- “Can we just have Essential?”
- If the site works and only needs keeping alive, yes, and we will not try to move you off it. But be honest about what it is: Essential is the systems, and it includes no time. It does not write anything, change anything or bring you anything. Most people who call us are not actually asking for that. They are asking for someone to run their marketing, which is a different job at a different price, and we would rather say so now than let you find out in March.
- “So is it just you?”
- No, and it is not forty people either. It is a small senior team who have done this before: design, copy, strategy, film, development, brought in for the thing each of them is actually good at. There is no account manager, so you talk to whoever is doing the work. Ricky is on every job, which is the part that does not scale and is not meant to.
- “A sprint and Managed are the same money. What is the difference?”
- One has a finish line. A sprint stands up a channel that does not exist yet: research, messaging, creative, cadences, tracking, first launch. Three months, then it ends and you own what it built. Managed runs a channel that already exists and keeps it fed, with the leads counted, for as long as you want it fed. The money is the same because the work is. Nobody can manage ads that have not been built yet.
- “We already know our positioning.”
- Then skip Think and keep the money. That is the whole reason this is sold as components. Plenty of companies come to us with the story settled and only need the estate built and a channel run. The ones who are wrong about it usually find out during the Build, which is the expensive place to find out.
- “£1,500 is agency money, and the last agency did nothing.”
- Probably because you were paying for advice rather than for a channel being run. Managed is one channel, run properly, with the leads counted. If in six months you cannot see where your enquiries came from, we have failed and you should stop paying us.
- “We have five sites. Is that five plans?”
- No. One plan, and £250 a month for each extra site on Active, or £75 on Essential, where nothing is being changed. Five sites on Active is £1,500, not £2,500. The plan you pick is about how much work you want done; the count is about how much there is to look after. Charging you five times over for one relationship would be easy money and an insult, so we do not.
- “What actually makes Managed worth £1,500?”
- A standing hour with a fractional CMO every month, one to one, that does not come out of your two days. Twenty-three years of running marketing in B2B and recruitment technology, in the room, on your numbers. Then a channel run properly, the leads counted, and two days of the squad to build whatever the hour decides. Bought separately that hour sits inside an £800 day. It is the part of the plan we would miss if you cancelled, and so is the part we price around.
- “Your Video Shoot is £3,000. Why is a Film Day £5,000?”
- Because a shoot is a day and a film is not. The £3,000 buys two operators, the kit and the day, and it is the right thing to buy if you already know what you want shot and who is cutting it. The extra £2,000 is the two things either side: the scripting and shot list beforehand, so the day produces something usable, and the fortnight of editing afterwards that turns one shoot into a film for the site and about ten cuts for social, subtitled and graded. A shoot with nobody cutting it is a hard drive. We have been handed several.
- “Should we just hire somebody instead?”
- Do the arithmetic properly first. A marketing manager is £45,000 to £55,000, plus employer National Insurance, pension, tools and the fee to recruit them, which is around £70,000 before anybody has done anything. Two channels fed with an asset every quarter is about £45,000 a year here, and it arrives with people who can build the site, shoot the video and run the ads, which one marketing manager cannot do alone. The honest case for hiring is that they are yours full time and they learn your business in a way we never will. That is a real advantage, and at some point you should take it. Until then this is cheaper and it is broader, and when you do hire, we brief them.
- “We are paying you more than anything on this page.”
- Then you are on a stack, not a tier, and it should come apart into lines you can read: a care plan that continues, and one or two things alongside it that finish. Ask us which is which and when each one ends. If we cannot answer that in a sentence, we have let a programme turn into a monthly bill, which is the thing this entire page exists to stop. If you are already with us, what you pay should reconcile to the prices on this page, and if it does not, that is a conversation we owe you rather than one you have to ask for.
- “What happens in month three if the leads are not there?”
- We tell you, in writing, before you have to ask. Every channel we run is counted, so by month three there is a number on the table rather than a feeling: what went out, what came back, what it cost per enquiry. If it is not working we say which of three things is true, because it is usually one of them. The offer is wrong, the audience is wrong, or the channel is wrong. Two of those we can fix inside the same fee. The third means stopping, and we would rather stop a sprint in month three than watch it run to twelve. Nobody has ever been sold a fourth month to save face.
- “Am I locked in, and who owns everything if we part?”
- You own your domain, your site, your content, your analytics and every account, and you always did. We hold admin access to do the work and we hand over every credential we have within fourteen days of you asking, whether you are leaving or just curious. No exit fee, no charge for the handover, and a full backup with it. The only commitment anywhere is the twelve months on a care plan, and thirty days before renewal you can stop with no argument. We are explicit about this because one of our clients bought a business, could not get into his own website for three days, and then found the plugins that ran it had been switched off the moment he stopped being somebody else’s client. That is not a hypothetical to us.
- “How much of my time is this going to cost me?”
- Two hours in the first week, then one call a month. That is the honest answer for a care plan or a sprint. A build asks for more, because there are two sign-off gates and you are the only person who can approve them: the page plan and the copy, roughly an hour each, and we need them back inside a week or the whole thing slides. Foundations asks for the most, about two hours of session time plus introductions to three or four customers. Everything else is our problem. We do not run workshops you have to attend to justify our fee.
- “Why twelve months on the care plans?”
- Because the work is. Backups, indexing and content only pay back over months, and we are not going to start something in January that gets cancelled in February with nothing to show. The price is fixed for the term, you can move up whenever you like, and thirty days before renewal you can stop with no argument and no fee. Projects and sprints have no such term. They end when they end.