina. We work exclusively with home service contractors and trades businesses: HVAC companies, plumbers, electricians, roofers, painters, landscapers, and builders, helping them build the kind of online presence that attracts steady leads, fills crews, and compounds over time.

This isn’t a generalist agency that dabbles in contractor marketing. It’s all we do.

The Story Behind Gridwork

Before starting Gridwork, I spent nearly two decades leading the marketing team at Snowbird Wilderness Outfitters, a Gospel-driven high adventure camp and ministry in Andrews, NC. That work taught me a lot about content strategy, written communication, and the kind of digital presence that actually builds trust with real people.

It also showed me a pattern I kept seeing everywhere: businesses with years of great work behind them, good reputations in their communities, and websites that were doing absolutely nothing for them.

I started freelancing on the side, working with contractors, builders, and landscapers, and the same story kept coming up. Great companies. Hardworking owners. No time to figure out digital marketing. And in too many cases, already burned by agencies who took their money, produced something flashy, and delivered zero return.

A contractor friend once told me he’d spent thousands on a billboard and couldn’t point to a single job that came from it. Another had a gorgeous new website that ranked for nothing. Neither had a bad business. They just had the wrong marketing for where they were.

That’s what Gridwork is built to fix.

I launched Gridwork Marketing in 2025 to give home service contractors a focused, honest alternative: a system that builds the right foundation first, compounds over time, and actually connects to how their business grows.

Why Contractors

I could have built a generalist agency. I didn’t, and it wasn’t an accident.

The contractors and tradespeople I know are dedicated problem solvers. The best ones take real pride in their work. They show up, do quality work, stand behind it, and genuinely care about the people they serve.

These are often family businesses or small companies built by someone who bet on themselves, hired good people, and now runs a crew of five, ten, or twenty who depend on consistent work coming through the door.

They’re too busy being great at what they do to also become digital marketing experts. That’s not a failure. That’s just how focused, high-quality businesses operate.

I also love that trades companies create real value in their communities. They create jobs. They train young people. They sponsor local events. They donate work to nonprofits and churches. These businesses deserve a marketing partner who takes that seriously and helps them grow in a way that’s sustainable, not just flashy.

There’s also something that genuinely bothers me about how online marketing currently works for trades businesses. The best contractor in a market, the one who does the finest work, treats customers right, and stands behind everything they do, has no guarantee they’re the one showing up first in search results. A company cutting corners or treating customers like transactions can outrank them simply because they figured out SEO first. That’s a problem I want to help fix. There is no good reason a great company should lose online visibility to one that doesn’t deserve it.

What I Actually Believe

Most marketing agencies get this wrong: they come in with a polished presentation, produce good-looking work, and focus on the wrong goals entirely.

A contractor trying to keep a third crew busy doesn’t need a new logo or a Facebook ad campaign. They need to show up first when someone in their service area searches for what they do. They need reviews. They need a website that ranks for the specific services they offer and the specific towns they serve.

Brand marketing compounds. Brand marketing pays off. But it pays off for companies approaching $10 million in revenue, not for a six-person HVAC company trying to fill their schedule in January.

Here’s what I believe home service companies actually need first:

A strong, well-built website that earns search traffic for real service searches
An optimized Google Business Profile and consistent local citations
A steady stream of genuine customer reviews
Location and service pages that reflect exactly what they do and where they do it

Build that foundation right, and it turns into a flywheel. The leads compound. The calls increase. And when you eventually want to add paid advertising or brand-level campaigns on top of it, everything performs better because the foundation is there.

Simple? Yes. Easy? No. But it works, and it doesn’t stop working.

How I Work

Every client engagement starts with a lot of questions. Every plumbing company is different. Every HVAC company is different. I refuse to treat them the same as another company two towns over that’s four times the size.

What makes a company’s marketing actually work is finding and communicating what makes that company different, not just what they do and where they do it, but why they do it, how they do it, and what their customers actually experience when they hire them.

I also operate with a strong belief that everything about a company’s marketing should work together as one cohesive strategy. A lot of freelancers and even some agencies focus on a single specialty in isolation, without accounting for how it fits into the bigger picture. My commitment is to focus on the areas where I execute best while connecting them to a larger strategy that makes every piece more effective. That sometimes means bringing in other specialists with different skill sets and collaborating on the best path forward for a client. I’m not interested in being the agency that does everything halfway. I’d rather do what I do well and make sure it’s working with everything else, not against it.

A Few Things I Won’t Do:

I won’t produce cookie-cutter content.

Generic, AI-generated content that could apply to any contractor in any city isn’t just useless. It actively hurts your site. Every page I write is specific, intentional, and connected to your actual business goals.

I won’t show you vanity metrics.

Rankings that don’t produce calls, traffic from people who will never hire you, reports that look good and mean nothing. If the numbers aren’t connected to real business value, I’m not interested in tracking them.

I won’t keep a project going if it’s not working.

If the data is pointing to a different direction, I’ll say so and we’ll make the shift. The best time to do the right thing is always now.

I won’t work with companies that cut corners on their work.

I only partner with contractors who take pride in what they produce and care about the customers they serve. Good marketing amplifies a good business. It can’t fix a bad one.

SEO is not a black box. If your agency can’t explain what they’re doing and why it connects to your business goals in plain terms, that’s a problem. I work as a partner, not a vendor. You’ll always know what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and what we expect it to produce.

Outside the Office

I live in a small mountain town outside Asheville, NC, with my wife Brittany and our seven kids, four girls and three boys, all twelve and under.

Brittany studied PR and advertising at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee, and spent several years writing for a newspaper in Birmingham before we moved back to the mountains. I studied marketing at Union, which is where we met. We both went all in on starting Gridwork in 2025 after years of side projects, and honestly, we probably spend more time than we should dissecting marketing messages and brand writing when we’re out in the world.

When we’re not working, we’re hiking, mountain biking, watching the kids play soccer in the spring and fall, and wishing we had more time for the garden. Brittany also directs a Classical Conversations homeschool co-op with nearly 40 kids and a full team of teachers and tutors.

We’re born again believers and active at Red Oak Church in Andrews, NC. Faith shapes how we approach our work, our clients, and the way we run this business.

Local Roots

Not Just Working in Asheville. Part of It.

Memberships, certifications, and the local directory I run. It is the difference between an agency that serves this market and one that lives in it.

Member
Supporting member
Living Wage Certified
Member
Founder