Podcast: From One Truck to Two Counties: How Lowry Fence Built a Dominant Local Presence in Texas
Matt Lowery didn’t plan to own a fence company. He spent nearly a decade managing maintenance for apartment complexes, handling air conditioner compressors on 115-degree rooftops and water heater leaks at 3 a.m., before a chance conversation with a friend put him on his first fence crew. What followed was five years of deliberate growth rooted in a simple idea: treat every customer the way you’d want to be treated, build an online presence that earns trust, and let the market come to you.
Matt recently joined Todd Baldwin on the Everyday Excellence podcast, produced by Everyday Media Group, to talk through how he built Lowry Fence and Patio into a recognized name across Grayson County and now Collin County, Texas. The conversation covered his origin story, the marketing strategies driving his expansion, the real frustrations with Google’s LSA platform, and how a custom AI tool is saving his team time on material orders every week.
From Apartment Maintenance to Fence Crew
Matt’s career before fencing was anything but glamorous. After starting as a porter at an apartment complex while attending the University of North Texas in Denton, he worked his way up through make-ready work and assistant maintenance to lead maintenance, eventually handling emergency AC failures on rooftops in summer heat and water heater leaks in the middle of the night. It paid the bills, but it tied him to an on-call phone he couldn’t escape.
The break came through a friend who worked for a commercial fence company. When a crew member didn’t show up, the friend called Matt on short notice and asked if he’d fill in installing chain link around a baseball field. Matt made about half his normal daily rate, but walked away thinking he’d found something worth chasing. He quit his maintenance job, took a significant pay cut, and went all in on fencing.
He worked for that company for nearly four years. The owner had promised that buying his own truck and tools would open the door to subcontracting opportunities, but the arrangement never materialized. Frustrated and ready, Matt started taking his own leads on the side, building fence on nights and weekends after his regular shift ended.
Home Advisor as a Starting Point
To get his first customers, Matt turned to Home Advisor. He’s candid that the platform takes a lot of criticism, and he doesn’t share it. As a new contractor still learning to run an in-home sales conversation, Home Advisor put him in front of real customers week after week so he could practice his pitch, identify where he was losing jobs, and sharpen what worked.
The ROI arrived quickly. Within a couple of months, he was making in a single weekend what he had previously earned in a full month at his old job. That was the signal he needed. He left his full-time position, committed to the business, and started building the foundation that would carry Lowry Fence through five years of growth.
Today, Lowry Fence no longer uses Home Advisor. The cost per conversion doesn’t compete with what a properly managed PPC campaign delivers, where his team controls the targeting, negative keywords, and customer profile. But for contractors just starting out, Matt recommends the platform without hesitation. Before you’ve built organic presence or a working PPC account, getting in front of real customers and practicing the sale is worth the premium.
What Lowry Fence Does Differently
When Todd asked what separates Lowry Fence from other fence and outdoor living companies, Matt didn’t reach for marketing language. He went straight to the craft.
Lowry sinks fence posts four feet into the ground. Most competitors stop at two to three feet. On wood privacy fence gates, where most companies frame in wood, Lowry builds the entire gate frame from steel, connecting the hinges and latch to steel posts for a 100% steel-to-steel connection. The result is a gate that resists sagging, twisting, and the long-term failure that plagues wood-framed alternatives.
Those choices are backed by a lifetime warranty. If a fence doesn’t hold to the standard Lowry’s team built it to, they return and fix it. No argument. No timeline. With more than 650 reviews across two locations and a 5.0 combined rating, that warranty has done what it’s meant to: building trust before the job even begins.
Communication Is the Differentiator Nobody Talks About
Matt made a point during the conversation that applies across every trade. Pull up the one-star reviews for nearly any home service company and you’ll find the same pattern: they didn’t communicate.
Customers understand that jobs run long, problems come up, and things don’t always go to plan. What they don’t forgive is silence. At Lowry Fence, communication is built into the process from the first estimate through post-production. When issues arise, Matt’s team doesn’t go quiet. They reach out with a clear picture of what happened and when it will be resolved.
