HBIS Hydra Site Brief — Forrestline Plumbing & Drain

This is a worked example, not a real client. Forrestline Plumbing & Drain does not exist — every name, number, licence, price and review count below is invented. It is here to show the depth a strong HBIS brief goes to, modeled on the best briefs CI Web Group has actually received. Read it as a yardstick for your own; do not copy its facts.

How to use this brief for the Hydra OS build

• Treat this file as the controlling source of truth for Forrestline Plumbing & Drain. Do not invent, interpolate, or "improve" prices, licence numbers, warranty terms, response times, service areas, or staffing. Missing business facts require Allen's answer. Missing research, audits, and performance baselines are CI Web Group work items, not questions Allen has to go research himself.
• Conflict precedence: the operator's latest written answer first; Google-verified records second; the current live website third; inference last. A fact currently published on the old site is not permission to keep publishing it. Inference may guide a recommendation but may never create a published fact.
• Anything marked [Missing — operator to fill during upload] or [Skipped by operator] must be raised as a question, never filled in by the agent. A skipped item is a decision, not an oversight.
• Build order: Site map (11) drives routes and IA. Page modules (12) drives layout. Conversion paths (10) drives every CTA and every form. First build sprint (24) is the execution queue. Preserve existing URLs until the crawl, ranking, backlink and redirect review in Section 14 is complete.
• Prefer overrides/forrestlineplumbing + clients/forrestlineplumbing.json over hard-coded one-off components. Use canonical item.url / PMS URLs for service links — never hand-build a service URL in a template.
• Ship mobile-first. One job per section. Landing-page heroes use a full-bleed visual plane with one promise, one proof element, one primary CTA — not a card grid. Nothing deeper than three clicks unless Section 11 requires it.
• Use Forrestline's own job photography (Section 16). No stock people, ever — Allen's standing rule. A stock photo of a smiling stranger in a clean shirt is the single fastest way to look like the roll-up.

Banned words and claims for this business

A banned claim in generated copy is a build failure, not a style preference.

Business identity

Legal entity: Forrestline Plumbing & Drain, LLC (Idaho, formed 2011) Customer-facing brand: Forrestline Plumbing Prior name customers still search for: "Allen Forrest Plumbing" — Allen operated as a sole proprietor under his own name 2011–2014. It still gets typed into Google. Worth a redirect target and a line on the About page; not worth a page.

Founded: March 2011, by Allen Forrest (master plumber, Idaho MP-4471). Nina Forrest joined full-time in 2013 and runs operations and the office. Independent, family-owned, not franchised, not PE-backed. Allen has said he has turned down two acquisition approaches — see Section 21, this is positioning material.

Headcount: 19 total — 12 field (1 master, 4 journeymen, 4 apprentices, 2 drain techs, 1 crew lead on sewer), 7 office/admin (2 dispatch, 2 CSR, 1 accounting, Nina, Allen).

Canonical contact

Locations

One profile only. Allen explicitly does not want a second GBP for Meridian — he had one in 2019, it was suspended for a virtual office, and he will not repeat it. Do not create or recommend a second profile.

Hours

After-hours emergencies — publish this, do not bury it. Allen carries the phone and will personally take a call about an active flood at 11 p.m., from an existing customer or a new one. That is a real service and it is a real differentiator in this market — say so. It belongs on the emergency page, in the footer, and in the Google Business Profile description.

Say it accurately, though. What exists is a person who answers, not a night crew. Allen picks up, talks the caller through shutting the water off, and books the truck for first thing unless it genuinely cannot wait until morning. So publish "After hours? We answer." and never a guaranteed overnight arrival window, a "technicians standing by" claim, or a dispatch time operations cannot hold at 2 a.m. Keep the form live 24 hours for everything that is not urgent.

Where Forrestline is NOT

• Does not serve Mountain Home, Emmett, or anything past Caldwell on I-84. The legacy site's footer lists Mountain Home. Remove it — it is generating calls dispatch declines, which is worse than no call.
• Does not do new-construction rough-in. Exited in 2018. The legacy /new-construction/ page still ranks and still converts wrong-fit leads. Redirect it, do not rebuild it.
• Does not do commercial grease-trap or restaurant work. [Skipped by operator] — Allen declined to explain further; do not press, do not publish anything about it.

Positioning & offer

The one problem Forrestline owns, in the customer's words:

"Something is wrong under my house and I have no idea who to trust or what it should cost."

Not "plumbing services." The problem is the information asymmetry — a homeowner staring at a $9,000 sewer quote with no way to tell whether it is honest.

Primary offer: Trenchless sewer replacement with a camera inspection you keep. Forrestline scopes the line, hands the homeowner the video file and a marked-up diagram, and quotes three options — spot repair, liner, full replacement — with the tradeoff of each written out. Free for a replacement quote. No obligation.

Included: camera inspection, locate, video file delivered, written three-option quote valid 30 days. Not included: the repair itself; any permit fee (Section 15); any landscaping restoration beyond backfill and compaction. What the customer has to do: be home for 45 minutes and have a cleanout or a pulled toilet for access.

The head-to-head answer — three different answers, not one

Something a competitor literally cannot say:

"We hand you the sewer video. It's your house — it's your footage. Every one of our competitors shows it to you on the truck screen and then it's gone."

