Why We Built Winback Engine (And Why We Can't Stop Talking About It)
I’ve been building companies since 1999. I’ve had wins, I’ve had lessons, and I’ve learned to recognize the feeling when something is genuinely working. Not “the metrics look okay” working. I mean the kind of working where clients are calling you excited, where the team is fired up, where the math is so clear that it almost feels too good.
That’s what’s happening right now with Winback Engine. And I want to tell you how we got here.
It Started at LTVplus
GQ and I co-founded LTVplus years ago. We built it into a 500+ person global customer experience operation serving over 100 clients. One of the services we ran was called RecoverPayments, where we’d help businesses recover failed payments and past-due accounts. It was solid work. Good margins. Steady revenue.
Over time, we started running win-back campaigns for some of our clients. Calling lapsed customers, getting them to rebook. And we got really, really good at it. The results kept getting better. The clients kept getting happier. It became clear that this wasn’t just another service. This was something special.
The Moment Everything Changed
We started working with a major multi-location franchise operator. They owned locations across several wellness and fitness brands. Thousands of customers flowing through their locations every month, and a huge chunk of them quietly lapsing after a few visits.
We put together a small team of trained agents and started making calls. Not automated emails. Not text blasts. Real phone calls from real people who knew the customer’s name, their last visit, and their favorite service.
The results hit us in the face.
Within the first few weeks, we were generating 35+ rebookings per week. The ROI wasn’t 2x or 3x. It was 9-10x. For every dollar the client invested, they were getting nine to ten back in recovered revenue. And the revenue was showing up within days. Not months. Days.
I’ve launched a lot of things. This was different. The speed of value delivery was unlike anything I’d experienced in business.
Why This Excites Me So Much
Here’s what makes Winback Engine different from almost every other service I’ve been involved with: the value is immediate, visible, and impossible to argue with.
With SEO, you wait months and then try to untangle what drove the results. With advertising, you’re always debating attribution. With consulting, the value is often subjective.
With Winback Engine? We call a list of lapsed customers. They rebook. The revenue shows up in the client’s system. Every call is recorded. Every booking is tracked. Every dollar is accounted for.
My co-founder Dave Schneider put it perfectly: “With most marketing services, it can take months before the client sees measurable results. This is completely different. The ROI is large, it’s easy to prove, and the process is straightforward. It just works.”
Dave comes from Shortlist.io, one of our portfolio companies. He brings this incredibly analytical, mathematical approach to everything. When I pitched him the Winback Engine concept, he dug into the data, saw the numbers, and said “I’m in.” He now runs operations and growth alongside me, and his systematic approach is a big part of why the campaigns perform so consistently.
Why Multi-Location Franchises
We tried this model with different types of businesses. Ecommerce. SaaS. Local services. The results were clear: multi-location franchise operators are where this absolutely crushes it.
Here’s why:
The customer lifetime value is massive. A single visit at a wellness or fitness location is $150-200. Over a year, an active customer is worth thousands. When that customer lapses, the loss is significant. But they’re also incredibly recoverable because they already know and trust the brand.
The scale is built in. A 10-location franchise might have 10,000+ lapsed customers across all locations. That’s a huge list of people who liked the service enough to come in at least once. Most of them just got busy and nobody followed up.
Private equity operators love it. Rollup companies that acquire franchise brands are always looking for ways to improve revenue per location. When you can show them 9-10x ROI on a service that starts delivering in the first week, it’s a very short conversation.
The Team Behind It
Winback Engine isn’t a startup operating out of a garage. It’s powered by the full LTVplus infrastructure that GQ and I built over years. Samir Said, a long-time business partner, came back and invested into LTVplus. He now runs our portfolio companies as CEO. Our agents are trained, supervised, and recorded. We’re ISO 27001 certified. Great Place to Work certified. We’ve been doing this kind of work at scale for over 8 years.
What’s new is the focus. Winback Engine takes everything we’ve learned about customer engagement and points it directly at the single biggest revenue leak in franchise businesses: lapsed customers.
The Offer
We kept the pricing simple because we believe in what we deliver.
You put down a $5,000 deposit. We integrate with your booking platform, train agents on your brand, and start calling within two weeks. We guarantee a minimum 3x return on your investment. If we don’t deliver after a 3-month pilot, your deposit is fully refundable.
The deposit gets credited against commissions as we deliver results. There are no long-term contracts. We earn your business every month with results.
What’s Next
We’re early. We’re growing. And honestly, I haven’t been this excited about a project since the early days of building LTVplus. Waking up every morning to see the rebooking numbers come in, hearing from clients who can’t believe how much revenue was sitting in their database untouched. That’s the kind of work that makes all the hard days worth it.
If you operate a multi-location franchise or service chain and you’re watching customers quietly disappear every month, I’d love to show you what’s possible. Book a strategy call at winbackengine.com and let’s look at the numbers together.
The results speak for themselves.