As Matt put it during the episode, people are generally pretty reasonable as long as you communicate with them. That principle has shaped Lowry’s review profile as much as any technical differentiator.
Todd drew the same parallel from Everyday Media Group’s work with marketing clients: when campaigns hit rough patches, clients who trust their agency’s communication give the team room to solve the problem. The ones who hear nothing are the ones who leave.
Building Organic Dominance Before Expanding
Lowry Fence launched in Sherman, Texas, in Grayson County. It isn’t the largest market in the state, and that turned out to be an advantage. With less competition, Matt was able to build his Google Business Profile, generate consistent reviews, and climb to the top of the local map pack for his primary search terms in roughly two years. Once he was ranking number one across the cities in Grayson County, he had hit a clear ceiling. There was nowhere left to go organically in that market.
So he opened a second location in Plano, in Collin County, which he describes as carrying roughly 50 times the web traffic of Grayson County. A year in, that location is generating strong returns. He’s since established presence in McKinney, Allen, and Frisco, with the long-term goal of achieving the same organic dominance in Collin County that he built in Grayson.
Todd noted during the episode that starting in a less competitive market and building a clean organic presence first is a legitimate growth strategy. Cutting teeth in Sherman before competing across Collin County meant Matt had a working playbook and proven systems before he needed to apply them in a much harder market.
The Full Marketing Mix
In 2024, Lowry Fence spent roughly 6% of revenue on paid advertising. That covered Google PPC, Bing PPC, Performance Max campaigns, and Local Service Ads. On top of paid digital, the company runs a television commercial, wrapped trucks, yard signs at job sites, fence signs with contact information, and a referral fee program for customers who send new business.
Matt described the TV commercial as part of an omnipresence strategy. A homeowner might see a wrapped truck on Monday, a yard sign on Wednesday, and a commercial on Thursday. None of those alone closes a deal, but together they build the kind of familiarity that turns a cold call into a warm one. He acknowledged he doesn’t yet have clean ROI data on the television spend specifically, but believes the cumulative effect is real.
Referrals have also grown substantially as the business has matured. The math compounds. One satisfied customer refers three. Three refer nine. After five years and hundreds of completed jobs, Lowry is seeing far more inbound referrals than in its early years, and Matt traces that flywheel back to the review strategy and online presence that generated the original customers. The referrals downstream from that first paid or organic lead are effectively free.
His philosophy aligns closely with what Todd has laid out for Everyday Media Group’s clients: referrals are valuable, but they trace back to the willingness to invest in marketing that produced the original customer in the first place.
The LSA Problem: When Google Gets It Wrong
Matt’s most specific frustration from the conversation involves Local Service Ads and a change Google made to its lead dispute process. Previously, a business owner could log into the LSA dashboard and request a credit for a lead that clearly didn’t qualify: a misdirected call, a wrong number, a request from outside the service area. That manual review option has been removed. Google’s AI now makes the determination.
The problem Matt’s team runs into regularly is tracking number recycling. Google’s LSA platform reuses phone numbers across different businesses. A number assigned to Lowry Fence on Wednesday might have belonged to a different company the day before. Customers who saved that number and call back to follow up with the previous business reach Lowry instead.
When Lowry’s staff tries to help those misdirected callers, pointing them toward the right business or explaining the mix-up, Google’s AI scores the interaction as a positive lead and charges Lowry for it. Matt’s current instruction to his phone staff: get off the call as quickly as possible with any wrong-number caller, then ring them back from a personal number if they actually want to help. It’s an absurd workaround to what should be a straightforward credit request.
Todd noted that Everyday Media Group has encountered the same problem on behalf of clients. When Google removed the manual dispute tool, concerns were raised internally that the AI replacement would produce bad outcomes. The Lowry experience confirms it. For high-volume LSA advertisers, tracking misdirected calls and documenting them carefully is now the only line of defense against charges that don’t belong.
AI That Is Actually Earning Its Keep
Beyond the LSA headache, Matt shared one of the more practical AI applications to come up in a recent episode. Lowry Fence has built a custom GPT that handles material order verification.