— Allen, intake call 2026-09-10. This is the single strongest differentiator in the brief. It should appear on the homepage hero area, the sewer page, and in the AEO bank.

Brand promise, one sentence a customer could repeat from memory:

"They showed me the video and gave me three prices."

Proof behind each positioning claim

Brand voice

Voice blend, in Allen's framing: 60% Confident & direct · 25% Technical & expert · 15% Community-first. 0% premium/polished. Allen's words:

"I don't want it to sound like a law firm. I want it to sound like the guy who's actually been under your house."

First person "we." Contractions yes. Short sentences. Target reading level: 7th–8th grade for service pages, higher is allowed in the guides. Jargon gets translated, never dropped — say "a belly, meaning a low spot in the line where water sits," not just "a belly," and not just "a low spot."

Tone by page type

Three lines that sound exactly like Forrestline (verbatim from Allen)

1. "If it's a $200 fix we'll tell you it's a $200 fix. We're not going to find you a $9,000 problem."

2. "Roots don't care how new your house is. If you've got trees and clay tile, you've got roots."

3. "We'll show you the video. Then you decide, not us."

Three lines that never would

1. "Forrestline Plumbing is your premier partner for all your plumbing needs."
2. "Don't wait — your pipes could fail at any moment!"
3. "We're revolutionizing the home-services experience."

How Forrestline refers to its own people and customers

• Its people: "techs" and "the crew." Never "technicians" in body copy (fine in a job title), never "associates," never "professionals," never "experts."
• Its customers: "homeowners" or "folks." Never "clients." Never "valued customers."

Getting these nouns wrong is the fastest way for generated copy to read as an outsider's.

Brand & visual direction

Logo

Vector originals exist for everything but the reversed lockup. Files are in the Drive folder in Section 16.

Colors

Typography

Current: Montserrat + Open Sans, both open-source, currently licensed fine. Allen will not pay for a display face. Substitute freely within open-source, but keep the geometric-sans headline feel.

Photography

Real only. Zero stock people — standing rule. Allen will kill a page over a stock photo faster than over a typo.

What exists: ~900 job photos in the Drive folder, phone-quality but real. Truck shots, crew on site, trenchless liner cures, water-heater installs, before/after drain camera stills. What is unusable: anything from before 2021 — different truck wrap, and two techs in them no longer work there. Planned: a half-day shoot for team headshots is budgeted but not booked. [Missing — operator to confirm shoot date]

Design adjectives, with a reference for each

1. Utilitarian — like a good tool catalog. Information density is a feature.
2. Grounded — earth tones, real dirt, actual trenches. Not a bright white lifestyle kitchen.
3. Legible-first — 18px floor on body copy. Allen's customer base skews 45+ and half of them are reading it outside on a phone.
4. Unfussy — no glassmorphism, no gradient meshes, no floating 3D pipes.

Explicitly reject: the purple/blue gradient tech look and the warm-cream-serif wellness look. Neither is this brand.

Inspiration, and the specific thing to borrow

Competitor looks to avoid, named

• Cascade Home Services — the stock-photo smiling family in a sunlit kitchen, and the sticky full-width discount banner. Avoid both specifically.
• Gem State Plumbing — cartoon mascot plumber. Allen finds it undignified and says his customers do too.

Motion: restrained. Fades and small reveals are fine; nothing that moves on its own, nothing parallax. Honor prefers-reduced-motion. Contrast floor AA, minimum body type 18px — non-negotiable for this audience.

Audiences & personas

Persona 1 — "The $9,000 quote" homeowner (highest value)

• Real customer type: owns a 1968–1985 home in the Boise Bench, North End, or west Meridian. Has just been handed a sewer replacement quote by someone else and is looking for a second opinion.
• Job to be done, their words: "Is this quote real, and is there a cheaper way that isn't a mistake?"
• Trigger: a backup, or a realtor's inspection during a sale.
• Where they search: Google, then Nextdoor, then a friend who "knows a guy."
• Decision length: 2–10 days. Longer if it is not actively backing up.
• Objections → proof:
  1. "This is a scare tactic." → The kept video file + the three-option quote.
  2. "Trenchless sounds too good to be true." → A cured-liner photo set from a named street, with the 50-yr material / 2-yr labor warranty written out.
  3. "Will they destroy my yard?" → Before/after of a lawn at 30 days. This is the single most-requested proof artifact and Forrestline has it.
• Second reader in the decision: a spouse, almost always, and usually the one who was not home for the inspection. That second reader needs the video and the written quote, not a conversation they missed. This is why the video-file handoff converts.
• Compares against: Cascade, and doing nothing for another year.

Persona 2 — The cold-morning water heater

• Type: anyone. No hot water this morning.
• Job: "I need hot water back today and I don't want to think about it."
• Trigger: cold shower.
• Decision length: under 4 hours. This persona does not read. They scan for a phone number and a price range.
• Objections → proof: (1) "Can you actually come today?" → the real same-day rule, stated. (2) "What's it going to cost?" → the published range, by type, on the page. (3) "Tank or tankless?" → a three-row comparison, not an essay.
• Second reader: none, usually. This is a solo decision.
• Compares against: Home Depot install, and the big-box quote is usually lower on the sticker and higher installed. Section 18 has the honest table.

