Built by service business owners. For service business owners.
Not the other way around. Live Oak Exterior Cleaning is our own exterior cleaning company, and it gets the same work we sell: the site, the listing, the tracking, the follow-up when somebody fills in a form after hours.
That is the whole of the credential. We are not going to tell you how many clients we have or how long we have been at it, because those numbers persuade nobody and we would rather show you the work.
Who you would be working with
We are Jared and Angela, and we run service businesses of our own.
Live Oak Exterior Cleaning is our own exterior cleaning company, and it gets the same work we sell. The marketing we sell is the marketing we rely on to keep our own work coming in.
That changes what we recommend. We have sat with the same questions an owner sits with: what happens when the phone goes quiet, whether the money spent last month did anything, whether the person who just called is worth driving out to see. Advice that ignores those questions is easy to give and expensive to follow.
How we got here
BARKmedia started in 2020. Our first clients were direct-to-consumer brands, where we ran national broadcast advertising and influencer campaigns. That same year, we also launched our own home service company: Live Oak Exterior Cleaning, a soft-washing business serving central Texas.
Live Oak gave us something an agency that has never run one cannot have. We were not writing strategy decks for contractors. We were waiting for our own phone to ring, fixing our own Google listing, and testing our own ads with our own money. We later launched Get Lit Drip, a seasonal holiday lighting company, and ran the same playbook from scratch.
By January 2024 we had learned something the hard way: what actually works for home service businesses is very different from what agencies usually sell them. So we made the switch. BARKmedia became a focused agency for home service companies, bringing the same execution we had built for national brands to a market that mostly gets second-tier work.
That is the story. We are not here because we read a book about contractor marketing. We are here because we have been the contractor wondering why the last agency did not deliver.
Our journey
The short version is that we figured out what works by running our own businesses. The longer version has dates.
2020
We started BARKmedia working with direct-to-consumer brands, running national broadcast advertising and influencer campaigns.
2020
We launched our own soft-washing business in central Texas. From day one we were operators: booking jobs, answering calls, running our own ads, and learning what marketing actually moves the needle for a home service company.
2022
We launched a seasonal holiday lighting company and ran the playbook again from scratch. Different market, different demand cycle, same lesson reinforced.
January 2024
By 2024 we had seen enough. Most agencies serving home service contractors were running the wrong playbook, chasing broad awareness instead of the customers already searching for the work. We refocused BARKmedia entirely on home service and service-based businesses.
Today
We still run Live Oak and Get Lit Drip. Every tactic we recommend to you is one we are testing on our own businesses, with our own money.
How we think
These are the things every decision gets checked against: which clients to take, which channels to recommend, how to answer when something goes wrong.
You can't improve what you can't see.
If an owner can't tell which marketing produced revenue, every decision after that is a guess. This is why tracking comes first.
Visibility creates opportunity.
People can't choose you if they can't find you.
Trust wins jobs.
The best business doesn't win the work. The most trusted one does.
Consistency compounds.
A small effort sustained over time beats a big effort once.
Marketing should make sales easier, not louder.
If the marketing is right, the sales call is shorter.
The best business doesn't always win. The most obvious one does.
This is the line that defines what we're paid to do.
Service businesses don't buy marketing. They buy the next customer.
Phone calls, forms, texts, booked appointments, quote requests, referrals - these are all the shape of the next customer. Channels change. The next customer doesn't.
Tactics change. Outcomes don't.
Search engines, platforms, and channels will evolve. Customers finding, choosing, and remembering businesses will not.
A bad client costs more than they pay.
Saying no to the wrong fit protects the work we do for the right one.
Has it worked for businesses like mine
No percentages, no case-study language. What the situation was, and what changed.
Electrical Austin, TX
$4K a month going to Yelp and Angi, no way to tell what any of it produced, and sales reps calling weekly to keep it that way.
We turned it off. The calls coming in now are tracked to the job, so they can see which ones turned into paid work.
Auto Repair Dripping Springs, TX
A shop that had been there for years, nearly invisible to the new families moving into Dripping Springs.
Local Services Ads plus video on Meta and YouTube, targeted to the zip codes around the shop. A year later there were more cars through the bays each week than they could staff for.
Exterior Cleaning Dripping Springs, TX
One targeted ad in the Belterra neighborhood, run for our own exterior cleaning company.
The first job came in the same day it went live.
Still deciding
We'll tell you honestly which one fits, even if the answer is none of them.
Most of the time it is obvious within a few minutes of looking at what you already have. Either of these gets you that answer.
Or just call. 210-347-0587