The Slow Takeover

Plano

From 2009 through 2016, I was running CI Web Group out of an office in Dallas while living in Plano, Texas.

Plano is a suburb north of Dallas where many of the corporate headquarters of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex relocated through the 1990s and 2000s. It is the kind of place where a working CEO with a school-age son could live without commuting all the way into downtown Dallas every day, where the schools were good, where the streets were quiet, where the operational logistics of running a household alongside a growing agency were as smooth as those logistics are ever going to be in any American city. Plano was where I lived. Dallas was where I worked. The drive between them was twenty minutes if I left at the right hour, longer if I did not.

Torel was eleven years old in 2009. He had grown up, by then, into the agency. The conference table that had been his bedroom in 2006 was now the conference table where the agency held its meetings, and he had moved on to the kind of bedroom an eleven-year-old has in a real house. He came to the office sometimes after school. He knew the team. He knew the rhythms of when I was free to talk and when I was on a call I could not be interrupted on. He had been raised, by then, to operate inside the cadence of a working business in a way most kids are not.

I was thirty-three years old at the start of that period and forty when it ended. The agency was three years old at the start and ten years old at the end. The years between turned me from a working agency operator into the operator I would still be in 2026, because almost everything I now know about how to run a room, how to read a room, how to walk into a room of people who do not know me and have their attention by the second sentence, I learned in those eight years. I did not learn it on a national stage. I learned it on the local circuit.

The Texas Circuit

The local circuit is the part of a business operator’s career that does not get written about in the standard CEO memoir, because by the time the memoir gets written the operator has been on national stages for so long that the local circuit has started to feel like prehistory.

That is a mistake. The local circuit is where the operator becomes the operator.

I spent eight years giving presentations across every major city in Texas — Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio. The presentations were at chambers of commerce, at the Dallas Business Journal, at Masonic lodges, at professional associations, at trade groups, at civic organizations, at industry meet-ups, at any room that would have a working CEO talk about how small businesses could win on the early internet. I would drive from Plano to a chamber breakfast in Houston on a Tuesday morning. I would fly to Austin for a Dallas Business Journal panel on a Wednesday lunch. I would drive to San Antonio for a Masons meeting on a Thursday evening. I would do the same thing the next week, with different rooms, in different cities, for different audiences.

I got invited back.

That is how the agency built its early book. Not through cold sales calls. Not through paid advertising. Not through Google rankings, even though we were also building those. The agency built its early book through hundreds of presentations to local business audiences across Texas, where the operators in the room would come up afterward and ask whether I would have time to talk about their websites, and whether I had a card, and whether the agency was taking on new clients. Most of those conversations turned into clients. The clients turned into referrals. The referrals turned into more presentations, in more rooms, in more cities, with more business owners coming up afterward to ask the same questions. The flywheel ran for eight years.

I was building the business. I was learning. Every presentation taught me something I did not know about how a room works, how a different industry talks about its own marketing, what an audience cares about, what an audience finds insulting, what an audience finds illuminating, when to make a joke, when to slow down, when to ask a question, when to move on. There is no school that teaches that. There is only the doing of it, in front of strangers, week after week, year after year, until the doing becomes the way you think.

Every Type of Business There Is

CI Web Group, in those eight years, was a generalist digital marketing agency.

That is a sentence that does not match the public narrative of the agency in 2026, where CI Web Group is known exclusively as the trades industry agency. In 2026 we serve trades contractors, the suppliers and manufacturers and distributors who serve trades contractors, and the technology and consulting and association partners who serve the trades industry as a whole. That is the agency the industry knows. That is not the agency that operated between 2009 and 2016.

Between 2009 and 2016, the agency took whatever clients walked in. Lawyers in Plano. Accountants in Houston. Restaurant chains in Austin. A surgical practice in Dallas. A dental group with offices in three Texas cities. A retailer with a regional chain across the Southwest. A manufacturer of niche industrial equipment in San Antonio. A service business operating across the Texas Triangle. The agency had clients in technology, in legal services, in medical practices, in entertainment, in sports, in real estate, in retail, in food service, in manufacturing, in professional services. We were a generalist. We were good at it. The agency was profitable. The agency was growing.

