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In many cases people will leave out of self interest.  This is the backbone to capitalism.  I have left a few very good jobs because that was not where I wanted to spend my time and efforts.  Since 21 I have been self employees and I’m 35 now so most of my adult life I’ve been an entrepreneur.  

During this time I have owned and operated several businesses and have had plenty of employees.  Some were real rock stars and as their talent grew they naturally outgrew their position and honestly needed to leave my company in order to grow as a person and expand and improve themselves.

You can only have 1 chief in charge or you end up like the post office where they have a manager for just about every employee they have.  If I ran multi national businesses I think your points are more valid.  However for most smaller businesses you have a turn rate that is very natural to have because people are going to out grow smaller companies or just decide that is not the work they want to do for the rest of their lives.

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I won’t say you should be committed.  In the effort to get more sales we all try different things.

I do digital marketing for a living and kind of curious what the base rate per call was for you? 

You seem to know your numbers so you should know what your close rate percentage is for calls.  Let’s say 20% so 1 in 5.

from there you can work out your life time value and your 6 month value per customer.  I normally build service based campaigns to break even or be slightly ahead at the 6 month mark which for auto companies normally mean just 1 visit and maybe… an oil change or a second veichle taken in.

What I’m getting at here is you could probably easily afford to pay $10 for a qualified lead that would yield you a sale every $50 dollars spent.  You can get this all day long doing Call only campaigns inside AdWords or a mix of call only and regular search ads that are bid adjusted for mobile devices.

While you should of caught the issue sooner as you mentioned, we all have to take our lumps.  Your established and a pro so you can luckily afford to take them every once in a while.

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AdWords can work great even on low budgets.

The biggest issue I see when going into service based companies accounts is that often times the default setting are never changed for the campaign setup.  You should only be showing your ads to the people inside your service based area and not to “people in or searching for”.

This along with bid adjustments for Mobile and Tablet traffic can help a lot. 

With service based industries you want to ensure you are sending people to the most relevant page on your website for the keyword that triggered the ad.  If you where doing “Brake Repair” for example your adcopy should be about brake repair and you should be sending people directly to your brake repair webpage.

You should also be using Call tracking via a Google forwarding number as well as call only campaigns.  With service based companies you are going to find that most people want to call and speak to someone before they drive to the shop.  The only conversion goal you really need to focus on is getting that phone call.

Because of this you may want to bid adjust down on PC and Tablet traffic and bid adjust up on mobile traffic as well ensure you have a responsive website that shows your phone number very clearly on mobile devices. 

AdWords is not magic.  I see it work fantastic for some businesses and just absolutely suck for others.  In adition to focusing on calls you need to have your staff trained on handling phone calls and landing the sale.  For most my auto mechanics they close between 20% – 40% of all calls.

You should also know and understand the life time value of your customer.  Loosing money on the front end of ads is perfectly fine if you can recoup and get a profit in a short enough time frame down the line

I’m not here to sell my services and honestly WAY too busy at the moment to take on any clients but I do offer 100% for free training guides and materials for digital marketing including a free AdWords Search guide on marketingplaybook.co  .  I also hold live free weekly hangouts on youtube Wednesday at 2PM where people can ask their digital marketing questions.  If you have a specific question feel free to post a reply and I should be able to answer.