The conversation comes before the plan, not after.
Most marketing gets priced as a package first and fitted to the business after. This runs the other way — the numbers come first, and the plan is sized to what they actually support. Five steps, start to finish:
Conversation
Your business, in your own words — what's working, what isn't.
Numbers
Average sale value, margin, current volume. Without this, nothing after it is honest.
Plan
A service mix built to your budget, and the maths behind it.
Build
Content, campaigns, whatever the plan calls for, delivered on a set cadence.
Report
What ran, what it did, what changes next month. Plain language, every time.
Thirty minutes, no pitch deck
On the phone or in person. What you sell, who buys it, what's already working, what's been tried and quietly dropped. Some of it is straightforward — your sector, how long you've been trading, what platforms you're already on. Some of it is more direct than a first conversation usually gets:
- What does an average sale actually make you, after direct costs — not revenue, profit?
- How many of those do you make in a typical month?
- What could you actually spend, honestly, not ambitiously?
- How much time can you personally give this, and are you willing to be on camera?
None of that is small talk. Every one of those answers changes what gets recommended next.
Whether it pays for itself, worked out before anything is proposed
Before a service mix gets built, I work out what it would need to cost and what it would need to produce to cover that cost. Not an industry average — your margin, your current volume, your real numbers.
Say your average job clears $400 profit. A month of content and ads costs $600. That's 1.5 more jobs to break even — everything after that is profit.
That's a worked example, not a quote. A business with a $50 average sale and thin margins needs a completely different plan to one with a $2,000 job and healthy margins — the same package would be reckless for one and pointless for the other. Yours gets worked out on your own numbers, specifically.
Sometimes the numbers say don't spend the money
If the extra sales it would take to break even are more than your business could realistically handle, or your margin's too thin for more volume to be the right fix, I'll say so plainly — and suggest what actually makes sense instead, which is sometimes a pricing review rather than a marketing spend. Marketing speeds up whatever's already happening in a business. If the underlying numbers aren't there yet, spending more on top doesn't fix that — it just spends money finding out.
Sized to what you can actually sustain
The plan that comes out the other end isn't just priced to your budget — it's sized to your real capacity. If you've got half an hour a week and can't be on camera, you won't be handed a plan that needs daily filming and a founder-led video series. If approval takes you a week, nothing time-sensitive gets proposed. A plan you can't actually keep up with is worse than no plan, because it fails in a way that looks like the marketing not working, when the real problem was the shape of the plan.
Every service on it is per-service, à la carte — one thing or twelve, no packages, no minimum term, changeable month to month as your numbers change.