A team working through a plan at a whiteboard

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 can be trusted just produces wrong answers sooner, and results you cannot explain six months later.

  1. 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.

  2. Week two

    Make the outcomes measurable

    Every step that matters gets named and recorded: each action we track (we call these events), the details it carries, and which question it 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.

  3. Week three

    Check the numbers against your bank

    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.

  4. 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.

Colleagues working together over notes and a laptop

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 review

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 gets in the way.

All three are avoidable, so it is worth saying them up front.

  • Nobody on your side can approve a change within a week. The work stalls, and the stalled weeks still cost you.
  • The reported number needs to look good more than it needs to be right. Honest numbers usually look worse before they look better.
  • 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.

The Get started form takes about five minutes and asks what you want to grow. Tell us what you cannot currently answer as well, and we can skip ahead.