By: Matt Emma
PRceptive co-founders Kevin Floyd and Adam Antz ran campaigns for more than 7,000 artists. Their new company builds a website for local businesses for free, then runs the marketing machine behind it.
Ask any plumber, roofer, or HVAC tech what the hardest part of the job is, and the answer usually has nothing to do with pipes or shingles. It’s the phone. The lead that came in while they were elbow deep in a water heater. The customer who called twice, got voicemail twice, and hired the next name on Google.
Kevin Floyd and Adam Antz know that problem better than most, because they spent more than a decade solving its mirror image in a very different industry. The two grew up a few years apart on Long Island, became friends through a mutual buddy, and went on to launch VM Agency, a music marketing firm that has run campaigns for more than 7,000 independent and major label artists, supported releases tied to billions of streams and views, and worked side by side with some of the biggest record labels in the business.
Floyd’s path there was its own story. A standout basketball player whose pro dreams ended with a knee injury, he poured the same discipline into music, learning to write, produce, and eventually market other artists after interning inside record labels to learn how the machine really worked. Antz was the business mind, a serial operator who had already built and run several ventures before the two broke the oldest rule in the book and went into business with a friend. It worked immediately.
But music taught them a hard lesson that most industries never have to learn.
“There is no word of mouth in the music industry,” Floyd says. “An artist who blows up will keep their marketing team as their best-kept secret. You can do career-changing work, and nobody ever hears your name. So we always knew we’d eventually take what we built somewhere it could compound.”
Working with thousands of artists also taught them something that had nothing to do with music. “Talent was never the problem,” Floyd says. “The artists who won were the ones with systems. The ones who answered fast, looked professional, and stayed in front of people. We started noticing the exact same pattern in every local business we knew.”
That observation became PRceptive, a website design and marketing company built specifically for contractors and home service businesses. But calling it a marketing agency almost undersells the model, because the headline offer sounds like a typo: PRceptive builds the business owner’s website for free.
A Different Economic Bet
The agency world typically makes its money up front. A five-thousand-dollar website build, a setup fee, and a retainer. Floyd and Antz inverted that. The build costs nothing, and the company only profits if clients stay month after month, starting at $97 for a fully hosted, managed, and secured website, with the flagship plan at $297 a month adding the full system layer: automated lead follow up, a unified inbox for every call, text, and message, a dedicated business phone line, a five star review funnel, local SEO, one tap marketing campaigns, and a missed call text back feature that responds to every unanswered call within seconds.
That last one matters more than most owners realize. Research published in Harvard Business Review found that companies that respond to a lead within the first hour are roughly seven times more likely to qualify it than those that wait. In the trades, where the customer with a burst pipe is calling down a list, speed is often the whole game.
“We’d rather charge a fair monthly price and earn the business every single month than overcharge once and lose them,” Antz says. “If we never overcharge and we keep delivering, you never have a reason to leave. That’s the whole plan.”
There are no setup fees, no contracts, and onboarding takes a single thirty-minute call. The owner approves the site. PRceptive handles everything else.
Built for the Front Seat of a Work Truck
Plenty of software exists for home service businesses. CRMs, schedulers, review platforms, chat widgets. The problem, the founders argue, is that most of it was built for people sitting at desks.
“Most software is built to look impressive in a demo,” Floyd says. “Ours is built for the person reading it from the front seat of a work truck, between jobs, on one bar of signal.”
The company now serves plumbers, electricians, HVAC companies, roofers, landscapers, remodelers, and dozens of other trades, along with dental practices and other local service businesses, with nearly 200 clients running on its systems daily.
Floyd is blunt about why he isn’t worried about crowded markets. “Saturation is not something we focus on. That will always be there. It’s the angles in which you operate that matter. It’s not about running a business in the world today. It’s about running it where the world is going. Believe in your ideas, pitch a tent, and wait for everyone to catch up.”
Antz puts the ceiling even higher. “We believe we can scale PRceptive to no end, because of the value we provide to the business owner. We only win when our clients do. Everything we build is priced to keep them for years, not to trap them for months.”
For the owner who would rather be on the job than fighting with six different apps, that may be the most valuable system of all.
Learn more at prceptive.com.
