Assessment, plan, decision, work log.

Most marketing relationships start backwards. A salesperson pitches a package, you sign a contract, and only then does anyone look closely at whether the package fits your business. We built the opposite order on purpose: look first, write it down, let you decide with the whole picture in front of you, then prove the work every month instead of asking you to trust a dashboard. That's the whole process. Below is what actually happens at each stage.

Step one: we assess your market

This is the part most agencies skip or rush, because a real assessment takes time and doesn't generate revenue until it's finished. We do it first anyway, and we do it before you've paid anything. It covers your website and its technical condition, your Google Business Profile and listings if you're a local or service-area business, your current ad accounts and spend if you're running any, and — the part that actually determines the plan — who else is competing for the customers you want.

That competitive read is the piece that makes the difference between a template and a real recommendation. A roofer competing against three independent local shops is a different job from a roofer competing against a private-equity-backed regional chain with an in-house marketing team. Same trade, same services on paper, genuinely different amount of work required to win. We're not guessing at that from a spreadsheet; we're looking at the actual businesses currently taking the calls you want and working out what it would take to outrank or outbid them.

The assessment usually takes about a week. We'll ask for access to whatever's relevant — analytics, ad accounts, your CMS if we need to check something technical — and we'll tell you plainly if there's a delay on our end rather than let the week quietly become two.

Step two: you get a written plan and a price

This is the document that replaces a price list. It contains the services we'd recommend and, just as importantly, the ones we wouldn't — most clients need two or three of the thirteen we offer, and naming the ones you don't need is part of the job, not a courtesy. It lays out the order we'd tackle things in and why that order, since fixing a broken Google Business Profile before running paid search to a page that doesn't convert is a different sequence than the reverse. It includes a rough month-by- month shape for the first six months, what we'd need from you and how often, and the monthly number on the front page in plain terms.

You keep this document regardless of what you decide next. If you want to take it to another agency and ask them to match or beat it, that's a legitimate use of it and we won't pretend otherwise. The plan is proof of the work we did during the assessment, and it belongs to you the moment we hand it over.

Step three: you decide

There's no countdown, no "this price expires Friday," and no follow-up sequence designed to wear you down into signing. Sit with the plan, take it to whoever else needs to see it — a business partner, an accountant, a franchisor — and come back when you're ready, whether that's tomorrow or next quarter. We'd rather be turned down by someone who understood exactly what they were saying no to than hired by someone who felt rushed into it. A rushed yes tends to turn into a confused client three months in, and that's worse for both sides than an honest no on day one.

If the answer is no, we ask what changed your mind, mostly because it helps us write a better plan for the next business in a similar position. There's no penalty for saying no and no pressure disguised as a "quick follow-up call."

Step four: we run it, and you see every month's work

Once you're a client, the reporting is a work log, not a rankings graph. Every month you get the actual tasks we completed, dated, with links to what changed — a new page, a fixed listing, a campaign that launched or one we paused because it wasn't performing. If your market genuinely didn't need heavy work in a given month, the log says that plainly and explains why, rather than padding the report with busywork to justify the invoice.

This is also where the plan gets revisited. Markets move — a competitor launches an aggressive campaign, a service that looked secondary in the assessment turns out to matter more once real data comes in, seasonality shifts what's worth spending on this month versus next. We treat the written plan as a starting point we adjust openly, not a contract we quietly ignore or rigidly enforce regardless of what's actually happening in your market.

What happens after the minimum term

Every plan states a minimum term up front, and it exists for a practical reason: most of these services can't prove themselves in six weeks. SEO and content take months to show in rankings; even paid search needs enough runway to optimize past the first few weeks of data. The minimum term is there so neither of us is judging the relationship before it's had a fair chance to work, not as a way to lock you into a fee, and after it, everything moves to month to month with 30 days' notice. Ad accounts stay under your billing throughout, pages stay on your domain, and none of it is held hostage if you decide to leave.

Where this sits with pricing

This process is the reason there's no price list on the site. Two businesses in the same industry can need completely different amounts of work — see how we price for the fuller explanation — and the only honest way to arrive at a number is to do the assessment first. Everything above is what that actually looks like from your side of the table.