Ghost Home Recovery

A calculator you run with a dealer, not one you send them. They put their own figures in, they watch the number build, and it is theirs by the end of it — which is the whole reason it lands.

What it is for

Every dealer knows they have customers who stopped coming in. Almost none of them know what that is worth, and the ones who guess guess low — because they price a ghost home at a shelf of chemicals rather than at a whole home. Water care is rarely more than about 15% of what a full-line home is worth in a year. The other 85% is the openings and closings, the pump that fails, the liner, the cleaner, the barbecue.

That gap is the conversation. The calculator does not argue it — it makes the dealer build it, line by line, out of their own numbers.

How to run it

Open it on their screen, not yours. It asks for their gross margin. A dealer typing that into a laptop with a supplier's hand on it is a different act from typing it into their own — and nothing they enter is transmitted anywhere, which the page says before the first field.
Start with the ghost-home count, and get the real one. There is a slider for dealers who do not know, and it is honest about being an assumption. The real number is in their system, and pulling it together is a better twenty minutes than anything on this page.
Make them fill in the three service lines themselves. They start at zero. Resist filling them in — the moment you put a figure on their service business it becomes your number and they stop defending it.
Use the 15% check as the question, not the answer. When water care lands at 30% of the home they have described, the page says one of the other lines is short. Ask which. That is usually where the dealer finds a category they had forgotten they sell.
Let them set the retention and the years. Nobody has measured how long a recovered customer stays — not us. A dealer who sets it low and still likes the number is a dealer who is going to run the campaign.
Hand it back. Print or Save as PDF gives them a one-page sheet with their own figures on it. Copy a link sends them the filled-in version — see the note below before you use it.

Four things to get right

The link carries their figures. Copy a link puts everything they entered into the URL after the #. A fragment never reaches a server, so nothing comes to us — but the moment it is pasted into an email or a Teams message their margin is in that message. Send it to the dealer, not about them. If you need a record for yourself, the PDF is the right artifact.
Never fill in their margin. The field ships empty on purpose. There is a "typical blended margin" band at 40–45% if they ask, and it is labelled as a band rather than as their number.
The tinted column is an assumption, and say so out loud. First-year gross profit is a measured response rate against their own figures. The multi-year figure additionally rides a retention rate nobody has measured. Naming that yourself, before they ask, is worth more than the number is.
Mail the whole list. The commonest failure this season was not a weak offer — it was a short list. Several stores mailed about a third of their ghost homes and read the thin result as the offer failing. And the offer itself is fixed at launch: a dealer who wants a different one brings it to Marketing before it prints.

The calculator

To send a dealer the blank tool, this is the address: https://bbi-quiet-customers.netlify.app/ To send one with figures already in it, build the figures with them and use Copy a link at the bottom of the tool itself.

Below is the live tool, exactly as a dealer sees it — the same page, not a copy. On a phone, or when you want the print dialog, open it in its own tab.