Many businesses—especially those in high-ticket service industries like law firms, cybersecurity agencies, and consulting companies—struggle with inconsistent lead flow, no-show rates on sales calls, and an over-reliance on short-term promotional tactics that fail to create scalable revenue.
This is because sales teams often spend considerable time engaging with potential clients who aren't actually ready or willing to make a major purchase. These leads may have been found through broad marketing efforts, such as a company's social media presence or ad campaigns, but many lack the interest or investment needed to become long-term customers.
This lack of a systematic approach to identifying and nurturing promising prospects leads businesses to wasting time chasing cold leads and failing to close major deals, resulting in unpredictable and inconsistent sales cycles that affect overall revenue and slow down long-term growth.
That's the problem 21-year-old entrepreneur Ciaran Houlihan set out to solve with Customers on Command, a hybrid marketing firm that helps service businesses secure leads more effectively by building predictable, systematic client acquisition engines.
Instead of chasing each lead individually, Customers on Command sets up an automated process to attract, qualify, and stay connected with high-interest clients. The system uses AI-driven outreach strategies consisting of emails, texts, and automatic reminders and follow-ups to keep customers engaged throughout the entire sale cycle, helping businesses convert more leads into paying clients and build a steady, consistent revenue pipeline.
Read on to discover how Ciaran Houllihan's marketing approach is reshaping lead-generation tactics for service-based businesses.
An Entrepreneur from a Young Age
Most marketers find their footing later in life, but Ciaran Houlihan started his career in online marketing as a teenager, working from his bedroom while still in high school. At 17, he launched his first business, Converté, a marketing agency that helps course creators and business coaches refine their sales processes and attract higher-quality leads, and scaled it to over $1 million in annual revenue.
As Ciaran became more familiar with marketing strategies, he realized that most businesses lacked a reliable way to distinguish between serious leads who were ready to buy and those merely browsing. Sales teams spend too much time chasing leads who skip business calls, back out of deals at the last minute, and likely never had any real intention of becoming customers, stalling sales cycles, driving up customer acquisition costs, and making revenue increasingly unpredictable.
This is an especially costly problem for service-based businesses, which rely on a steady flow of high-ticket clients to stay profitable. And with 61% of companies already reporting a decline in customer purchase frequency, this inability to identify and prioritize high-quality leads reduces revenue significantly.
Recognizing this gap, Ciaran saw the need for a different kind of marketing system—one built not just to boost visibility but to separate serious buyers from low-intent prospects.
Streamlining Client Acquisition with Customers on Command
In early 2024, Ciaran rebranded Converté as Customers on Command. Unlike traditional agencies, which focus on surface-level lead generation, Customers on Command delivers a fully automated client acquisition system that manages everything from initial outreach to conversion.
At the heart of the model is the AI Qualified Appointment Generator: an end-to-end tool designed to identify high-quality prospects, engage them at the right moment, and ensure that only the most qualified leads make it onto a sales calendar.
The process begins with precise audience targeting. Potential prospects are identified based on specific criteria (such as profession, age, or net worth) and engaged through channels like emails, SMS, retargeted ads, and LinkedIn messages—all tailored to generate interest. As leads interact, the system evaluates their likelihood to convert in real time and triggers automatic follow-ups that guide them through the sales funnel.
Once a lead books a sales call, the system continues nurturing and preparing them in advance by sending automated reminders and confirmations to ensure they attend the scheduled call, along with personalized content and detailed product information to keep them informed about the company's services. These strategies ensure prospects stay engaged, well-informed, and ready for a productive sales conversation, all while reducing no-show rates for businesses.
If a lead isn't ready to buy right away, the system continues to keep in touch with them through long-term follow-up sequences, such as periodic check-ins, to bring them back into the pipeline when they're ready to move forward, ensuring businesses can harness every possible conversion opportunity.
The result is a streamlined, data-driven process that keeps sales pipelines full of informed, sales-ready prospects—creating a more consistent and predictable revenue flow.
Ciaran's Vision for the Future of Marketing
Since its official launch, Customers on Command has shown incredible results in helping businesses improve their client acquisition strategies. Across its client base, businesses have seen call show-up rates exceed 85%, ad spend generating an 8x return on investment, and more than $60 million in total revenue. Internally, the firm drives an average of 120 high-quality appointments per month and is currently operating at a $2 million run rate, projected to surpass $5 million by the end of 2025.
With this system in place, Ciaran's long-term vision is to make structured, automated client acquisition the standard for all businesses by ensuring they maintain a consistent flow of high-quality leads, a predictable revenue pipeline, and a streamlined process from outreach to conversion. By moving beyond traditional marketing campaigns, he's focused on creating long-term systems that work in the background and automatically qualify leads so sales teams can focus on closing deals, not chasing them.
With Customers on Command, he's helping service-based businesses take control of their revenue pipelines and achieve sustainable, long-term success.
Leveraging AI to Drive Business Growth
According to Houlihan, AI-driven marketing isn't just the future—it's already here. Businesses that fail to implement systematic marketing strategies will continue to struggle with high marketing costs and low returns, unpredictable revenue cycles, and a constant need for expensive promotions just to keep the business afloat.
The future belongs to companies that build marketing systems that work 24/7, 365 days a year. Houlihan's approach ensures that lead generation, qualification, and conversion happen on autopilot, allowing businesses to focus on growth rather than survival.
For service-based businesses looking to establish a more consistent, predictable sales pipeline, join Customers on Command for a structured, automated solution that turns lead generation into a seamless, reliable system.
And if you want to learn more about optimizing your marketing strategies, follow Ciaran Houlihan on his YouTube and Instagram for expert tips.
