Engagements

Threeshapes,andaclearideaofwhentostop.

We are bought in one of three ways. All of them are priced before they begin, all of them end in a handover, and all of them are designed so that you could carry on without us if you chose to.

Shapes: 03
Fees: Fixed to scope
Media: Billed to you, direct
Notice: 30 days, either way

Second opinion

Fixed fee · about two weeks

An independent read on what you already have. We look at the site, the search presence, the list and the ad accounts, and write down what we would keep, what we would stop and what we would build.

Review of the assets you already own
The three things we would change first
What we would leave alone, and why
A ninety-minute session to argue with it

Taken by plenty of businesses who then do the work themselves. The document is yours either way, and we would rather you used it than filed it.

Build sprint

Start here

Fixed scope · fixed price

One asset, built properly, with a start and an end. A page architecture rebuilt, a lifecycle programme written, a measurement setup repaired, a rebuild supervised from the outside.

Written scope agreed before anything begins
Implementation with, or alongside, your team
Documentation and a real handover
An aftercare window while it settles

Where most engagements start. It is the fastest way for both sides to find out whether working together is worth continuing.

Standing advisor

Monthly · rolling, with notice

A named consultant with your business in their head: available for decisions, reviewing what your team and other suppliers produce, and holding the longer plan between quarterly sessions.

A regular working call and a written note
Review of work produced by other suppliers
Quarterly session on what to build next
An agreed point at which it should end

We keep the number of these deliberately small, and we will tell you when you no longer need one rather than wait to be asked.

Money

How we charge, written plainly.

Fee structures shape advice more than anyone likes to admit. Ours is arranged so that the honest recommendation and the profitable one are the same recommendation.

Hands mid-explanation across a table during a review

Scope, not spend: Our fee is set against the work described in the scope. It does not move when your media budget does, which means a recommendation to spend less costs us nothing and a recommendation to spend more earns us nothing.
Priced before it starts: Second opinions and build sprints carry a fixed fee agreed in writing. Standing advisory is a flat monthly amount reviewed each quarter. There is no hourly meter and no surprise line at the end.
Media stays yours: Advertising is billed by the platform directly to your own payment method. Your budget never passes through our accounts, so you can reconcile every pound at source without asking us for anything.
Notice, not lock-in: Advisory runs monthly after any initial period, with thirty days on either side. If the honest position is that you no longer need us, we would rather say it than wait for you to notice.

Sequence

The ladder decides the order.

We do not run a fixed process with named phases, because businesses do not arrive in a fixed state. What we do have is an order of preference: fix what holds everything up before improving what sits on top of it.

See which practice sits on which rung

L1
Permanent
The offer
What you sell, who it is for and what it costs. No amount of marketing survives an offer the market does not want, and no consultancy should pretend otherwise. We start here because the answer changes everything above it.
- Positioning and pricing sense-check
- Objections gathered from real sales conversations
- The claim the rest of the marketing has to support
L2
Compounds
The site
Every channel eventually points here, so this is where clarity pays the widest dividend. Structure, speed and plain explanation come before any attempt to send more people to it.
- Journey walkthrough with drop-offs named
- Performance budget and template repairs
- Rewritten copy on the pages that carry traffic
L3
Compounds slowly
Owned search presence
Pages that keep being found are the slowest thing to build and the hardest for a competitor to take away. This layer is where patience is repaid, and where most businesses under-invest because the return arrives late.
- Technical foundations and indexing
- A page map worth defending
- Writing produced from internal expertise
L4
Compounds
The audience you hold
An address collected honestly is reach nobody can ration. Building the list, giving people a reason to stay on it and treating it as an asset rather than a broadcast channel is the highest-margin work in most businesses.
- Capture worth exchanging an address for
- Lifecycle flows written in your voice
- Reviews and referrals as a repeatable process
L5
Stops with the spend
Paid reach
Last, deliberately. Advertising is excellent at accelerating something that already works and poor at substituting for something that does not. Placed at the top of the ladder it does its best work and costs the least.
- Brand and non-brand separated and reported apart
- Creative testing with stated arguments
- A written condition for reducing or stopping

From your side

Four things we need to be useful.

Somebody who can decide

One named person with the authority to approve a structural change. The speed of that decision is the single largest variable in how fast anything improves.

Access, at the lowest level that works

Read-only to begin with, on the accounts and properties involved. We never need billing credentials and we will say exactly why each permission is required.

Someone who can ship

Most of what we recommend touches the site at some point. We write the specification; a developer on your side, or a partner, has to be able to implement it.

Tolerance for being disagreed with

A meaningful part of what you are buying is an outside view. If the plan is fixed and the job is execution, an implementation partner will serve you better and cost less.

Honestly

Three situations where you should call somebody else.

You need results inside a month

Most of what we build takes a quarter or more to show. If the business needs revenue in four weeks, the honest answer is an advertising specialist and a sharper offer, not us.

You want somebody to own the number

We advise, build and hand over. We do not sit inside your org chart carrying a revenue target, and an arrangement that pretends otherwise ends badly for both sides.

The plan is already decided

If the work is to execute a strategy that is not open to question, you want an implementation partner. Half of what you would pay us for is the argument.

Principles

Five commitments we will not trade away.

Own before you rent

Where a durable asset and a rented one would produce the same result, we build the durable one. It is slower, it is less impressive in a first-quarter report, and it is the reason clients stay.

Subtraction first

Our first recommendation is usually to stop doing something. Most marketing programmes have more moving parts than the team can maintain, and removing one is often worth more than adding three.

Nothing you cannot maintain

We will not leave behind a structure, a tool or a process that depends on us being available. If your team could not run it in six months without a call, we have built the wrong thing.

We say when to stop

That applies to channels, to projects and to our own engagement. An advisor who never recommends less work is not advising, and we would rather end well than linger.

Plain English or it does not ship

Every document we produce should be readable by somebody outside marketing. If a recommendation only makes sense in our vocabulary, it is not finished.

Where to start

Find out how much of it you actually own.

Tell us what you have and we will send back an independent read: which parts would still be working if the advertising stopped, which would not, and what we would build first. No obligation attached to any of it.

Ask for a second opinion support@stakeconsultingltd.com