We onboarded a lot of new verticals.

Across those years I learned that a generalist who has done the work for fifty different categories of business has an operating intuition that a vertical specialist does not have. The generalist has seen what works across categories and what is unique to each. The vertical specialist has only seen what works inside one category, with no cross-category baseline to evaluate it against. Most agencies that go vertical too early miss this. They commit to one industry before they have seen enough categories to know what is generalizable about marketing fundamentals and what is industry-specific. They end up overweighting the industry-specific and underweighting the fundamentals. I went generalist for the first ten years on purpose. By the time I narrowed to the trades, I knew what was generalizable. The trades-specific work the agency does in 2026 is built on a generalist foundation that took ten years to lay down, and that foundation is one of the structural advantages CI Web Group has over its trades-only competitors that nobody talks about.

The Slow Takeover

While the agency was operating as a generalist, one of our verticals was quietly growing faster than the others.

That vertical was the trades.

I did not engineer it. I did not market into it. I did not run a campaign to bring in trades clients at the expense of any other category. The trades came in on their own. Every year, more contractors became clients. Every year, the contractors who were already clients referred more contractors. Every year, the trades-industry portion of CI Web Group’s book of business grew as a percentage of the whole, while every other category held roughly steady. The takeover happened gradually, across years, while I was doing the same generalist work I had been doing since 2006.

The trades, it turned out, were a fundamentally relational industry. The contractor who hires you in 2008 tells the contractor he golfs with in 2009, who tells the contractor at the supply-house counter in 2010, who tells the dealer-network rep at the manufacturer conference in 2011, who tells the regional manager at the distributor in 2012. The conversations chain. They chain across years. They chain across geographies. They chain across the categories of operator who are part of the trades ecosystem — contractor to contractor, contractor to supplier, supplier to manufacturer, manufacturer to distributor, distributor back to contractor. By the time I had been in the trades for five years, the people who had been having those conversations all knew the same handful of agency names. CI Web Group was on that handful.

The other industries we worked in did not chain that way. The lawyers and the surgeons and the accountants and the restaurants and the manufacturers each had their own social architecture, and none of them chained the way the trades did. The agency’s growth in those other verticals was linear. The trades were compounding.

By 2014, the trades were the biggest vertical in the agency. By 2015, the trades were a majority of the agency’s revenue. By the end of 2015, it was no longer accurate to call CI Web Group a generalist agency that happened to do well in the trades. It was more accurate to call CI Web Group a trades agency that happened to still be holding open the door to other verticals.

That recognition was the first piece of the strategic decision that came next.

Falling In Love With The Industry

The recognition was not just numerical.

I was, by 2015, deeply attached to the trades industry in a way I had not been attached to any of the other verticals. The contractors I had been working with for seven years had become friends. The friends had become advocates. The advocates had become the kind of clients who do not need an account manager because the relationship is direct enough that they pick up the phone and call me when they have a question. I was, somehow, in the middle of a community I had not consciously joined.

In an interview I did with HVAC Today around the time of the strategic narrowing, I tried to describe what had happened. I said: we fell in love with every person we came in contact with. People in the HVAC industry are so real, so transparent. Contractors are true entrepreneurs down in the trenches, taking care of business. It is real. And that is exciting.

I meant every word of that. The trades operators I had been spending my time with were not the corporate executives I had spent my own corporate decade alongside at Fossil. They were not the regional retail managers I had reported to at Nordstrom. They were not the distant board figures who set strategy at Tommy Bahama. The trades operators were small business owners running their own businesses, with their own trucks, with their own teams, with their own families to feed, and they were doing it inside an industry where the customer experience was direct — a homeowner in distress called, the contractor showed up, the problem got fixed, the contractor got paid, and the homeowner remembered. There was no hiding inside a corporate hierarchy. There was no taking credit for somebody else’s work. The contractor either fixed the burst pipe or did not. The work was real. The relationships were real. The economics were real.

