Home / How we work
Nothing starts until the scope and the price are in writing.
Five stages take you from a first conversation to in-house specialists working on your account. This page describes each of them, what we need from you to do the work properly, and how long things realistically take.
Request a free auditBefore anything is agreed
The audit is genuinely free, and the plan is yours either way.
Thirty minutes on a call, then a written review of what we found. It covers where enquiries are coming from, what they appear to cost, how quickly they are answered, what happens when a prospect does not reply, and which step of the funnel is losing the most people.
You keep that document whether you engage us or not. If you take it to another agency, or hand it to somebody in-house, that is a fair outcome. We would rather be judged on the quality of the thinking than on how hard it is to leave with it.
If the audit shows the problem is not a marketing one — pricing that cannot support the cost of acquisition, or a business already at capacity — we will say so on the call rather than propose a retainer.
What the written plan contains
- Where your enquiries come from today
- What each one appears to cost
- The gaps in tracking and measurement
- The step losing the most prospects
- What we would fix first, and why
- What that would cost, as a flat monthly fee
The engagement
Five stages, in order.
The sequence is the same for a single service and for a full engagement. Only the number of specialists changes.
The free audit
A thirty-minute call, followed by a written plan. We ask what you sell, what a customer is worth, how enquiries reach you and who answers them. We look at the accounts and the site ourselves before the call where access allows. Nothing is quoted until we have seen the current position, and there is no obligation attached to the document.
Scoping and fixed pricing
We put the scope in writing: which services, what is included each month, what is produced, and the flat monthly fee. The fee does not move with your advertising spend, so scaling a budget does not raise our invoice. Advertising spend, software licences and hosting are billed directly to you by those providers, at cost, and remain visible to you. Nothing begins until you have approved the document.
Specialist assignment and introduction
We assign a specialist in the discipline itself. Paid media, SEO, web and automation are separate crafts, and each is handled by someone who does that work daily and does it here, rather than a brief passed out to a contractor. You meet them on an introduction call, you know their working hours, and you deal with them directly rather than through a layer of account management. Where you have engaged several services, you meet the whole pod, along with the senior contact who holds the roadmap across all of it.
The first thirty days
The opening month is deliberately unglamorous. Access is granted and verified, every account and asset is created or transferred into your name, and tracking is repaired before anything is scaled — conversions, call tracking, form events and the link between an enquiry and the revenue it produced. In parallel your specialist documents the baseline, so later reporting compares against something real. Campaign work begins inside this window, but at a level that produces learning rather than a number we cannot yet trust.
The monthly rhythm
From month two onward the cycle settles: continuous management during the month, a written report at the end of it covering what changed, what moved and what is next, and a call to agree priorities for the month ahead. Budgets, tests and scope are reviewed openly. Where the top tier is in place, the quarter adds a strategy session that looks further than the next thirty days.
Communication and reporting
You should never have to ask how the work is going.
How we talk
On a single service, communication runs by email and scheduled calls with your specialist directly. On Full Growth, you get a shared Slack channel with the whole pod in it, so a question reaches the person who can answer it rather than a mailbox.
Response times
Four business hours on Full Growth. Next business day on the single services. Those are commitments we hold ourselves to, measured within the working hours we agreed at the introduction call and published to you at the start.
Monthly written reporting
A written report every month, in plain language: what was done, what changed in the numbers, what did not work, and what happens next. Where a movement is within normal variation, we say so rather than present it as a result.
Quarterly strategy
On Full Growth, a quarterly session that steps back from the month — channel mix, seasonality, what to stop, and where the next twelve months of investment should sit. It is a working session rather than a presentation.
What we need from you
The work is a partnership, and some of it can only come from your side.
Every discipline is delivered in-house, so there is no chain of subcontractors between you and the work. What we cannot supply is knowledge of your business and authority to act inside it.
Access is the first of these. Advertising accounts, analytics, the CMS, DNS and the CRM — created in your name, with us added as users. Where access is not available, our work becomes a list of recommendations somebody else has to action, and progress slows to whatever that person's diary allows.
The second is a single decision-maker. Approvals that need consensus across four people take weeks, and the cost of that delay lands on the results rather than on the process. One named person able to approve creative, budget and scope keeps the engagement moving.
The third is honest information. Real margins, real close rates, and a frank view of how much additional work you can take on. If a booked job is worth less than we assume, or your team is already full, we will optimise towards the wrong target with complete confidence.
Practically, that means
- Access to advertising, analytics, CMS, DNS and CRM accounts
- One named decision-maker for approvals
- Creative and copy reviewed within a few working days
- Honest figures on margin, close rate and customer value
- A realistic view of delivery capacity
- Enquiries answered by someone at your end
None of this is a demand. It is simply the part of the work that cannot be done from the outside, and engagements where it is in place perform visibly better than those where it is not.
Timelines
Different channels move at different speeds, and none of them move on demand.
Paid channels can show signal quickly. Within the first weeks there is usually enough data to see which terms, audiences and messages are producing enquiries, though early figures are directional rather than settled and small numbers move around more than people expect.
SEO and AI search optimisation work on a different clock. Technical fixes can register within weeks, but content, structure and authority take months, and competitive commercial terms take longer still. Assistants do not publish a ranking system either, so progress there is measured across repeated observations rather than a single position.
CRM, automation and deliverability work sits between the two. The build is finished quickly; the value shows up over the following months as follow-up sequences reach prospects who were never going to reply on the first day.
The one rule that governs pace
Nothing is scaled until the measurement behind it can be trusted. If conversions are double-counted, if calls are not attributed, or if the CRM cannot say which enquiry became revenue, then a larger budget only produces a more expensive version of the same uncertainty.
That occasionally means the first month looks slower than you would like. It is the reason later months can be judged on something firmer than an impression count.
Request a free marketing audit.
Tell us where growth has stalled. We will come back with what we would fix first, in writing.
Request a free auditA 30-minute review. The written plan is yours to keep either way.