About

MSO Signal publishes technical research on the economics of multi-location marketing: cost-to-serve curves, closed-loop attribution, consolidation strategy, and the data infrastructure that separates measured performance from modeled performance.

Everything here is built on primary data. No survey benchmarks, no vendor-sponsored studies.

The author

I'm Nick Martinelli. I manage marketing for 31 automotive service locations: single shops and multi-location operator groups, run on shared infrastructure, shared instrumentation, and one operating cadence. That book produces the telemetry this research is built on:

• ~12,900 unique inbound callers per month across the book
• 25 ad accounts under automated daily budget-pace governance
• Deterministic click-to-repair-order attribution built and audited across the book
• Millions of interaction records archived and joined against shop-management revenue

The through-line of the work: most multi-location marketing is managed on modeled numbers, and the gap between modeled and measured is where the margin hides.

Work with me

I take a small number of engagements with enterprise operators: MSO platforms, franchise networks, private-equity-backed roll-ups, and the executives responsible for their marketing P&L. Typical shapes:

• Attribution audit. Establish whether your ad-to-revenue join actually exists, and build it where it doesn't.
• Marketing due diligence. Pre- or post-acquisition assessment of a platform's real (measured) marketing economics.
• Cost-to-serve and budget architecture. Per-location budget governance, pacing automation, and the instrumentation layer that keeps mid-size platforms out of the dead zone.

If that's the problem you're holding, email me: [email protected]. Include your location count and a note on how you currently measure marketing return.