How I Built Two Local Businesses Using Constitutional Marketing

I get asked some version of the same question a lot: does any of this actually work, or is it just a fun framework for a book? Fair question. So instead of answering in the abstract, here's the honest version — what actually happened at Palmetto Lawn & Pest and 864 Vending Services, using nothing but the phone-and-fifteen-minutes approach this whole book is built around.

Palmetto Lawn & Pest started with one Facebook post

No business plan, no ad spend, no logo yet. I talked to my wife about starting a lawn business, decided to go for it, and posted about it to a handful of people I knew who managed local properties. One of them responded and asked me to start cutting some of their yards. That conversation, on a free platform, with zero marketing budget, was the entire origin of a company that's been operating since 2017.

Everything that came after — the Nextdoor strategy, the Google Business Profile work, the review funnel, the before-and-after photo habit — was built on top of that same instinct: show up where the people who need you already are, and be useful in public before you ever ask for anything in private.

864 Vending Services grew through the same playbook, applied differently

Vending is a different business with a different customer — location managers and office decision-makers instead of homeowners — but the underlying marketing approach didn't change. Local search visibility mattered more than national competitors realized, because companies like the big vending franchises know the major metro markets and don't bother chasing the smaller towns and bedroom communities surrounding them. That gap is where a small, consistent local presence wins.

Randall, the raccoon who shows up on my back porch most evenings, became the brand's mascot almost by accident — and ended up being some of the most effective, lowest-cost content either business has ever produced. Real, specific, slightly absurd, and completely free to make.

What actually moved the needle, in order

If I had to rank what's mattered most across both businesses, hyperlocal targeting comes first — a modest monthly Nextdoor ad spend aimed at specific neighborhoods has consistently outperformed broader social campaigns that generated more clicks but far fewer actual customers. Claiming and actively maintaining the Google Business Profile listing comes second; it's free, it's foundational, and most local competitors still haven't bothered to do it properly. A working review system that catches unhappy customers privately before they go public, instead of just hoping for good reviews to show up on their own, comes third. And consistent, unpolished, real content — before-and-after photos, job-site moments, the stuff that doesn't require a production budget — comes fourth, doing more long-term trust-building work than any single viral post ever has.

The honest caveat

None of this happened overnight, and none of it replaced doing genuinely good work. Marketing got the phone ringing. The actual lawn care and the actual vending service are what kept people calling back. If you're looking for a shortcut around doing solid work, this isn't one — it's a way to make sure the solid work you're already doing gets seen by the people who need it.