Shields says 44,212 emails got a pest control firm 7 jobs
The funnel from 690 replies down to 7 closed jobs is the number most local-services case studies leave out.
James Shields posted the full funnel for an Ohio pest control family business that had never sent a cold email. Four campaigns, 23,047 businesses contacted, 44,212 emails sent over 60 days. 690 replied, 41 agreed to a free inspection, 7 turned into paid jobs.
23,047 businesses contacted
The offer was one line and it did not change across the campaigns. Shields says there was no discount and no claim to be the best in Ohio, just a free termite inspection framed as "want someone to check your place for free?". Before this the company's work came from referrals and Google.
Read the bottom of the funnel, not the top
The reply number is the one that usually gets screenshotted. 690 replies on 44,212 sends is a reply rate most senders would take, and on its own it tells you the list and the offer were close enough to the market to get a response. What matters for anyone selling a local service is what happened after. Six percent of the replies converted to a booked inspection, and 17 percent of those inspections converted to paid work. From the sender's side that is 44,212 emails for 7 customers.
Shields does not say what a pest control job is worth, so the economics of that run are not in the post. What is in the post is the shape of the drop off, and the shape is the useful part. If you are quoting a local-services client on reply rate alone, this is the gap you are hiding from them. If you are quoting on closed jobs, you need the volume to survive two conversion steps that are both brutal.
For people sending, this is one agency's account of one client over 60 days, not a benchmark. Shields is selling a performance-model service off the back of it, which is worth knowing when you read the numbers.
The volume model behind it
Separately, Shields posted his internal math for September, where he says he booked over 200 calls. His stated assumptions are 10,000 emails per day, a 2 percent reply rate, and a 0.5 percent positive reply rate on new leads, which he says works out to 20 positive replies per day and 10 calls booked, of which 8 show and 6 are qualified. He says the system signed 8 new clients in September.
Those are his own assumed rates rather than measured output on a single campaign, so treat them as a model he runs to, not a result. The pest control run is the one with the counted outcome at the end.