Bay State Holdings
TL;DR
Three Massachusetts home-services brands on real revenue and real craftsmanship, with almost no marketing function underneath. Four vendors reported to nobody, three sites shared no design language, and nothing tied spend to an outcome.
2026
Project Type
Fractional engagement, November 2025 to March 2026.
Role
Fractional creative director and CMO.
Nobody Owned the Outcome
Three DBAs, one parent company, different channels, and various price points: Remodeling (design-build, the flagship, B2C), Kitchen Gallery (cabinetry, unproven, selling B2B to GCs), and Refinishing (tub and tile, the low end, residential and commercial). Premium work, presented with budget template aesthetics, and no established brand identity connecting the three.
I tackled a visual improvement, turning a mid 2010s 3D bloated design style into a simplified, modular, flatter style that was more approachable.
Intersection Between Branding, Marketing, and Sales
Starting as a fractional creative director, my role ended up being more of a fractional CMO. As a byproduct of designing, I was put in charge of defining and driving a unified strategy between the three companies, and ended up leading weekly meetings with Bay State’s marketing subcontractors (Google Ads, SEO, social media, and blogging).
It was in this capacity that I realized my talent for product management. As a designer, my bar for quality is high. Driving the identity behind the brand, I took it upon myself to enforce that same bar for all marketing and sales channels.
I built a Slack channel and work tracker to connect these subcontractors.
I hosted cross-department meetings to invite collaboration, like an Ads/SEO keyword refinement session.
I built a virtual sales presentation engine to give the sales team in-office collateral when clients arrive at the showroom.
I led CRM refinement, giving the sales team a stronger framework to turn leads into clients.
Paid Media, with Numbers
I wrote copy and compiled creative for four Google Ads campaigns across static and video, then audited every line before it went live. January 2026, in Analytics:
Remodeling, 9 leads, up from 5, cost per lead cut roughly in half to about $100 on $900 of spend.
Kitchen, 7 leads, up from 1, at $69 per lead, down about 81% from roughly $370.
A new basement campaign, 3 leads at $116 in its first month.
The chain behind those is intuitive. Audit the creative before it goes live with cross-departmental expertise, increase spending in high-leverage campaigns with a proven track record, kill what is underperforming, and rinse and repeat.
The Contact Forms Introduced Friction
The lead generation and intake funnel for each website was backwards.
Refinishing, the low-ticket brand that wanted volume, required a multi-step process, including a mandatory photo upload, before anyone could inquire.
Remodeling, the high-ticket flagship that needed to qualify, requested no information about the actual project size or complexity.
Kitchen Gallery, where contractor, developer and homeowner are three different conversations, never categorized each lead in their Zoho CRM.
Creating user journey maps for customers of each company enabled me to define a cleaner user flow for each website form, and implement smarter, more tailored conversion funnels.
Sunsetting a Brand Properly
The CEO closed Refinishing in February 2026, and I led the sunsetting strategy. Ad spend was redirected to Remodeling and Kitchen Gallery, and the website transitioned to a one-pager that upsells and redirects to Remodeling, leveraging Refinishing’s domain authority as a sustained traffic channel.
What I Learned
Branding really is the foundation of digital design, marketing, and sales. Being in charge of defining the branding strategy delivered value to inbound and outbound that was consistent with how the companies were being positioned.
Lead with results. The CEO was quick to make decisions, was distrustful of creative and marketing, and only saw cost until he saw a number move or gorgeous collateral. While vendor coordination, SEO, ads and social, and infrastructure advocacy are slow burns, early measurable outcomes bought the stakeholder trust for the work that takes longer to show.