PIMS runs the Local Lead Engine for independent propane operators — local SEO, Google Business Profile, listings sync, post-service review requests, vendor blog publishing and AI-search visibility — aimed at booked stops inside the 30-35 mile radius each bulk plant delivers to. PIMS covers all six parts under a 12-month agreement. Built by an operator who ran 87 propane branches across 12 states. Founding Partner Southwest Propane (three New Mexico locations) is live.
Booked stops.
Not clicks.
The Local Lead Engine your independent operation never built.
Marketing Department in a Box. PIMS, the Propane Insider Marketing System, is the propane-industry version, tied to the Propane Insider newsletter. Recurring marketing work, handled for you.
Your phone rings less than it did last winter. You tried a contractor, or hired somebody part time, and it didn't stick — you're not a marketing person and neither were they.
This page is the whole document: the problems, the fix, the comparison, the ROI math, the proof. No summary, no deck.
Read it in order or jump. One operator is live on it right now — Southwest Propane, three New Mexico locations.
Before the call: run the AI visibility check on your own company. About a minute. No call, no signup. We'll walk your actual results on the demo instead of showing you slides.
On this page
- A. Seven leaks in your lead flow
- B. What the engine does about each one
- C. Full feature matrix (6 pillars)
- D. Comparison vs three alternatives
- E. How few new customers pay for it
- F. How Founding Partner pricing works
- G. Southwest Propane proof point
- H. Why an operator built this
- I. Risk reversal + FAQ
- J. Next step
Seven leaks in your lead flow
Pulled from demo calls with operators who diagnosed themselves and reached out. The pattern holds from single-hub independents to five-hub regionals. You can see the first three. The last four stay invisible until somebody runs the numbers.
Phone is ringing less than last quarter — cause unknown
The #1 self-diagnosis in demo conversations. Lead volume declined but the owner cannot pin the source.
Google Business Profile half-completed and abandoned
Half-finished profiles are the norm among family-owned operators. Hours wrong on at least one location. Photos years out of date.
Review velocity flatlined three or more quarters ago
New review counts are zero or single-digit per quarter on most locations. Reply velocity even lower.
A national chain moved into the service area and ranks above you for your own keywords
Owner watches local pack drop them to position 2 or 3. Cost-per-acquisition climbs.
Hired a marketing person who posts memes on Facebook — cannot measure results
Paying a contractor every month with no attribution model and no monthly report. Output reads like social noise.
No monthly performance data — flying blind on marketing ROI
Budget justification impossible. Marketing feels like overhead, not investment. Owner avoids the line item.
Multi-location sites treated as islands — strongest hub subsidizes weakest
Each location managed by whoever has time. No cross-location strategy. Performance varies wildly within the same operator.
What the engine does about each one
One to one. Each leak above maps to a specific part of the engine that runs in the background once it's on.
| # | Problem | What PIMS does |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Phone is ringing less than last quarter — cause unknown | Local SEO + GBP audit + listings sync surface where prospects are looking and what is broken. Monthly performance report compares to baseline so the cause becomes visible. |
| 02 | Google Business Profile half-completed and abandoned | Multi-location GBP management with auto-posting, attribute completion, photo cadence, Q&A monitoring. AI-drafted review responses operator approves before send. |
| 03 | Review velocity flatlined three or more quarters ago | Post-service SMS or email review-request automation triggered by completed delivery or service ticket. Smart-routing to the right platform per customer. |
| 04 | A national chain moved into the service area and ranks above you for your own keywords | Radius-based per-location SEO + GBP work targets the exact keywords the chain is winning. Programmatic city pages cover every town inside the 30-35 mile delivery radius. |
| 05 | Hired a marketing person who posts memes on Facebook — cannot measure results | Auto-generated monthly performance report the 1st of every month. Per-hub rankings, GBP impressions, calls, direction requests, review velocity, blog traffic — all in plain language. |
| 06 | No monthly performance data — flying blind on marketing ROI | PIMS produces the same report every customer gets on Day 7 (preview) and Day 30 (first full). MoM + QoQ deltas. Auto-emailed to a multi-recipient list each cycle. |
| 07 | Multi-location sites treated as islands — strongest hub subsidizes weakest | Cross-location GBP coordination prevents cannibalization. Aggregated dashboard surfaces per-hub deltas. Multi-location SEO covers every service area without duplicating effort. |
Six parts. One engine.
All six run at every tier. What changes between Solo, Multi and Enterprise is how many locations are covered, how often Bill is in the room, and the per-location economics — not which parts you get.
The sixth part is AI search: Google's AI answers, ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Ask one of them about propane in your area and it will name a company. Maybe you. Maybe the outfit two towns over. Run the AI check and find out which — it takes about a minute and it's your own company name in the box, not a sample.