In the same HVAC Today interview, I also said the second thing that needs to be on the record about that period: we saw an industry severely behind from a technology, marketing, operations, ERP, eCommerce, and customer experience standpoint. Every part of this industry, other than HVAC equipment, was severely behind the curve. It was mind-boggling.

Both things were true. The industry was full of operators I had come to genuinely love. The industry was also operating, from a business-systems standpoint, a decade behind the rest of the American economy. Those two facts, together, were the strategic case for committing fully to the trades. Here was an industry of operators I respected, doing essential work that could not be outsourced or automated, who needed exactly the kind of help my agency was uniquely positioned to give. Here was an industry where the technology and marketing and operational sophistication was so far behind that almost any agency that did good work would be the leading agency in the category by default. Here was an industry where falling in love with the people I was working with was a thing that could happen, repeatedly, over years, in a way that almost never happens in agency-client relationships in other categories. All of that, together, was what made the next decision obvious.

The 2015 Decision

In 2015, we made the decision to commit fully to the trades.

The decision was a recognition, not a bet.

By 2015, the trades were the majority of the agency’s revenue, the majority of the agency’s referrals, the majority of the agency’s expertise, and the source of the relationships that mattered most to us. The other verticals we still served were good clients we had built relationships with over the previous nine years — and most of those clients we still serve today, two decades later. But the agency’s forward growth was clearly going to come from the trades. The data had been pointing at this for several years. The 2015 decision was just the moment we ratified what the data had already decided for us.

The decision was a recognition, not a bet.

[PLACEHOLDER — Jennifer to fill in: the actual scene of the 2015 decision. Where it happened, who was in the room, what the conversation looked like, who pushed back if anyone, what specific moment turned the conversation from “we should think about this” to “we are doing this.” The reader gets a richer chapter once this scene is dictated. The placeholder here is honest scaffolding until then.]

What I want you to register about that decision — even without the specific scene — is the operating principle underneath it. The strategic narrowing was a recognition of what had already happened in our numbers, not a forward-looking bet placed without evidence. Most CEOs make strategic decisions in advance of the data and then hope the data confirms them. I made the strategic decision in confirmation of the data and let the previous seven years of organic growth in the trades vertical be the evidence the decision rested on. Act on what is real, not on what could be real. Make the strategic move when the evidence is already there to support it. Do not pretend you can see the future. See the present clearly enough that the future becomes obvious.

After the 2015 decision, the agency’s public posture changed quickly. We stopped pursuing new non-trades work. We honored the existing relationships we had with our pre-focus clients, because those relationships were ours to honor and abandoning them would have meant something to me about the kind of agency I was unwilling to be. Some of those non-trades clients are still with us today. They have been continuously served for almost two decades — across the 2015 focus decision, across the COVID disruption, across the AI transformation that began in 2022. They are the next concentric circle of the same relational architecture that defines the agency, and they are the proof that the relationships we build are not contingent on whichever way our strategic narrative happens to be pointing.

One year after the 2015 decision, the largest distributor in the home services supply chain made the call that validated everything.

The Call

On April 20, 2016, my phone rang.

It was a consultant at IBM.

I want you to register what that means for a minute, because I did not register it correctly when the call came in. IBM was — still is — one of the largest professional services firms in the world. When IBM consultants call you, it is because some company you respect has hired IBM to run a search process, and IBM has decided you belong on the short list. IBM does not make those calls casually. The companies that hire IBM do not do so casually. The fact that I was getting that phone call, ten years into running an agency that was just starting to be known outside the trades industry, meant that someone, somewhere, had named CI Web Group inside a process that was being run at a level I did not yet operate at.

I did not know any of that, then. I just answered the phone.

The consultant on the line was professional and brisk. He told me his client was Ferguson — the plumbing and HVAC distribution company — and that Ferguson West was searching for the best marketing agency to serve their dealer-contractor network. He told me they had narrowed the field. He told me they wanted to interview CI Web Group. He told me they would like to do that interview in NorCal. He told me they would like to do it within the next several days.