Persona 3 — The hard-water/whole-home upgrade

• Type: recently moved to the Treasure Valley from a soft-water state, three months in, furious about the scale on the fixtures.
• Job: "Why is my water like this and what do I do about it?"
• Trigger: spotted glassware, dry skin, a failed appliance.
• Decision length: weeks. Researches heavily. Reads everything.
• Objections → proof: (1) "Is a softener a scam?" → a local water-hardness explainer with the actual Boise grains-per-gallon number. (2) "Will it ruin the taste?" → the RO pairing explanation. (3) "Do I need the $6k system?" → an honest tier table where the cheapest tier is genuinely recommended for some households.
• Compares against: Costco/Culligan, and a DIY unit from Lowe's.

Persona 4 — The realtor / property manager (repeat volume)

• Type: a handful of named agents and two property-management companies that send recurring work.
• Job: "I need an inspection-grade answer in writing by Thursday."
• Needs: fast scheduling, a written report, invoicing to a third party. Does not care about brand warmth at all.
• Second reader: their client, who will read the report.
• Note: this persona does not need a marketing page. They need a "For realtors & property managers" page with a direct scheduling path and a sample report. Low traffic, high value.

Who Forrestline does NOT serve, and how to disqualify politely

• New construction rough-in. One clear line on the services page: "We don't do new-construction rough-in — for that, [refer out]."
• Commercial restaurant / grease. Same treatment. [Skipped by operator] on the reason.
• Outside the service envelope (Section 8). The service-area page should state the boundary plainly rather than listing aspirational cities. An unqualified lead costs dispatch 6–8 minutes and the customer their afternoon.

Services & products

The money-vs-support split

Money services — build effort follows these:

Support services — these catch searches and route them:

Drain cleaning and hydro-jetting · camera inspection and locate · faucet, toilet, disposal and hose-bib repair · water line repair · gas line repair and test · sump pump · pressure-reducing valve · water-main shutoff replacement · slab-leak detection (detection only — see below) · frozen-pipe thaw (seasonal).

Brands deliberately NOT serviced, and the honest reason

• Navien tankless. Allen: "We've had three parts nightmares in a row and I'm not going to keep apologizing for a manufacturer's supply chain." Say it plainly on the tankless page — this is a real search and no competitor answers it.
• Slab-leak repair under a finished slab. Forrestline detects and then reroutes; it does not jackhammer finished floors. Be precise about this or the page generates jobs that get declined on arrival.

Equipment and brands

The Forrest Club (membership)

Financing

Partner: Greenlight Home Finance. Publishable terms only: "Financing available on approved credit. Plans from 0% APR for 12 months to 9.99% APR for 120 months."

Required disclaimer, verbatim, on any page showing a payment figure:

Financing is provided by third-party lenders under terms arranged between you and the lender. Subject to credit approval. Rates and terms shown are examples and are not an offer of credit.

Seasonal 0%-for-18-months promotion runs February and March only. Do not hard-code it; it needs a start/end date field.

Warranty posture

Dispatch / diagnostic fee — the most-searched, least-published fact in this trade

• $89 dispatch fee on any repair or diagnostic visit. Covers travel and the first 30 minutes including camera work on a drain call.
• Waived when: the customer proceeds with the repair that same visit; the customer is a Forrest Club member; the visit is a replacement or repipe quote (those are genuinely free).
• Never waived for a second opinion on someone else's quote where no work is booked — but say this plainly rather than hiding it, because it is fair and the honesty converts.

Geography & locations

The named places — these are what people actually search

Core market (no travel charge, standard scheduling): Boise — and within Boise, the units people actually type: the North End, the Bench, Southeast Boise, Harris Ranch, Columbia Village, West Boise, Barber Valley. Plus Garden City, Meridian, Eagle, Kuna, Star.

Edge market (served, $65 travel adder, next-day scheduling only): Nampa, Caldwell, Middleton.

Will travel for the right work (sewer and repipe only, quoted case by case): Horseshoe Bend, Idaho City. Not listed as service areas; mentioned only on the sewer page.

Not served, will not go: Mountain Home, Emmett, Ontario OR, McCall, Twin Falls. Remove all of these from the legacy footer.

Who is in that market, place by place

A service area is people before it is a map.

Real ties to each place — the material that makes a local page read as belonging

• Sponsors the Kuna Little League 10U team, 2019–present (7 seasons).
• Nina sits on the Boise Bench Neighborhood Association business committee, since 2022.
• Donated and installed the fixtures for a Boise Rescue Mission bathroom remodel, 2023. Photos exist, permission granted.
• Member, Idaho Association of Plumbing-Heating-Cooling Contractors, since 2014.
• Allen teaches a night section of the apprenticeship program at the College of Western Idaho, 2021–present.

That last one is the most under-used asset in this brief. It is E-E-A-T, recruiting material, and local credibility in one line, and it is verifiable.

Local conditions that genuinely change the work

• Water hardness. Treasure Valley municipal water runs roughly 11–17 grains per gallon — genuinely hard. It shortens water-heater life, scales tankless units, and is the single biggest driver of the Persona 3 search. Confirm the current figure with Boise's published water quality report before publishing a number. [Missing — operator to confirm current gpg figure with source]
• Clay tile laterals in pre-1975 neighborhoods, plus mature cottonwood and locust root systems. This is why the sewer market is where it is.
• Freeze events. A hard freeze in December or January produces a 3–5x call spike for burst hose bibs and frozen lines. The site needs a seasonal freeze page that can be surfaced fast, and a capacity-honest message during the spike.
• Irrigation season (April–October). Pressurized irrigation districts across Meridian/Kuna create backflow and cross-connection questions that are specific enough a competitor could not have written them.

