Before recommending channels, budgets or campaigns, I do the homework — your numbers, your customers, your competitors. Then we build a 90-day plan that fits your actual business. Skip step one and you're gambling.
Most service businesses skip strategy and jump straight to channels — Google Ads, Meta Ads, SEO. That's like buying lumber before you've decided what to build. Sometimes it works. Often it wastes a year of budget.
The strategy phase answers four questions: Who's your real buyer? What do they actually want? Where do competitors fail them? What can you afford to spend per client?
Once those are answered, the channel decisions become obvious. Sometimes the answer isn't even paid marketing — it's hiring a salesperson, or fixing your offer, or raising prices. I'll say so if that's the case.
"We need to do TikTok" or "we need SEO" — without knowing if either fits your customer or your unit economics. The channel is the conclusion, not the starting point.
Surveying your friends, your team, or worse — your competitors' marketing copy. Real strategy comes from talking to actual buyers, ideally lost deals and detractors.
Spending on growth without knowing what a new client is worth, what they cost to deliver, and the math you have to hit for it to make sense. Vanity metrics own that vacuum.
"Sarah, 34, marketing manager in Vancouver" personas built by ChatGPT are imaginary. Real buyer profiles come from interviews — friction points, hesitations, exact language.
If your strategy looks like everyone else's in the space, you've decided to compete on price and convenience. That's a hard fight to win as a small business.
Not a slide deck for the founder's drawer. A working document — short, opinionated, with math and decisions — that the team uses for the next 90 days.
One-page summary your team can act on tomorrow. The strategic bet, the math, the priorities.
5–10 interview synthesis. Real language, decision triggers, objection patterns, the words you should be using in every ad.
Top 8 competitors plotted on a 2-axis matrix. Where the white space is — and where everyone else is fighting.
LTV, CAC target, payback period, gross margin per service line. The math sheet that every decision flows from.
Which channels for which audiences, with rationale tied to unit economics. Budget split, expected timelines, kill criteria.
Week-by-week execution plan. Deliverables, owners, decision gates at day 30 / 60 / 90.
What could go wrong, what we'd watch for, what the early signals look like, contingency plans.
Templates, prompts and frameworks your team uses to keep executing after I leave.
Fixed project fee covering interviews, audit, math, plan, and the handoff workshop. Payable 50% up front, 50% on delivery.
If we move into ongoing execution after the strategy phase, 100% of the strategy fee is credited back against your first three months of base fees.
Running ads is execution. Strategy is the decision about what to execute and why. You can skip strategy and still get lucky — but you can't skip it and consistently win. Most agencies skip it because it's hard, slow, and unsexy.
Yes. We adjust the approach: instead of interviewing existing customers, we interview prospects you've talked to, lost deals, and people who fit your ICP from your network. The math gets fuzzier but the strategy still has shape.
Absolutely — that's the goal of the handoff workshop and implementation kit. About half my strategy clients run the plan themselves; the other half ask me to execute pieces of it. Either works.
The customer insights and competitor map stay useful for 12–18 months. The 90-day plan is, by definition, 90 days. We typically schedule a strategy refresh once a year.
Yes, standard practice. I work with one client per niche at a time in Vancouver to avoid conflicts.
Then I tell you. I've turned down strategy projects where the real bottleneck was the offer, the operations, or the price. I'd rather lose the project than charge you for a plan that won't work.
Free 30-minute call. We'll look at your business and figure out whether a strategy project is the right next move — or whether you should skip straight to channels.
Book a strategy call