JD Plumbing Partners

JD Plumbing Partners

At a glance: JD Plumbing Partners, an Encinitas, California marketing agency serving nearly 400 plumbing, HVAC, electrical, roofing and tree service businesses across the US, hired a Paid Media Lead through Search For Hire to run its four-person PPC team.

Search For Hire submitted one candidate, a home services paid media director with nearly ten years at a single agency, and JD Plumbing Partners made the offer 7 days later. The search was led by Daris Benallal, Head of Recruitment, and Josh Peacock, CEO, on the Gold package.

JD Plumbing Partners is a marketing agency for the trades. It started out working exclusively with plumbing companies and now serves plumbing, HVAC, electrical, roofing and tree service businesses, with a fully remote team of around 40 people and nearly 400 partners across the US.

Its model is deliberately simple: one package covering website, Google Business Profile, Local Services Ads and PPC, on month-to-month terms, with no percentage of media spend. Success is measured in calls from homeowners ready to book, not clicks or rankings. The agency is a Google Ads Partner and ranked #1016 on the 2023 Inc. 5000.

The brief

JD Plumbing Partners needed a paid media leader who could take ownership of department strategy and delivery, giving its founders, Jeremy Jackson and Derek, more room to focus on growing the business.

Both founders were closely involved in overseeing the PPC team. As the agency grew, it needed a middle-management layer: a lead who would own strategy and performance across the portfolio and run the department through its existing four-person team, rather than carry a personal book of accounts.

The role sits behind the agency’s client success team, which owns client relationships. That put technical depth and leadership ahead of client-facing polish, with home services lead generation a strong preference.

The challenge

The difficulty was finding someone with both leadership ability and genuine technical depth. Jeremy had interviewed senior PPC candidates who looked credible until the technical stage exposed gaps in their expertise.

He described that technical bar as the hardest gap to bridge. JD Plumbing Partners was confident in its own ability to hire for culture. It needed Search For Hire to bring candidates who could clear the technical stage.

The role also demanded high accountability. Jeremy wanted someone who would meet feedback head-on and fix problems fast, not retreat when something broke.

Can’t say enough good things about the Search for Hire team. We worked directly with Josh and Daris who were both great. Less than 10 days from our initial call we’d hired a stellar candidate. They took the time to learn our business and really understand what we were looking for and it showed. Incredibly easy to work with, lighting fast response times, and always on top of things. Night and day difference from the typical/traditional recruiting experience. Thanks guys!

Jeremy Jackson, Co-Founder, JD Plumbing Partners (5-Star Review)

The process

Search For Hire built the search around the technical bar Jeremy described, then assessed leadership and systems building alongside it.

Candidate criteria

• Google Ads lead generation depth that would hold up in a technical interview
• Experience leading a PPC team and building the playbooks and workflows it runs on
• Home services local lead generation experience
• High accountability and a drive to win

How we assessed

The right candidate surfaced within 2 days of the role going live, and Search For Hire had her booked in within 24 hours of her first response.

Before she reached JD Plumbing Partners, Search For Hire ran a vetting call and scored her against nine skill areas drawn from the discovery brief, covering Google Ads lead generation, performance diagnosis, lead quality tracking, team leadership, and playbooks and process. She scored 4.6 out of 5 overall, with top marks for playbooks, process and quality systems, and for home services experience.

Technical depth was tested directly. Asked how she would handle a sudden rise in cost per lead, she worked from macro to micro: ruling out tracking or site issues first, then drilling into campaign, service area, service line, ad group and search terms, and using CRM and call qualification data to separate lead-quality problems from media problems.

She also wanted exactly this remit. Unprompted, she said leading the team and the systems is the part of her role she enjoys most, and that she wanted to move away from day-to-day account work toward department strategy.

Search For Hire submitted her as the only candidate. She had two calls with the JD Plumbing Partners team, and the offer followed the second.

The outcome

Search For Hire placed a new Paid Media Lead at JD Plumbing Partners with nearly ten years in home services paid media at a single agency, where she rose from entry-level specialist to Director of Digital Advertising.

In that role she directs paid media strategy for about 130 home services clients across pest control, lawn care, HVAC and tree services, owning portfolio-wide performance rather than a personal book. She has promoted five team members into leadership roles and built her department’s PPC onboarding and training from the ground up.

At JD Plumbing Partners, she steps into the role the founders defined: owning paid search strategy and performance across the partner portfolio, and building the standards and workflows that let the PPC team scale with the agency.

I have nothing but great things to say about my experience with Search For Hire! Daris reached out to me on LinkedIn and helped me land an amazing role that was the perfect fit for me within a week. He was incredibly helpful in moving the process along, bridging the gap between both parties, and checking in regularly.

New Paid Media Lead, JD Plumbing Partners (5-Star Review)

Why this matters

In home services, paid search is where homeowners with an urgent problem find their next provider. For an agency running PPC across a large partner portfolio, the person setting strategy decides how well that demand is captured in every account.

That hire is hard to make because the gap rarely shows until the technical interview. Leadership without technical depth pulls founders back into the accounts. Technical depth without leadership leaves the team without a playbook.

Search For Hire’s job was to close that gap before the first interview. That is the search we were built to run.