The brief
Jordan Hammond founded Hammond Build Co. in 2012 as a two-person residential remodeling outfit in East Austin. Twelve years in, the company had grown to 14 employees, $4M in annual revenue, and a reputation for finishing on time - a thing that genuinely is not common in their market.
What had not grown was the website. The site they brought to us in February 2024 was a 2017 WordPress build by a local agency that had since gone out of business. It loaded in 7.2 seconds. It had no schema. It mentioned "remodeling" in the H1 and nowhere else. Their Google Business profile out-ranked it on every query.
They were spending $4,800/month on Google Ads to capture leads their organic search couldn't earn. The bottleneck wasn't capacity. It was discoverability.
What we found in discovery
Three things, in priority order:
- Their best service was invisible. Hammond's actual edge was kitchen-and-bath remodels - 60% of revenue, 80% of margin. The site treated it as a secondary line under "general contracting." We re-architected around the high-margin service first.
- Local pack was untouched. Their Google Business profile had 47 reviews averaging 4.9 stars but zero schema connection to the site. Eight competitors were ranking ahead of them despite weaker review profiles.
- Lead intake was hostile. The contact form had 11 fields including "project budget" with options starting at $50K - pricing-out 70% of leads before they'd even hit submit.
What we built
A 14-page site, hand-coded in Next.js, with three structural changes:
- A homepage hero anchored on kitchen-and-bath, not GC
- Service pages structured around buyer questions, not service categories - schema'd up for AI-search citation
- A 3-field intake form with progressive disclosure: name → project type → ZIP. Anything else asked after the lead lands.
"They asked me about sequencing on a remodel in the discovery call. Right then I knew this was different. Three months later - 31 leads a month. We had four."
- Jordan Hammond
What didn't work
The first version of the homepage hero used a long-form video background of a remodel time-lapse. Beautiful. Killed Largest Contentful Paint. Lighthouse dropped to 71. We replaced it with a still image and a CSS reveal animation in week 8 of the build. Aesthetic decisions live and die by the conversion math.