Ultimate Shield is losing $60K - $120K a year and nobody has told them.

What we did

On Sep 7 we filled in the contact form on ultimateshield.com like any other customer would. Black 2022 Tesla Model S, full front PPF, hood, bumper, fenders, mirrors, headlights.

The name, the email and the phone number on that form were all real and all ours. We sent the same message, the same car and the same words to 242 shops across California that day. 31 of them were in Orange County.

Then we watched email, phone and text for four days, and kept the file open for nine.

242 shops

across California, one day

1 request

same car, same words, every time

4 days

email, phone and text watched

31 shops

in Orange County, yours included

We measured four things: how fast a shop came back, what it quoted, which channel it used, and how many times it followed up. We did not buy anything, so we have nothing to say about who closes and who does not.

What the same car was worth in your county

Nine of the 31 Orange County shops put an actual number on that Tesla. The spread is wide. $1,200 at the bottom, $2,200 at the top, and a median of $1,650 (n=9).

Twelve shops answered at all. Nineteen never did.

One reading worth keeping: the highest quote in the county, $2,200, came back in under 2 minutes. That is one shop on one day, not a rule.

Who did it best

The bar was three things at once: answer fast, quote at or above the county median of $1,650 (n=9), then follow up at least once.

Nobody in Orange County clears it. Of the 12 shops that answered, exactly one followed up a single time. That is a finding on its own. In your county almost nobody chases the work after the first message goes out.

So we widened the net to the South Coast and found one shop that does all three. It is in Los Angeles, not Orange County. We had to leave your county to find it, and that is the part worth sitting with.

One shop out of 12 in Orange County sent a second message. The other 11 said their piece once and went quiet.

The whole county, fastest first

Same car, same message, same Monday. Sorted by how long it took to hear anything back.

Your row is below the twelve that answered, with the eighteen other shops that never did.

Every Orange County shop in the Sep 7 test. This table is the data view for the charts on this page.

What it usually turns out to be

1. 1

   The mail goes somewhere nobody opens

   An old employee, a web guy you stopped using, or a plain info@ that belongs to everybody and therefore to nobody.

2. 2

   It posts into a tool that is only open at the desk

   Nobody is sitting at the desk during an install, and the tab is closed by the time anyone checks.

3. 3

   It is landing in spam

   Form mail sent from a noreply address on a server that is not yours gets filtered, and you never see the bounce.

4. 4

   It arrives fine and nobody owns it

   Everybody assumes somebody else has it. The lead ages out in an inbox three people can see.

We cannot see your inbox, so we cannot tell you which one it is. Every one of them takes about five minutes to rule out.

The five minute check, if you want to do it yourself

1. Open your own contact form and send yourself a quote request under a fake name. Time how long it takes to land in an inbox a human actually reads.
2. Open the junk folder on that inbox and go back 30 days.
3. Ask out loud who is supposed to answer form leads, and by when. If the answer is a shrug, that is the whole diagnosis.

You are not slow. Your front door is.

What a working front door does

Five links. Each one only happens because the one before it did.

Who stops walking in

You know both of these men. One of them pays for the other.

You will not talk the first man out of being who he is. The price tag does that job for you.