Ryan Keene started MODE Renovation at 23. He came up through installation, no call center experience, no marketing background, and built the company one bathroom at a time. Today, MODE Renovation is pacing $35 million in annual revenue with roughly 150 installs a month, over 100 W-2 employees, and an 18,000-square-foot warehouse outside Irvine.
That’s the trajectory most contractors dream about. Here’s the part Ryan shared that most don’t know about: before signing up with gFour, MODE had completed hundreds of jobs and had zero repeat customers.
The work wasn’t the problem. MODE has a perfect 5.0-star Google rating. The follow-up just didn’t exist.
Customers finished an install, paid the invoice, and disappeared from MODE’s world entirely. The revenue that should come back through repeat jobs and referrals walked away with them.
That’s a common story for any growing remodeler.
Ryan named a problem every owner experiences:
“I call it whack-a-mole. We can focus on one thing in the business really well — we’ll be great at it while we focus on it. But then something else pops up over here. So we have to handle that one. And when we handle that one, this falls off.”
— Ryan Keene, Owner, MODE Renovation
You know you should be nurturing past customers. You also have payroll Friday, three crews short-staffed, a Yelp review to respond to, and a sales rep asking for a new lead source. The customer who just finished a beautiful installation last month? Off the radar.
By the time MODE signed up with gFour, the company had a database of past customers and no system around it.
gFour’s relationship marketing system connected directly to MODE’s CRM through an API.
Every completed install now triggers a sequence Ryan doesn’t have to think about: a premium appreciation package in the mail (cookies, a thank-you letter, a $1,000 gift card), followed by a review request, a referral conversation, and a long-term nurture cadence stretching months and years into the future.
The whole point: minimum lift, maximum return.
Owners like Ryan have a hundred fires to put out. The last thing they need is another marketing channel to manage.
For Ryan, the value is not having to think about it. He knows gFour is reaching out, in his words, “following up with the customers, not even just after the job, but for the months and years to come.”
Ryan’s vision is straightforward: every one of MODE’s ~150 monthly installs gets the appreciation package treatment. The job ends. The relationship doesn’t.
What gFour Actually Produced: The Numbers So FarThis is where patience pays off, and where most contractors give up before the system kicks in.
Customers who started receiving gFour’s appreciation packages in MODE’s first year didn’t refer their neighbor the next week. They referred them four months later. Six months later. A year later.
That’s how this works: 82% of customer referrals happen three or more months after the job is done. The system needs runway.
On a call with the gFour Team, Ryan walked through his numbers:
“Year to date, we’ve probably done like $400,000 or $500,000 in referral and repeat customers. Which might not sound like a huge number. But if you look at how much we spent to get that, why wouldn’t you do that?”
In the first five months of 2026 alone, MODE booked $400–500K in referral and repeat revenue. At that time, pacing toward seven figures in annual past-customer revenue, with a database that grows every month.
The review side compounds the same way. Before gFour, MODE had 88 Google reviews. Today they’re at 503 with a perfect 5.0 rating. That’s 415 net new five-star reviews — every one a closing-rate lift on the next cold lead.
The ROI Beyond the Numbers
The dollars and the reviews are the tangible return. There’s a quieter return most contractors don’t anticipate: what a program like this does inside the business.
It can act as a complaint filter. When a customer wants to flag something, they reach out through the nurture channel instead of going straight to Google.
For Ryan, that’s meant catching issues early and protecting MODE’s reputation publicly, while making the five-star reviews easier to earn.
It also pulls weight on the sales floor. MODE brings the appreciation packages into sales meetings to show reps what customers receive after the install. The team closes harder when they know the company stands behind them.
Ryan’s biggest takeaway is about where gFour fits inside a contractor’s business:
“We’re more of a sales and marketing company. We have to install showers. The installation, that’s the easiest part. It’s getting your phones to ring, it’s getting appointments set, it’s closing deals.”
That’s why he handed the past-customer side of his marketing to gFour: to keep the relationship alive without adding work for him or his team. The contractors who scale aren’t always the ones who install best. They’re the ones who treat marketing like the actual job.
Past customers — already sold, already happy, already in your database — are the cheapest lead source you’ll ever have. The only thing between you and them is a system around the relationship.
If budget is the concern, Ryan builds the program cost into an admin fee on every contract, absorbed across all his work rather than added on top.
His final word:
“People really need to get over the cost. Don’t look at it as a cost. It’s an investment, like anything else, that we need to be able to get a return on.”
For MODE Renovation, that investment is pacing toward seven figures of annual past-customer revenue from a program that runs without active management. Year Three will look different from Year Two. And Year Two looked different from Year One.
The contractors winning long-term turn the customers they’ve already won into the cheapest, fastest-closing pipeline they have. That’s what gFour built for MODE. And it’s built to do the same for any contractor sitting on a past-customer database with no system around it.
Schedule an appointment or consultation with us today to get started.
Book an Appointment