When the team submits a material order to a supplier, the supplier sends back a quote. Normally, someone has to go line by line and confirm quantities match, nothing was missed, and pricing is correct. That work is slow and detail-dependent. The custom GPT takes a screenshot of the original order and the supplier’s PDF, reads both, identifies any discrepancies in quantity, and drafts a correction email to the supplier. What previously required careful manual review now happens in seconds.
Matt took it further. He walked into the supplier’s office, installed the same GPT on their system, and showed them how to use it. Now the supplier can catch their own errors before the quote goes out. Both sides save time and reduce back-and-forth.
His test for any AI tool is straightforward: does this actually make us more capable, or are we just using it because it’s available? That question cuts through most of the noise around AI adoption in the trades and applies well beyond fencing. Start with tasks that are repetitive, detail-dependent, and currently slow. That’s where the ROI shows up.
What the Fence Industry Is Leaving on the Table
Matt made an observation during the episode that resonated with Todd: the fencing industry, as a whole, is behind. Plumbing has developed strong business and marketing communities. Roofing has built a robust ecosystem of education, software, and marketing discipline. Fencing hasn’t caught up.
That gap is also an opening. Contractors who invest in their online presence, build genuine review profiles, and treat digital marketing as a core business function compete against operators still relying on word of mouth and yard signs alone. The opportunity is significant in most markets.
Matt shared one example that made the point clearly. Every employee at Lowry Fence found the company the same way a customer would. They typed a search for the best fence company near them, read the reviews, looked at the website, and liked what they found. The business doesn’t recruit. It attracts. The same digital presence that generates leads also generates the people needed to fulfill them.
Advice for Contractors Starting Out
Todd closed the conversation by asking Matt what he’d tell someone just starting an entrepreneurial journey in home services. The answer was direct: be grateful for the problems. The more problems and riddles you’re solving every day, the more it signals you’re in the game and moving forward. When conditions get hard, treat it as a good sign. The harder things get, the more of your competition is stepping back.
The second piece was simpler: see everything through the customer’s eyes. Communicate with them. Earn their trust before the job is done. That’s the whole model.
What Lowry Fence Teaches Home Service Marketers
The patterns Matt described throughout this conversation are not unique to fencing. Everyday Media Group sees them across home service clients at every stage of growth:
• Starting in a lower-competition market to build organic presence before entering a crowded one is a legitimate growth strategy, not a consolation prize. Matt became the number one fence company in Grayson County before entering Collin County, where web traffic is roughly 50 times higher.
• Customers are reasonable, but only when communication is consistent. One-star reviews in home services almost always trace back to silence, not poor workmanship.
• The online presence that generates customers also generates employees. Hiring and recruiting are often the same problem as marketing.
• A business with strong operations and a genuine review profile creates a referral flywheel. The first investment in paid or organic marketing seeds years of downstream leads.
Key Takeaways for Home Service Business Owners
• Becoming dominant in a smaller, less competitive market first creates a proven playbook that’s easier to replicate in harder markets. Matt became number one in Grayson County before entering Collin County, where the search traffic is far deeper.
• Home Advisor is not a long-term lead solution, but it’s a practical tool for new contractors who need volume and practice before they’ve built out PPC or organic presence. A lead is a lead.
• Google’s removal of the manual LSA lead dispute feature has created real cost exposure for high-volume advertisers. Tracking number recycling can result in charges for misdirected calls where your team tried to help. Document these cases and dispute them directly.
• Communication is not a soft skill in home services. It is the primary driver of reviews, referrals, and repeat business. Build it into your process from estimate through post-job follow-up.
• Custom AI tools built around real operational bottlenecks deliver measurable ROI. Start with tasks that are repetitive, detail-dependent, and currently slow.
About Matt Lowery and Lowry Fence and Patio
Matt Lowery is the owner of Lowry Fence and Patio, serving residential homeowners across Grayson County and Collin County, Texas. Lowry specializes in residential privacy fence, wood and chain link fence, gates, pergolas, patio covers, concrete, and hardscape. For the full podcast conversation, catch Matt Lowery on the Everyday Excellence podcast hosted by Todd Baldwin of Everyday Media Group.
Website: https://loweryfencing.com/
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