I’m Keith Groben. I founded R7 Creative and I run it. If you’ve read anything on this site, I wrote it.
What I’ve done
Twenty years marketing local service businesses — startups up to $60M in revenue. Trades, sign and print shops, specialty contractors, home services, residential solar, multi-location car washes. Different industries, different budgets, different owners, and the same failure every time: no system mapped to how customers actually find a business, trust it, and call.
The work adds up to $36M+ in tracked client results, 2,300+ Google reviews generated by the review system, and 18% average year-over-year growth across the businesses running it.
What I built
So in 2025 I built R7 Creative. It’s not an agency and it’s not a SaaS tool. Agencies sell skilled labor by the hour. Software sells you a login and leaves you to run it. R7 sells the system itself — people where judgment matters, AI where it’s fast, automation where it’s repetitive — and runs it for you.
Two services, run as one: Content and Website, with Google Business Profile management alongside. The client owns the site, the domain, the code, the data and the profile. Month-to-month. We win the next month by performing this one.
Where I work
North Central Ohio — Mansfield, Ashland and Wooster, and across Richland, Ashland, Wayne, Holmes, Knox and Medina counties. R7 has clients further out, including multi-location work, but this is home ground.
How I know it works
Because R7 runs the whole system on a real business before it ships to a client. Yoder Graphics in Northeast Ohio is the live R&D environment: the two services drove +18% revenue in 2025, and adding the website produced +48% profit in Q1 2026 against Q1 2025. Everything R7 sells has been run there first.
Other work: US Solar went from 6 to 1,800 reviews in 18 months and became the second most-reviewed solar company in the country. US Roofing launched from zero and did $1.2M in its first year. Ohio Car Wash Holdings reclaimed roughly 30 Google profiles across its locations.
What I write about
Local search and Google Business Profiles. What AI answer engines actually read when they visit a website. What a local service website has to do. What marketing genuinely costs an owner-operated business, in real numbers. Every post here is first-person, from the work — not a content-mill draft with my name on it.