He sent over an RFP.

I read it. I did not like what I read.

The RFP described a marketing program built around exactly the things I had spent ten years telling my own clients not to spend their money on. Cheap landing pages. Paid-ads funnels. The kind of conversion-tactic-of-the-month playbook that was going to chew through marketing budget and leave the contractors who deployed it no better positioned for the world the internet was about to become. It was, in short, the wrong RFP. It was the kind of program a marketing agency that had not yet figured out what was changing would have written. It was the kind of program a Fortune 500 distributor would have approved if the people writing it had been listening to the wrong agencies.

I told Michael I did not want to go.

Michael, who had been with me for three years by then and had been in the Army for over twenty before that, regarded the question the way Michael regards every question. He listened. He thought about it. He told me we were going.

That was one of many times in our partnership that Michael would, gently and without making a thing of it, be the person who made sure I did the thing I did not want to do because the thing I did not want to do was actually the thing I needed to do. I had been learning him, by then, the way you learn anyone you have committed to in your life — in pieces, one situation at a time, by watching what he did when something hard came up.

What Michael did when something hard came up was tell you that you were doing it. Then he booked the flights.

The NorCal Conference Room

We flew to Northern California.

I had spent the days between the phone call and the flight rereading the RFP. I had spent the flight rereading my own notes. I had not written a presentation. I had not built a slide deck. I had not done any of the things I would normally do for a stakes-this-high meeting, because the truth was, I did not believe I was going to be invited to participate in the program the RFP described, and I did not want to be. I had no business pitching a program I disagreed with. I had spent ten years telling small businesses to invest in organic search and quality content and being findable for the right reasons, and I was not about to walk into a Ferguson conference room and sell a program built on the opposite premise just because the room was in NorCal and the company on the other side of the table was Fortune 500.

Michael did not push me to write a deck. Michael, who knew me better than I yet realized he did, knew that the version of me that walked into that room without a deck was going to be the version of me that told the truth. The version of me that walked in with a deck was going to be the version of me that tried to win something I did not actually want.

So I went in without a deck.

The conference room was the kind of conference room every Fortune 500 has — long table, leather chairs, a credenza with bottled water, a window that looked out at a parking lot, fluorescent overhead lighting that nobody had ever asked to be softened. There were eight to ten Ferguson executives in the room. They were polite. They were professional. They had clearly been in a number of these meetings already that week, and they had clearly been told that I was the next one on the schedule.

I sat down. They asked me to begin.

I told them I did not want to participate.

There was a pause in the room of the kind that happens when somebody says something the room was not expecting. The kind of pause where everybody at the table reorganizes their attention, in roughly the same instant, around the realization that the next hour is not going to go the way the schedule said it would go.

I told them I had read the RFP. I told them I disagreed with the entire premise of it. I told them what I thought the trades industry was actually about to need over the next decade, and why every single thing I had read in their RFP was going to lead their dealer-contractor network in the wrong direction. I told them I had spent the last decade building an agency around exactly the opposite playbook. I told them that if the program they were going to fund was the program described in the RFP, the right answer for everybody at the table was for them to hire a different agency, because mine was not going to be useful to them.

Then I told them what I would build instead.

[JLB-FILL: Ferguson 2016 operating argument — what Jennifer actually said in that hour. The position was, in the broadest strokes, that the trades industry was about to be reorganized by search visibility, that the contractors who would win the next decade were the ones whose websites became the front door of their businesses, that organic search was going to dwarf paid search in long-term value, and that any program built on cheap landing pages and paid funnels was going to underperform a program built on content, authority, and findability by an order of magnitude. The specific framing, the specific examples, the specific moments that made executives in that room start nodding — those belong here, in Jennifer’s words. She has the actual arguments she made. This paragraph is a placeholder for them.]

