Here’s exactly
how we work.
Most agencies are vague about the “how” because the “how” is the part where they hope you don’t ask. We’re the opposite. Every phase, every deliverable, every meeting cadence, every tool we use — laid out below. Read it before the first call so you know what you’re signing up for.
Every step, broken open.
Each phase below shows what happens, who owns what, and how long it actually takes. Hover into any phase to see the full breakdown — including the inevitable “what we need from you” parts that most agencies hide until you’ve already signed.
Audit & plan
We do a full audit of your current marketing — site, ads, SEO, tracking, conversion paths — and turn it into a written 12-month plan with priorities, KPIs, budget allocations, and a timeline. The output is a real document, not a slide deck. You’ll know exactly what we’re going to do, in what order, and what you should expect at each milestone.
- ✓Full audit of your existing marketing stack
- ✓Written 12-month strategic plan (PDF + shared doc)
- ✓KPI framework + monthly targets
- ✓Budget allocation across channels
- ✓Kickoff call (90 min, recorded)
- ✓Read-only access to ad accounts & analytics
- ✓Access to your CRM & existing customer data
- ✓2-hour kickoff session with key stakeholders
- ✓Brand assets (logo, fonts, photography)
Foundation build
The technical buildout — site updates or rebuild, tracking infrastructure (GA4, Meta Pixel, Google Ads conversion API, CallRail), CRM pipelines, email/SMS workflows, and ad creative production. This is the heaviest week of the engagement on our side, and the lightest on yours. You won’t hear from us daily, but you’ll see weekly progress in Slack and the project board.
- ✓Site updates / new landing pages built
- ✓Conversion tracking deployed & QA’d
- ✓CRM pipelines & automation workflows configured
- ✓Initial ad creative + copy variants
- ✓Reporting dashboard set up (Looker Studio)
- ✓Approval on creative direction (1 round)
- ✓Content review of landing page copy
- ✓Customer photography (or we’ll source stock)
- ✓30-min weekly sync call
Launch & data
Campaigns go live. The first 4 weeks of live data come in. We’re watching ad performance daily, tweaking creative, optimizing audiences, and identifying the early winners. Don’t expect peak ROAS yet — the first month is data-gathering. The patterns become clear by week 4 and our recommendations sharpen.
- ✓Campaigns launched (Meta + Google)
- ✓Daily monitoring + creative iteration
- ✓First end-of-month report (data + insights)
- ✓Lead quality feedback loop with your team
- ✓Speed-to-lead from your sales team (5-min target)
- ✓Weekly lead-quality feedback (“good fit” or “not fit”)
- ✓Realistic patience — month 1 is data-gathering
Scale & optimize
We have enough data now to scale what’s working and kill what isn’t. Budget shifts toward winning campaigns. Creative rotates monthly to fight ad fatigue. SEO content production is in full swing. CRM nurture sequences run 24/7 in the background. This is when most of the compounding growth happens — and when most clients see CPL drop and pipeline stabilize.
- ✓Monthly creative refreshes
- ✓SEO content (4–8 articles/month, depending on plan)
- ✓Monthly written report + 60-min review call
- ✓Quarterly strategic review & plan recalibration
- ✓Subject-matter expertise for SEO content (15 min/week)
- ✓Customer success stories / case anecdotes
- ✓Monthly report review & strategic input
Compound growth
Six months in, the foundation is paying compound interest. Organic search rankings are kicking in. Past customers are coming back via nurture. Your CRM is full of warm leads. We’re spending less time fighting basic problems and more time looking for the next 10x lever. This is the phase where engagements become genuinely strategic — and where the ROI math makes the engagement obvious.
- ✓New channel exploration (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, podcasts)
- ✓Brand-building content alongside performance
- ✓Quarterly business reviews with leadership
- ✓Year-2 strategic plan delivered in month 11
- ✓Bigger-picture business strategy input
- ✓Visibility into product or service evolution
- ✓Quarterly leadership review participation
Strategic partner
By year two, we’re effectively part of your team. We’re in your Slack, in your weekly leadership meetings, and we’re reasoning about your business as if it were ours. This is where the relationship pays off most — not because of new “tactics,” but because of compounding institutional knowledge that nobody else has. Most clients renew year after year not because they have to, but because the cost of starting over with anyone else is enormous.
- ✓Continued execution + new channel build-outs
- ✓Annual strategic plan + budget recommendations
- ✓Whatever the business needs next — ad-hoc strategy
- ✓Annual budget & goal alignment
- ✓Continued trust + open communication
- ✓The freedom to tell us when something’s not working
How often you’ll
actually hear from us.
The biggest complaint people have about agencies is “I never know what they’re working on.” We solved that with predictable cadences — daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly — across every channel. You always know what’s happening, when the next update is, and how to reach us in between.
Async on Slack
Shared Slack channel between your team and ours. Quick questions, screenshots, lead-quality feedback all happen here. We respond within business hours, usually within a couple of hours.