Per-city permit and inspection differences

This is what justifies dedicated city pages instead of a generic service-area list.

Forrestline pulls the permit in every case. The homeowner never does. Say this — customers assume the opposite and it is a real differentiator against handyman competition.

Languages served: English. Two field techs speak conversational Spanish; Allen will not advertise Spanish-language service because he cannot guarantee a Spanish speaker on every call. Respect this. No Spanish landing page, no "se habla español" badge.

Proof & trust

Licences and registrations

Insurance and bonding

General liability $2,000,000 aggregate; auto $1,000,000; workers' comp in force. Carrier name: [Skipped by operator] — Allen will state limits but not the carrier. Publish the limits, not the carrier.

Certifications

Continuing education: Idaho requires 8 hours per licence cycle; Forrestline runs an additional quarterly in-house training block. The site can say training is current and ongoing rather than merely that it exists.

Technician-level credentials are attached to named people, never claimed at company level. Do not write "our NATE-certified technicians" — that is an HVAC credential and Forrestline does not hold it.

Reviews

Ratings move. Every published rating must carry a "checked" date or a live pull. The Yelp 3.9 is genuine and Allen has no objection to it being visible; do not hide it, do not feature it.

Team roster (E-E-A-T)

An expert page with no named humans is not an expert page. Allen, Marcus and Tavi are enough to launch with. Do not wait for all twelve.

Awards

None Forrestline will claim. Allen on the local "Best of" awards: "Those are pay-to-play. I'm not buying one." Do not manufacture an award section. Drop it entirely and put the CWI instructor line and the Perma-Liner certification in the space it would have taken.

Testimonials and case studies — permission status per item

A testimonial that proves nothing specific is decoration. None of the "great service, fast and friendly" reviews should be pulled onto the site.

Conversion paths

Primary CTA: "Call (208) 555-0147" Secondary CTA: "Get a free replacement quote"

On mobile, the phone wins. Tap-to-call is the top-right persistent element and the first in-hero button. The form is second everywhere on mobile except the sewer and repipe pages, where the free-quote form is first because that decision is not made in one call.

Every channel and where it lands

The urgency path, in full

Someone with an active flood arrives on the site. What they see, in order, above the fold: "Shut off your main. Here's how." → a 20-second how-to → the phone number → the real hours.

What the site promises: "Most same-day requests booked before 2 p.m. are served the same day. We're open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., seven days a week. After 7, if it's an emergency, call anyway — Allen answers. Anything that can wait, leave a message and we'll call you by 7:30 the next morning."

What actually happens: exactly that. This promise is the ceiling of what operations can hold and it must not be inflated by a single word.

Cutoff rules that appear on the site: the 2 p.m. same-day cutoff, and a capacity-honest banner during freeze events. Dispatch (Renata) owns keeping both true, and the freeze banner needs a toggle in the client config so the office can flip it without a deploy.

Objection → offer pairs, which is what the hero and mid-page CTAs get built from

What happens after submit — tell them the truth

Confirmation copy names the person: "Got it. Renata or one of the dispatch team will call you back within the hour during business hours — from (208) 555-0147, so save it." First question asked on callback: "Is water moving right now?" — that is the real triage question and the form should ask it too.

Lead qualification

Minimum worth asking: name, phone, address (for the service-area check), and one plain-language "what's happening" field. Fields Allen wants that customers will resent: preferred appointment window and "how did you hear about us." Name the tradeoff explicitly — the second one duplicates what CallRail and UTM capture already do and costs conversions. Recommendation: drop "how did you hear about us" from the form and solve it with attribution instead. Keep the appointment window; it earns its friction.

Site map

Hub and spoke

• Sewer hub = /sewer-repair-boise/. Spokes: trenchless liner, camera inspection, the clay-tile guide. All three link up to the hub; the hub links down to all three.
• Water heater hub = /water-heaters/. Spokes: tankless, repair-or-replace guide.
• Water hub = /water-treatment/. Spoke: hard-water guide.
• Geo hub = /service-areas/. Spokes: each city page, each linking up and to its two most relevant money pages.
• Orphan watch: /ridge-club/ and /financing/ have no natural parent. They are linked from every money page's CTA block instead. Flagging them here so nobody "fixes" it by burying them.

Must-keep URLs, and the redirect map

Losing a ranking URL in a rebuild is the most common self-inflicted wound. The full crawl in Section 14 governs; this table is the starting point, not the final map.

Deliberately NOT built in v1, so nobody re-litigates it mid-build

• Individual pages for faucet/toilet/disposal repair. They are one combined page. Thin service pages do not rank and they dilute the hub.
• A blog with a posting cadence. The four guides ship; a cadence decision comes after launch.
• A Spanish-language section. Section 8 — operator declined.

Deepest page is three clicks. Nothing goes deeper.

Page modules

Homepage

Hero spec: headline promise "We'll show you the video. Then you decide." · subhead naming sewer, water heaters and hard water plus the service area · proof element = the 4.8/612 rating inline · primary CTA = Call · background = a full-bleed real photo of a Forrestline crew at an open trench, Bench neighborhood, 2025. Full-bleed plane, not a card grid.

