Know exactly what a customer is worth, what you can afford to spend to get one, and whether your marketing is actually paying off. The numbers every owner should know, free.
Most local businesses guess at marketing. The owners who win know exactly what a customer is worth, what they can afford to spend to win one, and whether each channel is actually profitable. This calculator gives you those numbers in seconds.
Customer lifetime value (CLV): profit per job times how many times an average customer buys. Cost to acquire a customer (CAC): what you spend in marketing divided by the customers it produces. ROI: the profit from new customers versus what you spent. If CLV comfortably exceeds CAC, you can spend more to grow. If not, the channel is bleeding money.
A healthy business keeps customer acquisition cost under about 25-30% of customer lifetime value. That leaves room for delivery costs and profit. If you’re paying $400 to win a customer worth $600 in lifetime profit, you’re on thin ice, and that’s exactly why organic rankings matter: they lower your cost per customer over time instead of renting it from ad platforms forever.
That is the whole game. We build sites and rankings that bring leads in organically, so your cost per customer drops over time. Free audit.
Get a free audit →Or call/text: (407) 694-2055You supply six figures: average job value, profit margin, how many jobs an average customer gives you over the years, monthly marketing spend, leads per month, and close rate. Only the first two are required. The rest is arithmetic you could do on paper. Profit per job is job value times margin, and the headline number, what a new customer is worth, is that profit times repeat jobs. New customers per month is leads times close rate. Cost per lead is spend divided by leads, cost per customer is spend divided by customers, and ROI is first-job profit minus spend, divided by spend.
Two lines are conventions rather than your data. The healthy ceiling on acquisition cost is set at 25 percent of lifetime profit, a common planning rule that leaves room for the cost of delivering the work. The break-even line divides your monthly spend by the profit one closed lead produces, so it answers how many leads have to arrive before the spend pays for itself. Everything runs in your browser and nothing you type is sent anywhere or stored.
What it cannot do matters more. It has no connection to your ad accounts, analytics, CRM, or phone log, so every output is only as honest as the numbers you enter, margin especially. It cannot tell which channel produced a lead. If your lead count mixes paid, organic, referral, and repeat callers, your cost per lead will look better than what the spend actually bought. Counting leads cleanly is its own job, which is why first-party lead dashboards are running on more than 20 of the sites we manage, and why measurement gets treated as separate work. To check an agency quote rather than your own math, use what should you pay instead.
They answer different questions. The ROI line compares one month of spend against profit from first jobs only. The headline figure counts every repeat job a customer will ever give you. A month is also short: work sold in March may not close until June, especially on larger tickets. Read the two separately, and never read either one as a forecast.
It is a rule of thumb, not a law, and not our data. A quarter of lifetime profit is a common planning convention because it leaves room to actually deliver the work at a margin. A business with long customer relationships can afford more. Thin-margin, one-and-done work should sit well under it. Treat the line as a starting point for your own judgment.