A good business with a ceiling
A family-owned electrical contracting firm came to us in a strong position. More than two decades in business, a solid reputation, steady work. And almost all of that work arrived the same way: the phone rang. Referrals, repeat clients, a name passed along.
That had built a real company. It had also built a ceiling.
The firm knew exactly where its growth was. Not one-off residential service calls — commercial accounts, and especially the multi-site chains, where proving yourself at one location can open the door to fifty. What it didn’t have was any way to get in front of those decision-makers on purpose. As the owners put it plainly: they had never run a campaign. Not a failed one — none. Outbound was simply not something the business did.
A company that grows only on word of mouth grows at the speed of other people’s memory. To grow faster, it needed a second engine — one it could point where it wanted.
What we built
A narrow target, on purpose. An electrical contractor can, technically, serve almost any building. That breadth is a strength in the long run and a trap at the start — “everyone” is not a campaign you can learn from. We ran deep discovery into which work was actually worth the firm’s time: the commercial projects, where an average job dwarfed a typical residential service call, and where one satisfied client could become a chain. From that we defined six specific buyer personas — the contractors, property managers, facilities directors, and multi-site operators who actually sign off on electrical work — and aimed the first effort squarely at them.
Messaging that sounded like the firm. Outbound that sounds like an agency gets deleted like an agency. We built the email sequences from the firm’s own voice — its website, its materials, and recordings of how the owners actually talk about the work — so the outreach read as if it came from the person whose name was on it. The messaging led with what discovery told us the commercial buyer actually values: speed, a fast diagnosis, hassle-free end-to-end service, and honest pricing — not a discount.
More than one way in, built to last. Email alone is fragile. We paired the sequence with a warm-handoff step — the moment a prospect engaged, the owner was prompted to call, turning a cold call into a timely one — and a professional-network touch. Underneath it sat the unglamorous infrastructure that keeps outreach alive: small daily send batches, domain warm-up, and email authentication, so volume could grow without ever putting the firm’s primary inbox at risk. Lead scoring surfaced only high-probability prospects; existing customers, and any account the firm didn’t want to approach, were suppressed from the start.
Every piece of it was built on the firm’s own platform account — every contact, every reply, every result owned and controlled by the client, not by us.
The outcome
The firm went from no outbound capability at all to an owned, running, multi-channel growth engine — pointed precisely at the commercial accounts it had wanted to reach for years, and live within the engagement’s first weeks.
It was also built to be handed back. A weekly standing call and a steady cadence of short, plain-language video updates kept a busy, non-technical owner genuinely in the loop — no jargon, no black box. And the engagement was scoped to end the right way: with the system in the client’s hands and a playbook for running it themselves.
A referral-driven business doesn’t need to abandon what made it successful. It needs a second way to grow that it can actually steer. Building that — and then handing over the keys — is the work Peppermint Labs exists to do. Peppermint Labs is a Toronto-based go-to-market and outbound sales consulting firm, helping B2B businesses build owned pipeline systems across Canada and North America.