For owners and leaders who pay for marketing and can't tell if it's working
Most of the time, that's a business problem, not a marketing problem.
From the ad to the sale · where the money usually goes
It's a leak somewhere between the potential customer and the sale. On a free Chain Check, I'll tell you where I think the biggest leak is. If it's worth digging into, the Revenue Leak Review is where I go through your numbers, tracking and follow-up in detail and put a dollar figure on it.
$1M+ a month. That's where one business I worked with took its ad spend, once we could see what was really working. Their reports said each customer cost about $150. It was really about $1,200. We moved the money to what actually brought in customers, and they scaled from there.
Attention
You pay for ads, a website, an agency.Usually fine. Most owners spend here first.
Capture
Someone calls or fills out a form.Call goes to voicemail. Form is broken.
Response
Somebody gets back to them.Called back two days later. They already hired someone.
Conversion
You send a quote and follow up.Quote goes out, then nothing.
Value
They hire you.Nobody knows what that customer cost or was worth.
Retention
They come back.Never heard from you again.
Referrals
They send their friends.No review. No referral.
Measurement
You see what worked.Reports show clicks, not dollars.
The Revenue Leak System
Every question, every rule and every fix in it is mine, from more than a decade of looking inside businesses. It's what runs behind every Chain Check. Here it is on a made-up business.
Step 1 of 6
Pick your business type and the questions change. A nonprofit isn't asked about quotes, and a store isn't asked about job sites.
What best describes what you run?
Now every question talks about leads, quotes and jobs. A store would see carts and orders. A nonprofit would see donors.
Step 2 of 6
Phone speed, whether the site works on a phone, and whether your tracking is actually installed. What it finds, it fills in for you to confirm.
Website scan · sampleplumbing.example
I filled in 3 answers from what I found, each marked for you to confirm.
Step 3 of 6
Forty checks, from the first ad to the repeat customer. Every link comes out holding, cracked or broken.
Step 4 of 6
Your spend, leads and customers become what a customer really costs you, source by source.
What a customer really costs you, last month
| Spent | Leads | Customers | Per customer | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Ads | $1,200 | 30 | 8 | $150 |
| $400 | 20 | 1 | $400 | |
| Referrals | $0 | 6 | 4 | $0 |
An average job is $3,500, and you close about 1 in 4 leads, so every lead is worth about $875 to you. That's what a missed call costs.
Step 5 of 6
Biggest leak first, by what it's likely costing you. That's the order I'd fix them in.
Your biggest leaks, likely cost a year
Step 6 of 6
A 30-day plan pulled from more than 80 fixes I've written, plus the Leak Fix Kit with every template filled in for you.
Your 30-day plan
Leak Fix Kit · missed-call text
Hi, this is Sam with Sample Plumbing Co. Sorry I missed your call! What can I help you with? You can text me back here or call 210-555-0100.
Every template comes filled in with your name and business.
From the first call to the fix
30 minutes. You tell me what you spend, where leads come from and what happens after they come in. I ask a lot of questions. You leave knowing your weakest link and where I'd look first.
I go through your numbers, tracking and follow-up, and you get your top 3 leaks, what each is likely costing you and what to fix first. Five business days. $1,250.
Your team can work from the plan, or I can do it with you.
Who's doing this
I'm Preston Cone. I started inside Facebook working with the businesses that advertise there, worked on the digital team behind the 2016 presidential campaign, ran digital for the 58th Presidential Inaugural Committee, and built a seven-figure agency. I've worked with more than 200 businesses and organizations. My wife, Laura, runs the operations and finance side, so the numbers get checked twice.
Everywhere I've looked, the money isn't lost in the ads. It's lost after someone raises their hand. That's what I look for first.
Software company
Marketing leadership
Cost per acquisition dropped from $738 to $345 while paid trials went from 501 to 2,260. June 2025 set a record at 22,847 trials. Most people think you have to choose between cheaper and more. You don't, if you measure the whole path and stop looking only at the ad.
Subscription business
Paid acquisition
A $29.99 a month fitness subscription. We got new subscribers for about $9 each, and the average subscriber stayed about 5.1 months. Each one brought in roughly $153 in subscription revenue. Along the way we built a paid Facebook following of 111,453 at about 14 cents each.
This is the whole idea in one example. A cheap lead means nothing by itself. What matters is what the customer is worth after you get them.
National organization
Petition campaign
For one national organization, our campaigns brought in 95,493 completed petition signups on $4,925 in paid media. That's about 5 cents a person, from the organization's 2020 campaign report.
Getting people in the door that cheaply is the Attention and Capture links working. The harder part, and where most organizations lose the value, is what happens after.
Advocacy organization
Texas
We helped one organization grow a list from roughly 3,000 people to about 90,000 in a month. That audience generated tens of thousands of dollars during the campaign and kept producing revenue for months afterward.
The petition brought people in. The follow-up is what turned them into supporters who gave again and again.