Mobile order differs: 1, 2, 3, 8, 4, 6, 9, 5, 7, 10. The pricing block moves up on mobile because the phone visitor is price-checking, and the photo gallery moves down because it is the heaviest thing on the page.

/sewer-repair-boise/ (money page 1)

Hero (full-bleed trench photo, "Free camera inspection with any replacement quote") → the three options compared side by side, from §18 → what the camera actually shows, with real stills → the yard: before, day-of, 30 days later → permit handling by city, from §8 → warranty, both numbers → the second-opinion story → price ranges from §19 → FAQ ×6 → CTA.

Hydra Build Components needed: the comparison component (liner vs. spot vs. full dig — data from §18), the gallery component (job sets from §16, grouped by job not dumped in a grid), and the estimator is NOT used here — a sewer cannot be quoted without a camera and a fake estimator would lie. Say so.

/water-heaters/ (money page 2)

Hero ("No hot water? Most same-day requests booked before 2 p.m. are served today") → the ranges, immediately, by type → tank vs. tankless three-row comparison → the hard-water lifespan explanation, linking to the guide → brands and why Navien is not one of them → warranty and who registers it → FAQ ×5 → CTA.

Components: comparison (tank vs tankless, from §18), and the estimator with the by-type ranges from §19. The estimator caps at the top of the published range and hands off to a human above it — do not let it quote a number nobody will honor.

/water-treatment/ (money page 3)

Hero → the local hardness number with its source → good/better/best tier table where the cheapest tier is genuinely recommended for some households → what a softener does and does not fix → RO pairing → FAQ ×5 → CTA.

Proof placement is specific, not "add social proof": the 4.8 rating goes in the homepage proof strip; the "kept the yard" testimonial goes in the sewer page's yard section and nowhere else; the Perma-Liner badge goes beside the 50-year warranty line on the sewer page, with its "why it matters" sentence attached.

SEO & AI-search priorities

The entity set

Business: Forrestline Plumbing & Drain, LLC · Boise, ID · GBP cid above · licence PLC-C-14883. People: Allen Forrest (MP-4471, CWI instructor) · Marcus Nnamdi (BT-2288) · Tavi Brennan · Nina Forrest. Places: Boise, Garden City, Meridian, Eagle, Kuna, Star, Nampa, Caldwell, Middleton + the named Boise neighborhoods in §8. Brands: Perma-Liner · Rinnai · Bradford White · A.O. Smith. Services: trenchless sewer replacement · CIPP lining · sewer camera inspection · water heater replacement · PEX repipe · water softening · hydro-jetting · backflow testing.

Money phrases

Phrases Forrestline refuses to chase — a refusal is as useful to an agent as a target

• Anything with "cheap" or "cheapest." Allen's call, flatly.
• "24 hour plumber boise." They are not one. Chasing it produces calls they cannot serve and reviews they will deserve.
• "Water damage restoration." Adjacent, lucrative, and not a service they offer.

Phrases taken from a competitor, and why this site deserves to win them

• "sewer line replacement boise cost" — currently an out-of-state aggregator with no local numbers. Forrestline will publish real Treasure Valley ranges with what drives them. Genuinely better content wins this.
• "tankless water heater boise" — Gem State's page never mentions hard water, which is the reason tankless units fail here. Forrestline's page will, and will say which brand it refuses to install and why.

The AEO bank — customer questions and the operator-approved answer-first reply

What assistants should cite Forrestline FOR — only where the proof exists

1. Trenchless sewer replacement in the Treasure Valley. Proof: Perma-Liner certification PL-ID-0412, 7 years of jobs, photo evidence.
2. What plumbing actually costs in Boise. Proof: published ranges with the variables behind them, which no local competitor publishes.
3. Hard water in the Treasure Valley and what it does to equipment. Proof: the local gpg figure with its source, plus the water-heater lifespan pattern across 15 years of jobs.

Everything else is excluded rather than aspirational. Forrestline has no authority claim on emergency response and should not seek a citation for one.

Internal-link hubs, and the rule that keeps the structure alive

Three content hubs: sewer, water heaters, water quality. Rule: every new piece of content links up to exactly one hub and to at most two sibling spokes. No new page may be published without a parent. This is what stops a year of blogging from turning into 60 orphans.

Schema, and where each gets its data

Technical & integrations

Current stack

Where leads must arrive — the integration that matters most and breaks most often

Every web lead → ServiceTitan lead queue, with the CallRail session and the landing page attached. An email-only fallback to office@ is acceptable as a backstop, never as the primary. Test leads must be demonstrated end to end before launch — form submitted → appears in ServiceTitan → source and campaign fields populated → dispatch sees it. Show the evidence; do not assert it.

Analytics and search properties

The GA4/GTM accounts are held by a former vendor. This is the most common migration hostage situation in this business and it must be resolved before cutover or 15 years of historical data is lost. Owner: Nina. Escalate if it is not resolved by the crawl milestone.

Domain, DNS and email — holders named, never passwords

No password, key, or recovery code appears anywhere in this brief, and none may be added to it.

Google Business Profile

One profile (§2). Delegate manager access to [email protected]. Do not create a second profile. Do not change the primary category off "Plumber" without asking — Allen has tested "Drainage service" before and lost map visibility.