30-min sync call
Same time every week. Quick KPI review, what’s launching, what we need from you. Recorded for anyone who can’t attend. 30 minutes, no fluff. Cancellable when there’s nothing to discuss.
Written report
End-of-month PDF report covering KPIs, what worked, what didn’t, what we’re testing next month. Plus a 60-min strategic review call. This isn’t a dashboard screenshot — it’s a real analysis document.
Strategic review
Quarterly business review with your leadership team. Bigger-picture thinking — channel mix, budget rebalancing, new market opportunities. This is the meeting where the next quarter’s plan gets set.
The tools we
actually run on.
Most agencies hide their tooling. We don’t — because the tools matter. Every tool we use is best-in-class for its job, and we know it deeply. No black-box dashboards. No proprietary tools that lock you in. If you ever leave us, you keep all your data, all your accounts, all your integrations. They were always yours.
And if you already use a tool we’ve not listed, we’ll integrate with it. We’re tool-agnostic — we just want what’s best for the work.
The 90-day view.
The 12-month view.
The two horizons buyers ask about most. Here’s our honest answer for both — what’s realistic in 90 days, what compounds over 12 months, and what you should *not* expect to see in either.
Quick wins,
real data.
The first 90 days are about foundation, launch, and early data. We expect to see meaningful early wins — but be honest about what compounds over months vs. what happens in week 4.
- ✓By day 30: tracking deployed, campaigns live, first leads
- ✓By day 60: early creative winners identified, CPL trending down
- ✓By day 90: stable cost-per-lead, predictable flow, first cohort of nurture results
- ✓What you should NOT expect: SEO rankings, organic compounding, brand recall
Compound
growth.
The 12-month horizon is where the boring, slow plays pay off. SEO compounds. Past customers re-engage. Your CRM fills with warm leads. By month 12, the business looks meaningfully different.
- ✓By month 6: SEO content showing first ranking gains, organic CPL dropping
- ✓By month 9: compounding starts — organic traffic doubles paid traffic value
- ✓By month 12: predictable pipeline, mature CRM, brand recall in your market
- ✓The non-linear truth: month 11 produces more results than months 1–6 combined
Things people ask
before signing.
The questions we hear most about how the engagement actually runs. The biggest fear is always “what if it doesn’t work?” — so we’ve tried to be honest about that one specifically.
Honest answer: month 1 results are usually modest, and that’s expected. You’re paying for foundation that month — site updates, tracking, creative production, ad account warm-up. Real ROI shows up in months 2–4 as we have enough data to scale winners and kill losers.
If by month 3 the numbers aren’t trending in the right direction, we have a hard conversation. Sometimes we extend the diagnosis (lead quality issues are usually sales-team speed-to-lead problems, not ad problems). Sometimes we adjust strategy. Occasionally we’ll recommend pausing until conditions are right. We’ve never asked a client to keep paying for results that aren’t materializing.
We work alongside in-house teams all the time. Most often the split is: in-house owns brand, content, social, customer comms — we own performance marketing, SEO technical work, and conversion optimization. The cleanest divisions are by function, not by channel.
What doesn’t work: trying to coordinate two parties on the same task. We’ll discuss what makes sense for your team during the first audit call.
Strategy isn’t sacred. Markets shift, products change, priorities pivot. We expect mid-engagement changes — they happen in 70%+ of engagements. The plan we deliver in week 1 is a starting point, not a contract.
What we ask is that strategy changes go through the weekly call so we can think through the implications together. Reactive month-over-month pivots burn budget; thoughtful quarterly recalibrations compound.
Strategy, account leadership, and the work that requires judgment is done by senior team members — typically the people you meet on the audit call. Production work (ad builds, creative iterations, SEO content drafts, dashboard setups) is split between senior and supporting team based on complexity.
What you won’t get: a senior pitching you, then handing you off to a junior they introduce in week 2. Your account lead is consistent across the engagement.
Standard engagements are month-to-month with a 30-day notice period. No multi-year lock-ins. The reason: marketing should compound month over month — if it isn’t, you should be able to leave. Locking clients in usually masks performance problems we’d rather face directly.
For larger engagements (Web rebuilds, multi-channel launches) we sometimes structure 6-month commitments with milestone-based payments — that’s case-by-case and only when both sides need the certainty.
Everything is yours. Always was. Your ad accounts, your domain, your analytics, your CRM data, your content — all owned by you. We just operate them on your behalf during the engagement.
If you leave, we hand off cleanly: documentation of what was built, access transferred, a 30-day handover window where we’re available for questions. No drama. No held-hostage data. If we ever made it hard to leave, it would be the end of the agency.
Now you know how.
Want to start?
Free 30-minute audit of your current marketing setup. We’ll point out exactly where the leaks are — same depth of analysis we apply when we engage new clients. Yours to keep, even if you don’t hire us.