How we work
Four weeks to the first honest answer.
Not four weeks to a deck. Four weeks to a number you can act on, and a clear view of whether we are worth keeping.
The first month
The order matters more than the speed.
Every week here depends on the one before it. Changing the advertising before the measurement is honest just produces wrong answers sooner, which is why most agencies show results in week two and cannot explain them in month six.
Week one
Write the questions down
Two hours with whoever actually knows the business, and no laptops open. We leave with a list of things you cannot currently answer, ranked by what a right answer would be worth to you. Everything after this is judged against that list.
From you: Two hours from the people who know how the money is made.
Week two
Make the outcomes measurable
Every step that matters gets named and recorded: the events, what they carry, and which question each one serves. You approve the plan before anything is installed. This is the week that decides whether the next six months mean anything.
From you: Access to your site, your ad accounts and whoever manages them.
Week three
Reconcile against what you banked
The numbers are set against what actually arrived in the bank. Where they disagree we fix the measurement rather than the report. Almost every engagement finds something here, and it is usually uncomfortable and worth knowing.
From you: Last quarter's real revenue figures, in whatever form they exist.
Week four
The first honest read
What the numbers say, what surprised us, and the one change we would make first. In plain language, written by a person. This is the point where you can judge whether the work is worth continuing, and you are meant to.
From you: An hour to read it and argue with it.
Most of the value in week one comes from somebody in your business saying a number out loud and somebody else disagreeing with it. That is the meeting. We just write down what it turns out you needed to know.
After the first month
A rhythm, rather than a project that never ends.
A weekly note
Spend, customers, cost per customer, what changed and why. Two minutes to read. Not a dashboard link.
A monthly read
The longer one. The funnel, the channels, what the month taught us, and what we propose next.
A quarterly argument
Where we go back to the list from week one and ask whether we are still answering the right questions. Priorities change, and a measurement plan nobody revisits slowly stops describing the business.
What makes this go badly.
Said out loud, because all three are avoidable and all three have happened.
- Nobody on your side can approve a change within a week. The work stalls, and you pay for the stall.
- The reported number needs to look good more than it needs to be right. Ours usually looks worse first.
- The questions from week one are never revisited, so a year later we are all carefully measuring something that stopped mattering in March.
Your turn
Week one starts with one question.
30 minutes, and the first thing we will ask is what you cannot currently answer. You can bring that to the call and skip ahead.