Must-keep scripts and embeds

• CallRail dynamic number insertion — breaks attribution completely if dropped.
• ServiceTitan booking widget on the drain and water-heater pages.
• A Google review carousel currently on the homepage. Replaceable; the data matters, the widget does not.

Accessibility and performance constraints

WCAG 2.1 AA, 18px body minimum, AA contrast — not aspirational, this audience skews 45+ and reads outside on a phone. LCP under 2.5s on a throttled 4G connection; over half of sessions are mobile on cellular.

Compliance & legal

Licence display: the Idaho plumbing contractor number must appear in the site footer and on any page quoting a price. Format: ID PLC-C-14883. The public works registration goes in the footer only.

Guarantee language operations will actually honor — write these boundaries out, because a guarantee the field cannot deliver is a complaint generator:

One-year warranty on repair labor. Two years on water-heater and trenchless liner labor. Fifty-year manufacturer material warranty on Perma-Liner CIPP liner, subject to the manufacturer's written terms. Warranty covers our workmanship; it does not cover damage from ground movement, freezing, or work performed by others on the same system.

Never publishable as a claim: "lifetime warranty," "guaranteed savings," "guaranteed same-day," or any warranty stated without its labor/material split.

Privacy / Terms / Accessibility: use the CI Web Group templates. No existing pages worth keeping. Add an Idaho-appropriate SMS addendum once A2P status is confirmed.

Consent status: testimonials — written, per item, tracked in §9. Job photos — Allen's customer agreement includes a photo-use clause since 2021; anything shot before 2021 is unusable for that reason as well as the truck-wrap reason. Never publish a customer name with an exact address, and never a house number in a caption.

SMS / TCPA: [Missing — A2P 10DLC status unconfirmed]. No SMS CTA ships until this is resolved. Blocking item, named in §23.

Regulated claims that cannot be made at all: no guarantee of a rebate or utility credit; no claim about water safety or health effects of hard water (hardness is an aesthetic and equipment issue, not a health one — do not imply otherwise); no "certified" claim for a credential not in §9.

Who signs off on published claims: Allen Forrest, sole approver. No backup named. Treat Allen as the single gate for every price, credential, warranty, and service-area statement.

Media & asset library

Google Drive folder (shared with CI Web Group): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/EXAMPLE-FOLDER-ID

(One shared folder link beats twenty attachments. A build with no owned photography falls back to stock, which is the fastest way to look like every competitor.)

What is inside

Thin or missing categories, stated plainly so the site does not silently do without them: team headshots, shop/premises, and anything showing the office side of the business. The site will lean hard on job photography as a result, which suits the brand — but the team page cannot ship with one 2019 headshot.

Video

Podcast, press, third-party coverage

• Idaho Business Review, 2023, a short piece on trade apprenticeship shortages, quoting Allen. [Missing — operator to supply URL]. This is a citation a generative engine can use; chase it.
• CWI program page listing Allen as an instructor. [Missing — URL].
• No podcast appearances. Allen would do one. Not a launch item.

Documents

Warranty certificate template · the three-option quote template (redacted sample pending) · Forrest Club agreement · Perma-Liner spec sheets and the manufacturer warranty document · Rinnai and Bradford White brochures.

Usage rights per group

Originals are held by Nina, in the Drive folder. If the folder link is not enough, Nina is the contact.

Job-site photography specifically

In-progress and finished work, before/after pairs, crew on site, equipment in use, branded vehicles. The in-progress shot — the open trench with the liner curing — is the one competitors never publish and the one that wins the job. Forrestline has ~40 of those sequences. Use them heavily.

Client stories, case studies & reviews

Kept in Allen's and Nina's own phrasing. This is the material no competitor can reverse-engineer.

Story 1 — The $11,000 second opinion (the best one in this brief)

"Lady out in Meridian called us in tears. She'd had a quote for eleven grand to replace her whole main line, and she'd already put half of it on a card as a deposit somewhere else. We put the camera down and it was a single offset joint about fourteen feet out, right under the driveway edge. Fourteen hundred bucks to spot-repair it. I told her to go get her deposit back and I'd do it Thursday. She got it back. We did it Thursday. She's sent us four neighbors since."

• Stakes: $11,000 she did not have, on a card.
• What the team did: camera, locate, found a single offset joint at 14 ft.
• Outcome: $1,400 spot repair, deposit recovered, four referrals.
• The memorable detail: "Go get your deposit back."
• Permission: written, anonymized only. Customer will not be named, will not appear in a photo. Run it as "a homeowner in Meridian." Do not push for more.
• Where it goes: homepage section 6, and the sewer page. It is the proof for the entire Section 3 positioning.

Story 2 — The lawn that stayed

"The thing people don't believe about trenchless is the yard. This guy on the Bench had just put in sod the spring before and he was sick about it. Two pits, one at the cleanout and one at the sidewalk, and the sixty feet in between never got touched. We went back thirty days later and took a picture. You can't tell we were there."

• Permission: written, first name only.
• Assets: before / day-of / 30-days-after photo set in the Drive folder.
• What it proves: the #1 Persona 1 objection, answered with evidence instead of adjectives. This set belongs in the sewer page's yard section and nowhere else — spreading it around weakens it.

Story 3 — The freeze week

"December of '22 we did ninety-one calls in five days. What I remember is we told people the truth. If we couldn't get to them till Thursday we said Thursday. Everybody else was telling people 'today' and then not showing. We got reviews out of that week from people whose pipes we never even fixed, because we were the only ones who called them back."

