Engagement

Three ways this works, and four reasons not to.

What an engagement looks like, what we need from you before it can start, and the situations where hiring us would waste your money. The last list is the useful one.

Start the conversation When not to hire us

Hire

Before anything is scoped

Most engagements start with an audit, not a retainer.

Scoping a programme against assumptions is how both sides end up disappointed in month three. You can act on the brief with your own team.

Shapes

Three ways an engagement is structured.

There is no rate card, because scope moves the number and scope is not knowable before the audit. What we can tell you before any commitment is which problem is worth solving first.

Diagnostic audit

Fixed scope, one deliverable

A written brief on one part of the growth system: where demand comes from, which handoffs leak, what the measurement cannot currently see, and a sequenced backlog with dependencies marked. Most engagements start here because the alternative is scoping a programme against assumptions.

You suspect something is broken but the reporting will not tell you what.

Build and hand over

Project, defined end state

We build a specific system — lead routing and attribution, a conversion path, an AI-assisted content operation, offline conversion import — then document it and hand it to your team. The end state is agreed before the work starts, and it includes who operates it afterwards.

You know what needs to exist and do not have the capacity to build it.

Ongoing operating partner

Continuing, reviewed on a cadence

We run part of the growth system with your team, on an agreed measurement plan with defined leading indicators. Reviews are scheduled, and the review has authority to change the sequence or end the arrangement.

The work is continuous and you want accountability attached to it.

Prerequisites

What we need from you.

Short list, and none of it is unusual. The absence of the fourth item is the one that most often stalls an engagement after it has started.

Access to the analytics, ad accounts and CRM — read access is enough to start.
One person who can decide, or who can get a decision inside a week.
An honest account of what has already been tried and why it stopped.
The commercial numbers that matter: what a customer is worth and how long they take to close.

Wrong fit

When hiring us is the wrong call.

Stated plainly because discovering it in month three costs both sides more than reading it here.

You need a guaranteed ranking or a guaranteed AI citation

We will not sell one, because nobody controls those systems. If a guarantee is a requirement, another provider will give you one — it just will not be enforceable.

The brief is content volume at a target cost per article

Publishing many lightly-varied pages against the same intent splits the signal and ranks all of them lower. If the brief is throughput, we are the expensive way to get it.

You want the agency to own the accounts and the data

Everything we build sits in your tenancy. If the preference is for a provider who holds the accounts, that is a different operating model.

There is no budget for measurement

Without a way to tell whether the work is doing anything, an engagement becomes a matter of opinion in month four. That serves neither side.

Tell us what is not working

Continue with context

Choose the next useful path.

Go deeper into the evidence, compare the connected work, or bring us the constraint you are trying to resolve.

Questions

Ownership, cost and guarantees

The answers that usually come next, including the ones most agencies leave vague.

Evidence

What the claims rest on

Three case studies, each labelled by the kind of evidence behind it.

Stack

Whether we know your systems

The platforms we work in, and the architecture behind this site.

Current

What we are working on

A dated note on where attention is going, and what changed since the last one.