I had been talking for about an hour when one of the executives across the table from me sat back in his chair and exchanged a look with the executive next to him. I knew that look. Anybody who has ever sold anything to a buying committee knows that look. It is the look that says: this is not the meeting we thought we were having.

I finished my hour. I thanked them for their time. I told them I appreciated being considered, and that I understood completely if they decided to go in a different direction. I gathered my things. I shook hands. Michael, who had been in the lobby the entire time, stood up when I came out, and he looked at my face and he said, “How did it go?”

I told him I had probably just talked us out of the biggest opportunity my career had ever seen.

He said, “Okay.”

That is what Michael said. Not “Why did you do that.” Not “Oh no.” Not “Maybe you can call them and walk it back.” Just “Okay.” Because Michael knew, the same way I knew, that if I had walked in there and pitched a program I did not believe in, I would have hated myself for the next decade. Whatever I had just done, the version of me that came back out into that lobby was at least the version of me that had told the truth. He could work with that. He has always been able to work with that.

We flew home.

July 13, 2016

Several weeks later, the phone rang.

It was the IBM consultant. He sounded amused. He told me Ferguson had decided to retool the program. He told me they had reviewed the agencies that participated in the search and concluded that the agency they were looking for was the one that had walked into the room and told them they were wrong about what they were buying. He told me Ferguson West would like to retain CI Web Group as a preferred digital marketing agency for their dealer-contractor program.

I was sitting at my desk. I do not remember what I said in response. I remember registering, in approximately equal measure, that this had just happened, that I had not seen it coming, and that I was going to have to call Michael.

I called Michael.

Michael said, “Okay.”

Same word. Different occasion. Same person. He has, over the course of the years that have followed, said “okay” in that exact tone after every major event in my professional life. The tone is its own language. It means: I am not surprised. I am proud of you. I always knew this was where this was going. Now let us figure out what comes next.

On July 13, 2016, the Ferguson-CI Web Group partnership formally launched with our first joint dealer-education webinar. The date is a thirteen. It belongs in the seven-thirteens spine of this book — the line of dates that runs through the family and the agency and that I have been showing you across the last several chapters. July 13, 2016 is the date the partnership became real, the date the work began, the date the agency stopped being a regional Texas operator with strong trades referrals and became a national distributor partner with a Fortune 500 endorsement.

What came next was Ferguson built their entire dealer program around CI Web Group.

Not a piece of it. Not a regional pilot. Their entire dealer program. The program that served thousands of contractors across the western United States. The program that became, over the next several years, the model Ferguson would use to think about how digital marketing should be delivered to a contractor network. The program that became, over the next decade, the relationship that would scale from West to National. The program that became, in December of 2025, the boardroom moment at the Ruud conference in Las Vegas when Ferguson Corporate would ask CI Web Group to be their national technology and marketing agency and to lead the charge on AI optimization.

All of that started in that NorCal conference room, when a forty-year-old woman from a ten-year-old agency told a Fortune 500 distributor that the program they were going to fund was the wrong program, and the distributor decided, against the standard physics of how Fortune 500 selections work, that the right answer was to hire her anyway.

I did not know, in that conference room, that I was making the bet that would define the next decade of my career.

I just knew the RFP was wrong, and I knew I could not pitch a program I did not believe in, and I knew Michael was waiting for me in the lobby.

That turned out to be enough.

By the end of 2016, CI Web Group had been operating for ten years.

The agency had committed exclusively to the trades. The agency had a Fortune 500 distributor partnership. The agency had hundreds of contractor clients across the country. The agency had a small team and a Dallas office and a Plano-based CEO who had given more presentations across more rooms than most operators give in their entire careers. The agency was, by any reasonable measure of agency health, a success.

What I did not know, in 2016, was that the agency I had spent ten years building was about to spend the next six years quietly preparing for an event none of us could see coming. The Ferguson partnership would scale. The trades industry would mature into the operator base it is in 2026. The agency’s positioning would solidify. The team would grow. The work would deepen. And then, on a lanai in Kauai on November 30, 2022, the world would change in seventeen hours.

That is the next chapter.