Jon Del Construction
Luling, Texas
In the 12 months before I took over, the website brought in 34 leads. In the most recent 12 months it brought in 70. Same builder, same market. The difference is that people can find him now and the site gives them a reason to reach out.
I wrote this in a proposal years ago: We believe in a full funnel approach.
Get someone's attention, capture them, follow up by email, track what they do, and turn them into a customer. I've been doing it the same way ever since. I just call it what it is now.
Want to know what I'd fix first in your business?
Start here · The Revenue Chain Scorecard · free · 10 questions · about 3 minutes
Every business has a chain between spending money and making money. Your revenue is limited by the weakest link in it. Spending another $10,000 on leads when nobody answers the phone doesn't fix anything. It makes the problem bigger.
Attention → Capture → Response → Conversion → Value → Retention → Referrals → Measurement
Fix first: ResponseI'd set up an automatic text back on every missed call and form.
Take the 3-minute scorecard and see yours.
What I believe
I've worked inside digital operations that brought in people at a scale most marketers never see. That's the reason I stopped believing lead count is the number that matters.
Most marketing gets judged on activity: clicks, traffic, followers, leads. Those are fine, but none of them is the goal. When you spend $10,000 on marketing, the only real question is what happened to the money. Did the leads get called back? How fast? Did they buy? What did that customer cost you, and what were they worth?
If nobody can answer that, nobody knows if the marketing worked.
AI is making this more obvious. Writing an ad or building a landing page is cheap now. Knowing what to do, what to stop doing and where the money is getting lost is the part that still takes somebody who has done it.
Year-end Revenue Leak Review · 5 of 5 spots left
It's my Revenue Leak Review, timed for year-end. I'll go through where your money goes after someone clicks: your tracking, your landing page, your offer and your follow-up. Laura runs the numbers behind the scenes, so you know what you can afford to pay for a customer before you spend. You get a clear list of what to fix, in five business days. $1,250.
Book by November 13 to have your results before Black Friday.
Ways to work with me
I find it · five business days
Laura runs the numbers behind the scenes, so you know what you can afford to pay for a customer.
$1,250
If we work together on the fixes within 30 days, the full $1,250 goes toward the Intensive.
Start with a free callI find it and fix it · two weeks
I go through your business from the first click to the repeat customer: ads, website, how leads get handled, how fast they hear back, follow-up, sales, reviews and tracking.
You get the five biggest leaks I found, what each one is costing you, what I'd stop, what I'd put more money behind, and a 90-day plan. I fix the quick wins I can address during the Intensive and give you the plan for everything else.
Starts at $2,500
Talk to me about itI stay on · monthly · a few clients at a time
We meet every week. I go through the numbers, set the priorities and direct the people doing the work, whether that's your team, your vendors or mine.
You get someone who has run this at scale making the calls, without hiring a full-time marketing executive. And you never get a report from me without dollars in it.
Starts at $5,000 a month
Talk to me about itNot sure which one? Book a free call and I'll tell you. Or take the 3-minute scorecard first. And when a plan calls for building something, like ads, a website or a CRM, my team at Cone Agency can do it, or I'll work with the people you already have.
From Laura, on working with us
“You'll get one clear price and one invoice. If anything changes, you'll hear it from me before you ever see it on a bill.”
About me
I grew up in Comfort, Texas, and moved back a few years ago. In between, I worked inside Facebook, joined the digital operation behind the 2016 presidential campaign, and was promoted to Digital Director of the 58th Presidential Inaugural Committee while I was still in my twenties.
Since then I've built a seven-figure agency, founded a marketing software company and led marketing from inside a SaaS business. I've bought traffic, built funnels, raised money, grown lists, fixed tracking and led teams, for national organizations and for builders, plumbers and pool companies here in the Hill Country.
Clients usually hired me for one thing: ads, a website, a campaign. The work kept growing because the real problem was rarely the thing they hired me for. Broken tracking, then broken follow-up, then a weak offer, then a list nobody was using. The Revenue Chain is the name I finally gave that pattern.
I've had things work better than anyone expected and I've made expensive mistakes. Both taught me the same thing. The ad is rarely the problem. The problem is usually what happens after someone raises their hand.
I don't do this alone. My wife, Laura, and I have built the agency together since we were newly married. She has a degree in business administration and worked at a private holding company before coming on board to run the side of the business most clients never see: operations, billing, finance and taxes. I'm the one you'll talk to about marketing. She's the one who checks whether it made money.
I'll talk about this anywhere: podcasts, conferences, trade groups
A note from Laura
“Preston finds the leaks. I'm the one who checks the bank account to see if fixing them worked. I've run the books, billing and taxes for our business from the start, so I look at marketing the way a bank statement does: what came in, what went out, and what was left.”
Contact
I answer my own phone and my own email. Tell me what's going on in your business and I'll tell you straight whether I can help.