Most marketing vendors treat AI search as a side experiment they'll get to. We run it full time. The person running it spent 25+ years running propane companies before he ever built software for them, so the answers we're teaching those engines to give are the ones an operator would actually give.
Think of it as the secret AI expert on your team — at a fraction of what the alternative costs. Agencies bill thousands a month for less than this.
Local SEO
- ✓Radius-based per-location SEO covering every ZIP code in your delivery area
- ✓Rank tracking per service-area keyword, refreshed weekly
- ✓LocalBusiness + FAQPage + BreadcrumbList schema deployed sitewide
- ✓AI-assisted meta titles + descriptions on every page
- ✓Programmatic city + service pages for every town inside the 30-35 mile delivery radius
- ✓Quarterly SEO refresh against the latest Google ranking signals
- ✓Page-speed + Core Web Vitals monitoring on every page
Google Business Profile (GBP)
- ✓Multi-location GBP management with auto-posting on a defensible cadence
- ✓Completeness audit + fixes for every hub (hours, attributes, services, photos)
- ✓Q&A monitoring with AI-drafted response suggestions
- ✓AI-drafted review responses operator approves before each send
- ✓Weekly location-specific GBP posts in your voice, not boilerplate
- ✓Photo cadence recommendations + scheduled uploads
- ✓Cross-location coordination to prevent rank cannibalization
Listings & Citations
- ✓Name / address / phone (NAP) checked for a match across 52 directories
- ✓Directories including Apple Maps, Bing Places, Yelp, Foursquare, BBB, Nextdoor, MapQuest, YellowPages
- ✓Day-one submission worklist, then ongoing mismatch monitoring
- ✓Quarterly consistency audit + fix-on-detection
- ✓Per-location service-area definition matched to your actual delivery radius
Reviews
- ✓Post-service review-request automation via SMS or email
- ✓Triggered by delivery completion or service-tech check-in
- ✓Smart-routing to the platform where you most need reviews (Google / Yelp / BBB / Facebook)
- ✓AI-drafted response suggestions for every incoming review
- ✓Sentiment-tagged review log feeds next round of marketing copy
- ✓Per-hub tracking of review velocity + average rating trajectory
Vendor Blog
- ✓1-2 AI-drafted blog posts per week branded in your voice, not Propane Insider's
- ✓Seasonal + evergreen propane topics (heating prep, tank safety, fill timing, autofill vs will-call)
- ✓Editorial rules ensure zero cross-promotion of unrelated brands
- ✓Auto-publish to your WordPress site once you approve
- ✓Content strategy follows propane operator seasonality + local buyer intent
AI Search (AEO)
- ✓Get found when prospects ask Google’s AI answers, ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini for a propane company in their area
- ✓AEO-shaped content blocks (TL;DR / definitions / numbered processes / FAQ with FAQPage schema / cited stats)
- ✓AI-crawler access verified per-bot for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, OAI-SearchBot, Applebot-Extended and Bingbot — checked weekly, with the exact fix if anything changes
- ✓Per-engine optimization playbooks — each AI engine has different citation logic; PIMS treats them distinctly
- ✓Entity-authority signals: Knowledge Graph + Wikidata-ready claims + Organization / Person / LocalBusiness JSON-LD with sameAs link networks
- ✓Monthly AI-citation tracking: how often you show up in AI search answers, with diffs over time
The full technical standard every site we build has to pass →
Bonus: Monthly Performance Report
- ✓First-of-month auto-generated + auto-emailed to your recipient list
- ✓Per-hub rankings movement on every tracked keyword
- ✓GBP impressions, calls, direction requests, website clicks — MoM
- ✓New reviews + sentiment breakdown + reply velocity
- ✓Vendor blog traffic + best-performing posts
- ✓Listings consistency snapshot across directories
- ✓MoM + QoQ deltas in plain language — no jargon
Against the three paths you already looked at
Category framing — not a hit piece on any specific company. Most operators evaluating PIMS have looked at one or more of these paths. Each does something well; none covers the same surface at the same price point with the same propane domain knowledge. The "Generic SaaS" column is a STACK — you would not buy one generic tool, you would assemble seven of them to attempt our bundle, and still not get propane awareness in any of them.
