The article recounts Jack Hepp being fired for underspending a PPC client’s budget by roughly 50%, illustrating that underspend in home services means missed demand and lost gross margin. The real failure highlighted is a lack of proactive communication and pacing management; issues should be surfaced immediately with a concrete catch-up plan. It stresses training on PPC principles tied to calls, revenue, and margin rather than just procedures, and provides a recovery playbook focused on owning mistakes, quantifying impact, and instituting pacing checkpoints. Finally, it warns that automation requires vigilant human oversight to protect intent, geography, and lead quality, and urges feeding offline conversion truth and maintaining regular human QA.

Getting Fired for Underspending: The PPC Lesson Contractors Can’t Afford to Learn Twice

TL;DR: Underspending isn’t “saving” budget—it’s starving your phones. Jack Hepp’s early-career firing for 50% underspend is a masterclass in communication, training, and why automation still needs human judgment. Own issues early. Optimize for calls, not clicks.

The Mistake: Underspending Is Not “Being Efficient”

Jack Hepp got fired after underspending a client’s budget by nearly half. That’s not a clerical error—that’s lost demand. In home services, demand is perishable. If you don’t show up when the homeowner’s AC dies, another company will.

Run the math. Say your monthly budget is $10,000. You spend $5,000. If your blended cost-per-booked-call is $150, you just left ~33 booked calls on the table. With a $600 average ticket and 40% gross margin, that’s roughly $8,000 in gross profit you didn’t help generate. No owner wants to hear you “saved” $5,000 when you also missed $8,000 in gross margin.

Underspend = unbooked jobs = trucks sitting still. The only “efficiency” that matters is more profitable calls at a steady pace.

Root Cause Wasn’t Math—It Was Silence

The core failure wasn’t a bid strategy. It was communication. Jack didn’t call the underspend out early, explain the pacing issue, or reset expectations mid-month. When spend lags, you don’t wait for end-of-month reports—you raise your hand immediately and fix it.

For contractors, that means daily pacing checks and fast moves: open geo, loosen match types (with negatives), bump bids on high-intent queries, and adjust dayparting. But the first step is telling the client the truth, fast, with a plan and a timeline to catch up.

Training Gap: Procedures Without Principles

Jack also lacked training and mentorship. I see this in agencies and in-house teams: people know which buttons to push but not why. They follow a checklist, then freeze when the situation doesn’t match the playbook.

Managers: teach the physics of PPC—auction dynamics, lead quality tradeoffs, and how budget pacing ties to booked revenue. Teach people to think in terms of calls and margin, not just CPC and CTR. Procedures matter, but principles keep you from driving off a cliff when the weather changes.

Recovery Playbook: Own It, Fix It, Learn

Jack bounced back by leaning on his network and embracing transparency. If you ever underspend (or overspend into junk), here’s the play:

• Own it quickly. Same day if possible. No spin.
• Show the impact in jobs and dollars. “We missed ~28 calls; est. $6–8k gross margin.”
• Present a catch-up plan. Expanded geo, bid adjustments, tightening negatives, boosted LSAs, and any rapid-response levers.
• Set pacing checkpoints. Daily spend targets and a mid-week review to confirm progress.
• Document the root cause. Was it seasonality, caps, new negatives, automation shifts? Prevent it next month.

Automation Won’t Save You (And Can Sink You)

AI can move levers faster than you. It can also push you into mismatched targeting and nonsense copy that hurts brand and lead quality. I’ve seen broad match pair “water heater install” with “water heater manual PDF,” RSAs that read like lorem ipsum, and location targeting that quietly drifts 50 miles out of the service area. Machines don’t care if your dispatcher’s drowning in tire-kickers.

Use automation as a power tool, not an autopilot:

• Protect intent. Exact and phrase for core money terms, with controlled broad and aggressive negatives.
• Guard the geo. Regular location reports; exclude bleed-over ZIPs; check IP/advanced location settings.
• Feed it truth. Offline conversions: booked job, sold job, revenue. Stop optimizing to form fills.
• Human QA. Weekly ad copy review, search terms triage, and lead quality sampling with the CSR team.

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