Straight answers, no sales pitch.

Plans start at $197 a month for Foundation, which covers your custom website, hosting, your own domain, unlimited updates, and Google optimization. Lead Engine is $397 a month and adds your Google Business Profile, local SEO, review automation, and missed-call text-back. Growth is $497 a month and adds online booking, a CRM, the 24/7 AI assistant, and email and SMS marketing. Full details are on our pricing page.

No. Every plan is month to month and you can cancel anytime. There is no setup fee and no long-term commitment.

No. We build the system first and show it to you before you pay. If it is not clearly better than what you have now, you owe nothing.

Most builds are live within a week. A working version usually exists in days, not months, because we build with AI and compute doing the heavy lifting.

We are local in Easton, Maryland and work with businesses across Talbot County and the Eastern Shore, including St. Michaels, Oxford, Trappe, Cambridge, Denton, Centreville, Chestertown, Stevensville, Grasonville, Queenstown, and Salisbury.

Local service and retail businesses: trades like HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and contracting, plus salons and barbers, restaurants, auto repair, marinas and charters, inns and B and Bs, fitness studios, and retail shops. If it has customers, money, and busywork, we can build a system that runs it.

No. We build it, we run it, and we handle updates for you. You never log in to anything unless you want to. If you want a change, you tell us and we make it, usually the same day.

That is common. We look at what you have and tell you honestly whether it needs a rebuild or just needs the lead systems wired into it. The free 15-minute look covers exactly that.

Speed to lead is how fast a business responds to a new inquiry after someone calls, fills out a form, or messages them. For local service businesses it is measured in minutes, not hours, because the customer is usually contacting several businesses at once and tends to hire whoever responds first.

Aim to respond within about five minutes during business hours, and faster if you can. Research on lead response time consistently shows the odds of reaching and qualifying a lead drop sharply after the first few minutes, because the customer's attention is highest right when they reached out.

A customer with an urgent problem will go with the first business that gets back to them, not necessarily the cheapest or the one with the best website. Responding first means you are the one having the conversation while competitors are still leaving voicemails, so you book the job before anyone else gets a chance.

Automate the first response. Missed-call text-back replies to unanswered calls within about 30 seconds, and instant lead notifications send new web-form submissions to your phone as a text instead of an email. Both close the gap between when a lead reaches out and when they hear back, even while you are on a job.

A missed call from a service customer is usually a warm, ready-to-buy lead, so the cost is the full value of the job you do not win. For trades like HVAC, plumbing, electrical, or roofing, a single lost call can be hundreds or thousands of dollars in work, plus the future repeat business and referrals that customer would have brought.

Across local businesses, about 30 percent of inbound calls go unanswered. For a one-person or small-crew operation that is on jobs all day, the real number is often even higher, because you cannot stop mid-task to answer every ring.

Service customers usually have an urgent problem and several competitors one tap away, so they will not wait for a callback. The call was also earned through ads, referrals, or a Google listing you paid for, which means a missed call wastes money you already spent to make the phone ring.

Missed-call text-back recovers roughly 30 percent of missed calls by sending an instant text that keeps the caller in a conversation with you instead of moving to the next result. It does not catch everyone, but it wins back a meaningful share of leads you are losing today purely because of timing.

Missed-call text-back is an automation that sends a caller an instant text message when your business does not answer their call. Within about 30 seconds the caller gets a short, friendly message acknowledging the missed call and asking what they need, which keeps the conversation alive instead of letting them move on to the next business.

The automatic text typically fires within about 30 seconds of the missed call. That speed matters because a caller searching for a local service business will often dial the next result within a minute or two, so reaching them right away keeps you in the running.

You need a business number that can both receive calls and send text messages. Some existing numbers already support this and some do not, depending on how they were set up. If your current number cannot text, a textable business line can be put in place that keeps the same look for customers.

No. It does not replace picking up the phone, it fills the gap between a missed call and a lost job. When you cannot answer because you are on a job, the automatic text holds the lead so you can reply by text when you get a free moment.

Usually yes. A live answering service charges for human time, so the more calls you get the more you pay, and you often pay for minutes spent on calls that go nowhere. An AI receptionist is typically a flat monthly rate no matter how many calls come in, which makes it cheaper for most local businesses, especially during a busy stretch. If your call volume is low and steady, the gap is smaller.

Yes. An AI receptionist answers instantly every time, day or night, weekends and holidays included. It never has a queue and never goes home, so when an AC dies at 11 p.m. or a pipe bursts on a Sunday it captures the job you would otherwise lose to voicemail.

A live answering service is worth the cost when your calls are emotionally sensitive and a human touch genuinely matters, when callers often have complex one-off situations that need real judgment, when your call volume is low enough that per-minute pricing stays cheap, or when you simply prefer a real person on every call and will pay for it.

An AI chat bot answers common questions like hours, address, and pricing, responds to missed calls with a text in seconds, qualifies new inquiries, books appointments onto your calendar, follows up with quiet leads, and sends Google review requests after a job. For most local businesses the biggest win is response speed, because a reply in 30 seconds keeps the lead from calling a competitor.

A bot struggles with anything that needs real judgment or relationship context: an upset customer with a complaint, a complex custom quote with many variables, or a caller who just needs a calm human voice. A good setup always gives the customer an easy way to reach a real person, and that request goes straight to you with no dead end.

Most setups are live within 48 hours. The bot is trained on your real answers, your tone, your hours, and your service area, then connected to your existing phone number, booking calendar, and contact list. You review every conversation in a simple dashboard and can jump in anytime, and the answers get tuned over the first few weeks based on what customers actually ask.