| Dimension | PIMS | Digital Agency | In-House Hire | Generic SaaS Stack |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Who does the work | PIMS runs it — the work is the product, not the tools | An account team, learning propane on your dime | One hire, and only for as long as they stay | Nobody. No schema markup, no AI-crawler configuration, no programmatic city pages, no entity-graph work, no NFPA 58-aware compliance triggers. Every hour of the work stays on your desk. |
| Time to first output | Week 1 (auto) | 30 - 60 days (onboarding ramp) | 60 - 90 days (ramp) | 2 - 4 weeks per tool (config + integration) |
| Propane domain knowledge | Built in — operator founder | Generic — learns on client dime | Generic — learns on the job | Zero propane awareness in any of the tools |
| 6-pillar coverage (incl. AI Search) | All six included | Most (depends on scope) — AI Search rarely covered | Spotty (depends on hire) — AI Search expertise rare | Takes seven separate tools — still incomplete; AI Search is its own additional category |
| Multi-location support | Designed in — cross-location SEO + GBP | Yes, but upsell cost | Manual (not scaled) | Per-location fee in each tool — multiplied |
| Monthly performance report | Auto-email 1st of month | Quarterly or by request | Ad hoc / none | None — would need a separate aggregator tool |
| Dedicated account contact | Shared (Solo) / Account mgmt (Multi+) | Yes (account manager turnover risk) | Yes (the hire — turnover risk) | Ticket-based across multiple vendors |
| Scales with office count | Per-office linear, flat cap at Enterprise | Non-linear cost jump | Exponential (new hires) | Per-location fee × each tool in the stack |
Pricing is covered on the demo.
“How do I know a lead became a stop?”
We see calls, direction requests and form fills. Your office knows which ones became a site survey and a first fill. One line logged on your side and the monthly report ties the two together. Anybody who claims they can count your closed accounts without your data is guessing.
Discuss your office locations
Pricing is covered on the demo.
Southwest Propane — Founding Partner #1
One customer, named, with the starting line documented. That's all we have and we're not going to pad it.
Southwest Propane is a three-hub family-owned propane delivery operator in New Mexico — Moriarty (main filling station + East Mountain / Albuquerque corridor), Pecos (Santa Fe corridor), and Mountainair (rural service area). Like most independents, they had no in-house marketing, and their online presence was working against them: all three Google Business Profiles were incomplete and inconsistent, addresses were wrong across listings, and the operation was losing leads to a national chain in their service radius. Goal: rebuild local visibility from the ground up, fast, without them hiring a full-time marketer.
What our team did: corrected all three Google Business Profiles and standardized the name, address, and phone so every listing across the major directories reads the same, and stood up rank tracking plus AI-search visibility. Today Moriarty and Mountainair rank #1 on Google for every keyword we target, the listings are corrected, and we track how the AI search tools (ChatGPT, Google's AI answers, and the like) surface Southwest. Location-specific GBP content, a starter set of homeowner-voice blog posts, and a post-service review-request program are built and staged to publish as Business-Profile access and live review links come online. A monthly performance report is configured for the GM (Valentin Lucero) and leadership. They are live as our first Founding Partner; the case study carries the documented April 2026 starting line and month-over-month deltas as the data lands.
See the full Southwest case study →Why an operator built this
Bill Stomp ran 87 branch offices across 12 states over a 25+ year fuel-delivery operating career. Combat veteran. He's since helped 200+ propane companies. He's been on the operator side of every conversation a propane marketer would have.
PIMS exists because Bill kept watching family-owned operators get outranked and outmarketed by national chains — not because the chains had better service, but because the chains had marketing departments. PIMS is the marketing department your independent operation never had.
Not a tech founder who watched a YouTube video about propane. An operator who lived it, built the tools he wishes he had had, and is now selling them to the operators behind him.
He's not guessing what an empty truck costs. He's paid for plenty of them.
What if it does not work?
How will I review progress during the agreement?
Use Mission Control and the regular digest to review work done and next missions. Compare available Google call data with your office records of new accounts. PIMS is a 12-month agreement.
How do I know a lead turned into a real stop?
You tell us. PIMS can see calls, direction requests and form fills. Only your office knows which ones became a site survey and a first fill. Give one person one line to log it and the monthly report ties the two together. Anybody who claims they can count your closed accounts without your data is guessing.
How is this different from hiring an agency?
An agency rep learns propane on your dime and then leaves. This was built by an operator who ran 87 propane branches. The propane knowledge is in the product, not in one account manager you have to train and then re-train when they quit.
How is this different from hiring a part-time marketer?
A part-time marketer is a real salary for someone who does not know propane yet, and you are the one who has to manage them. PIMS is the whole engine running whether you remember it or not, built by somebody who ran 87 propane branches. We will put the two side by side with your numbers on the demo.
What agreement term does PIMS use?
PIMS uses a 12-month agreement. Review the agreement with Bill before signing.
What about my existing website and blog?
We work with what you have. We do not make you rebuild. We clean up GBP, sync listings, take over local SEO, and start drafting your blog.
What if I have 6+ locations across multiple subsidiaries?
Multi-subsidiary chains get custom enterprise pricing per their operation. All deals at this scale require Bill's personal sign-off — book a demo or call (610) 228-0887 directly to discuss your structure.
Discuss your office locations
Bring your office locations: together, we map the delivery territory each office serves.
Want numbers before you book? Run the AI visibility check first — about a minute, no signup — and we'll start the call from your results.
Veteran-owned and operated · Founded 2022 · larry@propaneinsider.com