• What it proves: the capacity-honest promise in Section 10 is not marketing language, it is how they actually operate under load.
• Permission: company story, no customer named. Free to use.
• Where it goes: the About page, and it is the justification for the freeze-event banner in Section 10.

Story 4 — The apprentice

"Tavi came to me out of the CWI program. Couldn't solder worth a damn. Five years later he runs the sewer crew and he trains the new kids. That's the whole model — I teach the night class, and the good ones come work here."

• What it proves: the CWI instructor line is not a résumé item, it is a hiring pipeline.
• Where it goes: the careers page and the team page. This is the strongest recruiting asset in the brief.

Story 5 — The one they got wrong

"We put a water heater in for a guy in Eagle and the T&P line wasn't routed right. Didn't leak, but it was wrong. Customer didn't catch it — our own guy caught it on a Forrest Club visit eight months later and we went back and redid it for free and told him why. He was more impressed by that than if we'd done it right the first time."

• Permission: company story, no customer named.
• Why it is here: an operator willing to tell this on the record gives the site something rare. It belongs on the About page as the concrete version of the callback policy in Section 7.

The worst public review, and the honest answer

The Yelp 3.9 includes a 1-star from 2024: a customer charged the $89 dispatch fee for a second opinion where no work was booked.

"He's not wrong that he paid eighty-nine dollars and didn't get anything fixed. He got an hour of a licensed plumber's time and a camera down his line. That's what the eighty-nine is. What we got wrong is that our website didn't say it clearly enough before he called."

This is the origin of the pricing-honesty block in Section 12 and it should be treated as a design requirement, not an anecdote. Objection-handling content beats a scrubbed reputation.

Reviews worth quoting

Prioritize the ones that describe a specific problem solved. Pull these four; do not pull "great service, fast and friendly."

Formal case studies

Products & service comparisons

The head-to-head tables a buyer actually wants. For every comparison, the fact source is named — a comparison table is a liability if the numbers cannot be defended.

The sewer decision — the highest-intent comparison search in this market

Where the answer flips: three or more failure points, or any belly, and spot repair stops making sense. A collapse or a grade problem, and lining stops making sense. Fact source: Allen, intake 2026-09-10, plus Perma-Liner's published installation criteria.

Tank vs. tankless — with the local variable nobody else publishes

This table is the tankless page's whole reason to exist. Gem State's version omits the water hardness entirely. Fact source: Allen; local hardness figure pending confirmation (§8).

Repair or replace a water heater

DIY vs. hiring out

Stated honestly, because the credibility is worth more than the work lost:

• Do it yourself: a flapper, a supply line, a disposal, a hose bib washer, a P-trap. Forrestline will publish how, and will say so.
• Hire out: anything on the gas line, anything requiring a permit, anything in a wall, and every water heater — a bad T&P routing is a real hazard and it is the most common DIY error in this trade.

Forrestline vs. the alternatives — including where a competitor is the better fit

Comparison content Allen refuses to publish: anything naming a competitor's pricing. "I'm not going to put another shop's numbers on my website. I'll compare what we do, not what they charge." Recorded here so nobody re-proposes it mid-build.

Pricing & calculator inputs

Everything an estimator needs to compute a number — not a display price.

Water heater replacement — full calculator spec

Worked example, end to end (verify this against a real invoice): 50-gal tank → tankless conversion, Meridian garage, gas resize needed, no pan required. $4,400 base + $900 gas resize + $1,200 venting + $180 expansion tank = $6,680. Permit and haul-away included. Within the published $4,400–$7,900 range. ✓

Sewer — not calculator-eligible

Priced per foot after a camera inspection, $95–$180/ft depending on depth, access, and surface (lawn vs. driveway vs. sidewalk ROW). The estimator must not quote a sewer job. It collects the address and books the free camera inspection instead. A number quoted without a camera is a number that gets revised, and a revised number is how trust is lost.

Drain cleaning

Water treatment tiers

Bounds and guardrails

• Calculator ceiling: $8,000. Above that it stops and hands off to a human. Do not let it quote a repipe.
• Minimum invoice: $89.
• Required disclaimer wherever an estimate appears:

Estimates are based on typical conditions and are not a quote. Final pricing is confirmed on site by a licensed plumber before any work begins.

Discounts and their stacking rules

State the non-stacking rule explicitly — a calculator will happily stack these into a price nobody will honor.

Rebates, credits, taxes

• Idaho Power offers a heat-pump water heater rebate. [Missing — operator to confirm current amount and eligibility]. Do not publish an amount until confirmed and dated. Forrestline files the paperwork where a rebate applies; the customer pays the full price and receives the rebate directly. Never imply a rebate is deducted from the quote.
• No state sales tax on installed labor in Idaho; materials taxable at 6%. [Missing — confirm with Nina's accountant before publishing any tax statement]
• No processing fee on card payments.

What must NEVER be shown as a price

• Any sewer number before a camera.
• Any repipe number at all — whole-home repipe is too variable and a published figure will be wrong by thousands.
• Any rebate amount that has not been confirmed with a date and a source.

People, positions & careers

Every position

For the open roles

A careers page with no pay range is filtered out by most candidates before it is read. Allen has agreed to publish all three ranges. Publish them.

