The decision rule behind every Blueprinted weekly review.
Category: Marketing ROI
You have the scoreboard. Cost per booked job by channel, updated weekly. Now the number changes and you freeze. That's not a data problem — that's a missing decision framework. Here's the matrix.
Scale
Data trigger: cost-per-booked-job is dropping or stable for two consecutive weeks AND capacity exists to absorb more work AND no quality flags from field operations. The two-week requirement matters. One good week is noise. Two consecutive weeks is a signal. The capacity check matters too — scaling a channel when your install crew is already at 110% doesn't help you; it creates rescheduled jobs and angry customers. Action: increase channel budget by 20%. Review in seven days. Document the decision so you can trace whether the gain held.
Fix
Data trigger: cost-per-booked-job rising for two consecutive weeks, but the channel is still producing booked jobs at any cost. Rising cost means something changed — the algorithm, the offer, the competition, the CSR handling those specific leads. The channel isn't dead; it's degrading. Action: assign a fix owner with one named hypothesis, a 14-day window, and a defined improvement metric. If the cost-per-booked-job doesn't improve in 14 days, the verdict flips to Cut automatically. The 14-day window prevents the most expensive pattern in contractor marketing: holding a broken channel because "we've invested so much in it."
Cut
Data trigger: 60 days of underperformance with no successful fix path, or a Fix verdict was issued and the fix failed. Action: zero the budget. Redeploy to the next-best performing channel — don't let it sit unallocated or disappear into overhead. Document why the channel was cut and what it would take to reactivate it. Cuts aren't permanent — they're conditional. A channel cut in February can be reconsidered in June if the underlying conditions change.
Investigate
Data trigger: your CRM, ad platform, and agency report disagree by more than 5% on lead volume or revenue attribution for the same channel and time period. Action: no budget decisions on this channel until the numbers reconcile. Assign a 7-day reconciliation window. Identify which system is the source of truth (usually the CRM) and audit the others against it. Every decision made on unreconciled data is a guess with extra steps — and in a system where you're allocating thousands of dollars per week, guesses are expensive.
The discipline is the decision, not the data. Every owner who's run marketing long enough has experienced the pull toward certainty — waiting for one more week of data, one more agency explanation, one more report before making the call. The matrix replaces that pull with rules. The rules are imperfect. They will occasionally produce a wrong decision. But consistent, rule-based decisions over time will outperform intuition-based decisions on the same information. Make the call. Document it. Learn from it. Move on.