Christopher Gosselin
I rarely leave negative reviews, especially for small businesses. If I’m reviewing a small company, it’s usually because they earned five stars. In this case, I feel obligated to share our experience so other landscape companies don’t make the same mistake. Manny and his team are personable. Unfortunately, they are completely out of their depth when it comes to running Google campaigns for a design-build landscape company. They put us into a call campaign that burned through $13,000 and generated a flood of spam and irrelevant calls. Call campaigns are typically suited for emergency services like locksmiths and plumbers not high-ticket design-build landscaping. We raised concerns for weeks about the strange calls we were receiving. Nothing meaningful changed. At the same time, their keyword strategy was wildly off base. We run a design-install landscape company. Their campaigns were targeting lawn maintenance, sprinkler repair, and unrelated low-ticket services. Again, we flagged this repeatedly. More than half of the leads were unqualified. This went on for months. Zip code targeting was another major issue. I understand how Meta and Google targeting works. This was not a minor optimization issue 50–60% of leads were coming from outside our service area. That is unacceptable when geographic targeting is one of the most basic campaign settings. We’ve worked with multiple marketing firms over the years. No one expects perfection. But this was not a performance fluctuation it was systemic incompetence. When we asked for reasonable compensation due to wasted ad spend and mismanagement, they refunded January’s service fee. We terminated them in early February, and they claimed they “refunded” February" despite the fact that it was not a full month of service. Communication was consistently slow. Getting in contact with Manny was difficult. When we fired them after 4.5 months of poor performance, he said he was “surprised” and followed it with, “That’s too bad because February was going to be the month where we focused on ROI.” After nearly five months and over $100,000 in ad spend, that statement was beyond concerning. They also claimed they generated $1M in revenue for us. The actual number was closer to $600–700K and that was with over $100K in ad spend. Anyone who understands landscape margins knows that return is extremely poor. On top of that, I had to assist them early on with basic data tracking because their automations were set up incorrectly. Website edits took far too long. Landing pages frequently broke. They removed photos from our website, which we had to fix. They never added ALT text for SEO. These are foundational marketing tasks. This company presents itself as a high-level marketing firm. In reality, it appears to be heavily outsourced, poorly managed, and lacking real strategic oversight. Manny is a strong salesperson. Execution is where everything falls apart. We can absorb inefficiencies like this. A smaller landscape company likely cannot.