Yes. Google's local ranking weighs relevance, distance, and prominence, and reviews are a core part of prominence. The number of reviews, your overall rating, how recent they are, and whether you respond all feed the signal. Relevance and distance are mostly fixed, so reviews are the lever you can actually move to show up higher on Maps.

There is no magic number, and steady beats sudden. A profile earning a few new reviews every month signals an active business better than one with a big pile of reviews that are all two years old. Aim for a consistent flow rather than a one-time push, and focus on out-reviewing the other businesses showing up for your search in your town.

Ask the moment the customer is most pleased, which is usually right after you finish the job, hand back the keys, or solve the problem they called about. When someone says thank you or you saved me, that is your cue. Waiting until a week later in an email blast loses most of them, because the good feeling and the urgency have faded.

Give them a direct link that opens straight to the review box instead of telling them to search for you on Google. Every business profile has a short review link you can drop into a text, an email, or a QR code on your counter or invoice. The goal is one tap from yes, I'll do it to a star rating and a comment box.

Ask right after the job is done, when the customer is happiest, and send a direct link that opens the review box in one tap. The most reliable version is to automate it: when a job is marked complete, a friendly text with your review link fires automatically within an hour. That way the ask happens every time without you remembering.

Yes. Google counts responding to reviews as part of the prominence signal, and it shows prospective customers you pay attention. A short, genuine thank-you is enough for positive reviews. For negative ones, a calm professional reply does more for your reputation than trying to get the review removed.

Yes, and it can win you customers. Stay calm, do not argue, and offer to make it right offline. Future readers judge how you handle a problem far more than they weigh one unhappy person's complaint. A thoughtful reply to a one-star review often does more for your reputation than the review itself costs you.

Yes. Google's policies prohibit incentivized reviews and review gating, which means you cannot pay for reviews, trade discounts for them, or send the link only to customers you think are happy. Getting caught can get your reviews removed or your profile penalized. Ask everyone, make it easy, and let the reviews be real.

Yes. A Google Business profile and a Facebook page help people find you, but a real website is the only part of your online presence that you fully own and control. It captures Google Search traffic, hosts your contact form and automations, and gives serious customers the detail they need before they hire you.

They are useful but not enough on their own. Both are owned by other companies and optimized for their goals, so reach and visibility can change without warning. They are built for quick impressions, while a website tells the full story of your business and keeps your contact details and automations in a place you control.

Not many. A clean five-page site that loads fast, clearly describes what you do and where you do it, shows your phone number, and makes it easy to reach out is worth more than a large, slow site. Size is far less important than speed, clarity, and a mobile-friendly layout.

Fast load time, a mobile-friendly layout, a clear description of your services and service area, a visible phone number, and an easy way to contact you without calling. Connecting the site to automations like missed-call text-back and review requests makes it work even harder for you.

If you get more than a handful of leads a month and you are tracking them in your head, a notes app, or a spreadsheet, a CRM pays for itself. It stops leads from going cold when you get busy. For a solo contractor or small shop on the Eastern Shore, even a lightweight setup recovers jobs you would otherwise lose to follow-up gaps.

A spreadsheet is a static list you have to update by hand, so it falls behind the moment you are busy. A CRM connects to your phone and contact form, logs conversations automatically, reminds you to follow up, and shows every lead's stage at a glance. The CRM does the remembering for you, which is the part a spreadsheet cannot do.

It varies, but for a local service business one recovered lead a month usually covers it. The bigger cost is the setup and the habit of using it. Easton Automations keeps the initial setup simple on purpose, with no long contract, so you are not paying for features you will never open.

A simple, working setup can be running in a few days, not months. The starting build is a place for new contacts to land, a pipeline with four to six stages that match how you run jobs, and one or two automated follow-ups. Everything else gets added later once you are in the habit of using it.

Missed-call text-back is almost always the best starting point. When a customer calls and you cannot pick up, a text goes out within 30 seconds so the conversation keeps going while your phone is in your pocket on a job site. The benefit is immediate and visible, usually firing within the first few days, which makes it easy to trust before you add the next piece.

No. Missed-call text-back and automated follow-up run through your existing business number. Review requests go out by text using customer contact information you already have, and appointment reminders connect to whatever calendar you already use. The only thing that changes is how much manual work you do each week.

For most service business owners, manually calling back missed calls, reminding people of appointments, asking for reviews, and following up on quiet quotes adds up to an hour or two a week of work that maintains process without generating revenue. Over a year that is real time, and automation also makes it consistent instead of something you only do when business is slow.

For a market the size of the Eastern Shore, a test budget of about 10 to 15 dollars a day for two to four weeks is enough to get real data without overcommitting. At that stage you are learning which ad, audience, and offer produce a call or form submission at a cost you can live with. Once you know what works, you scale the winner.

Usually it is one of two things: the campaign objective is optimizing for clicks or form fills instead of real customers, or your targeting is too broad and pulling people outside your service area. Tighten the geography to the zip codes you actually serve, run a lead or conversion campaign rather than an engagement one, and follow up fast so the leads you do get stay warm.

Match the channel to how customers find you. Google ads catch people actively searching for your service, so they work best for urgent, search-driven jobs like emergency plumbing or storm cleanup. Facebook and Instagram reach people before they know they need you, which is better for awareness. If budget allows they complement each other, but if you must choose, pick the one that fits your customer's intent.

Targeting too wide a geography and then having no fast follow-up. They run ads to a 25-mile radius they cannot fully serve, then see leads come in at 9 PM and respond the next morning after the person already hired someone else. Start tighter than feels comfortable and automate an instant first response so no inbound lead goes cold overnight.