Benefits, in full

Incentives

• No commission. Deliberate, and it is a positioning claim in Section 3 — do not break it for a recruiting page.
• Quarterly team bonus on shop revenue, paid to field and office alike.
• $1,000 referral bonus for a hire who stays 90 days.
• Callback-free quarterly bonus — a tech loses nothing for a callback, and gains for a quarter without one. This is why the warranty policy in Section 7 does not create bad incentives, and it is worth explaining on the careers page.

Why work here, in Allen's words

"I don't do commission. I've worked at shops that did and I watched good plumbers turn into salesmen and hate themselves. Here you fix what's broken and you go home. If you want to make more money you get better at the trade and I'll pay you for it. That's it. That's the whole pitch."

And, asked what his longest-tenured employee would say:

"Marcus has been here seven years. He'd probably say nobody's ever asked him to tell a customer something that isn't true. That's a low bar and it shouldn't be, but it's the one."

This paragraph is the careers page. Do not rewrite it into marketing language.

Culture specifics that are demonstrable rather than claimed

• 7 a.m. shop meeting, 15 minutes, every day. Everyone is there.
• What happens when someone makes a mistake: Story 5 in Section 17 is the answer. Go back, fix it free, tell the customer why. No write-up unless it repeats.
• On-call is 1 week in 5 and it ends at 7 p.m. There is no overnight rotation, and for a plumber comparing shops, that is the most persuasive line on the page.

Hiring process

Applications → [Missing — operator to confirm: ATS, email, or form]. Currently email to Nina. Nina screens, Allen does a ride-along interview, decision within a week. Publish the timeline — candidates in this trade are comparing three offers and speed wins.

Competitors & whitespace

Above-the-fold audit

None of the three publishes a real price range for a real job. All three publish a coupon. That is the gap.

Whitespace — what no competitor in this market offers

1. Published price ranges for the actual work, not a coupon. Nobody does this.
2. A second-opinion offer, named as such. Nobody does this, and it is aimed directly at Cascade's weakest point.
3. The video file handed to the customer. Nobody does this.
4. Per-city permit handling stated plainly. Nobody does this.
5. Hard water explained with the local number. Culligan owns the softener phrase with national content; nobody owns the local explanation.

Which competitor wins the money phrases, and with what page type

Cascade wins plumber boise and emergency plumber boise with paid search plus a thin service page. That is instructive: the format winning is not strong content, it is budget. The organic opening is the comparison and cost content Cascade has no page for at all. Go there first rather than fighting for the head term.

Market consolidation

Cascade was acquired by a regional PE-backed platform in 2023. Three smaller shops have been absorbed since. Forrestline's position is the alternative to that, and the no-commission policy plus the family ownership is the substance behind it — not a sentiment, a structural difference. It belongs on the About page, stated plainly and without bitterness.

Success metrics

The outcomes the site owns in 90 days

Lead volume vs. lead quality, stated separately

Volume target: +35% total leads. Quality target: the share of leads that are in-area and in-scope rises from an estimated 70% to 85%.

These are tracked separately and reported separately. Optimizing the first and reporting the second is how rebuilds get called failures. The out-of-area lead problem is a known, fixable cause — the legacy footer lists cities Forrestline does not serve (§8).

The revenue logic

Allen's figures, shared for this purpose: average ticket ~$740 across all jobs; sewer jobs ~$9,200. A single additional sewer job per month covers the entire annual cost of the rebuild. That is the honest bar, and it is the one to report against.

What success and failure look like, in Allen's words

"Success is I stop having to explain the eighty-nine dollars on the phone forty times a week, and the sewer calls that come in already know what trenchless is. Failure is it looks nicer and the phone does the same thing it did before."

Measure the first clause: the site should reduce the questions dispatch answers. Track it by asking Renata monthly. It is qualitative and it is the metric the owner actually cares about.

Gaps & conflicts

[Missing] checklist, grouped by section, with owner

[Skipped by operator] — kept visible so a later reader knows these were decisions

Conflicts

Unverified assertions — marked so no agent treats them as established fact

• "Four service vans" — Allen said four; the legacy site says three and the GBP photos show three. Count them before publishing a number, or publish none.
• "612 Google reviews" — accurate on 2026-09-11 and will have moved by launch. Pull live or re-date.

Completeness

94. The six blocking items are: the hardness figure, A2P status, GA4/GTM access, the rebate terms, the tax treatment, and the GBP Saturday hours conflict. Everything else thins the build without stopping it.

First build sprint

Ten to fifteen tasks in dependency order. Each names the sections it reads from and what must be true for it to count as done.

Blocked tasks, named so the sprint does not stall silently

• Task 13 — blocked on the water hardness figure.
• Any SMS CTA — blocked on A2P 10DLC status. Not in this sprint at all.
• Rebate copy anywhere — blocked on Idaho Power terms. Not in this sprint.
• The §22 organic baseline — blocked on GA4 access recovery. Escalate at task 2 if unresolved.

Explicitly out of scope for this first slice, so the sprint ends instead of expanding

Kuna and Nampa geo pages · a blog cadence · the backflow testing page (queued next, not now) · the trenchless process video · any Spanish-language content · a second GBP.

End of brief. Forrestline Plumbing & Drain is a fictional composite created as a reference example. 94% complete, 6 blocking gaps named, every conflict recorded rather than guessed.