CASE STUDY / 5280 LIGHTS / DENVER METRO

What five months of building actually produced.

I started a permanent lighting company in Denver in April 2026 with no customers, no reviews, and no rankings. This is the whole build log — what I made, what I had to wait for, what it earned, and the two tracking mistakes that cost me data I can't get back.

Two halves, and only one of them is work

This split is the honest version of what I sell. The left column is five months of my evenings, and it's the part I can hand you in weeks. The right column is calendar time, and no one can compress it — not me, not an agency, not a franchise. If someone tells you they can have you ranking and reviewed in thirty days, they are describing the left column and charging you for the right one.

Organic search, week by week

Five clicks in the first week of May. Eighty-five in the third week of September. The curve only gets steep in month five — which is exactly why a new installer needs paid ads running underneath it.

What I won, and what I didn't

This is the part most case studies leave out. I did not out-rank the established companies on the obvious local terms. Five months in, "permanent christmas lights denver" sat around position 21, "lighting installation denver" around 19, "trimlight denver" around 28.

What I took page one for instead were the brand-comparison searches people run right before they decide — "govee prism vs pro 2," "everlights vs govee," "govee installation near me," "how much does it cost to install govee lights." The red line is those queries. One comparison page now drives about half of all my organic clicks.

Revenue started before the marketing worked

The first payment landed June 23 — before the profile was verified, before rankings moved, before any of it was producing. Early jobs come from your network, from neighbors who watch the first install go up, and from ads. That matters if you're deciding whether you can afford the ramp: you are not waiting five months for your first dollar.

Where the money came from

Ten of nineteen customers have no recorded source. Every one of them came in before I put "How did you hear about us?" on every form on August 7. That's $42,579 of revenue I can't attribute to anything, and I never will be able to. It is the single cheapest mistake on this page to avoid and the most expensive one I made.

The milestones, in order

• Apr 25Site liveCity pages, Govee comparison and cost pages published Apr 21–25.
• May 9Google Ads launchedMeta ads first ran May 3–9.
• Jul 10Google Business Profile verifiedVerification work started Apr 22. Eleven weeks.
• Aug 7Lead source captured on every formThree months later than it should have been.
• Sep 2Conversion tracking fixedUntil this date, Google saw none of my leads.
• Sep 25GHL became the CRMKeap kept as backup only.

What I'd tell you to expect

If you launch with this system built for you, you skip my five months of building. You do not skip the eleven weeks of profile verification, the twelve weeks it took to get from one review to fifteen, or the eighteen weeks of ranking movement. Those are calendar, and they start the day your profile goes in — which is why that's the first thing I do, before the website is even finished.

Expect ads to carry you through months one to four. Expect organic to become real somewhere in month five. Expect your first revenue well before either of those, from people who already know you. And expect September's numbers on this page to be flattered by the season, because lighting demand climbs into the fall on its own — the ranking line is the one that isn't seasonal, and it's the one I'd judge me on.

Start where I am, not where I started.

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