Please take the time to read the following as it will quickly help to establish if there is a good fit.
Your existing team or your new freelance team will do most of the heavy lifting, while we help to oversee and project manage their work. You’ll also work directly with them on day-to-day tasks, while our emphasis is on growth and performance.
To get the best from our relationship, it’s important that you communicate with us clearly, action requests for any materials, and provide timely feedback.
Our services are not about hours, they’re about impact, and we want to work with clients where we can deliver in a big way. The deliverables are discussed in more detail below, but as a guideline, we typically spend anywhere from 10 to 20 hours per month, per client.
Time is not the best measure of the value we provide. Consider that a f/t CMO costs 150-250K per year and agency daily rates can run to 4 figures. Our services cost a fraction of that with far less commitment. Since we focus on strategy and oversight, we’re able to get a lot done in a short amount of time.
Let's look at a hypothetical example of what our impact could look like.
Your monthly marketing budget is 10K, ROAS is 3, revenue is 30K. Factoring in the COGS, you’re just about breaking even but customers are not coming back, making this unsustainable. We come in and help to re-focus your target audiences, setup new ad structures and optimise cost per click. With some time and experimentation, ROAS jumps to 4, making your campaigns ‘somewhat’ profitable. We then help to boost lifetime value by 25% through an email engagement programme and revamped social / influencer strategy. Some of these new profits are reinvested into improving conversion rates by 20% (CTA, landing pages, messaging, etc). Your 10K budget is now generating 50K of revenue / 20K earnings. Further lifetime gains are yet to be realized. This would equate to an ROI of 10x on our fees. On top of that, our impartial advice has helped you to avoid several costly mistakes (we’ve made them all already, so you don't have to), making the true ROI closer to 15x.
We help to source freelancers with your unique situation in mind. We do all the screening and only put you in touch with the best candidates so you can have the final say. Over the years we’ve worked with 000s of freelancers and have developed a good process. Ultimately, every contract is between you and the freelancers directly. Things can and will go wrong just like they do with employees or agencies. When this happens, we will jump in to find replacements with minimal disruption to the business.
We promote the freelancer model for several reasons. (1) It removes the typical agency model from the equation and is a lot more cost effective. (2) Stable freelancers tend to be happier due to their better work-life balance, resulting in better outputs for you. (3) You can focus on keeping your core team nimble, happy and productive. (4) There is great talent all over the world so why limit yourself.
We are not a panacea. It takes time and we suggest working with us for at least 6 months to 1 year. The goal is to help you build a lean and sustainable marketing function, address inefficiencies, and share lots of insights along the way, so you gain long-term value.
This depends on your situation, target market, product range, channels, etc. Once we’ve discussed this we can give you a clearer indication.
We are external consultants and while we do act as an extension of your team, we are not a part of your full-time staff and would prefer for that to be clear to all stakeholders.
We are here to give you strategic oversight and help oversee the execution as an outsider with a fresh perspective, so we would rather not. In our experience, regular team calls are not always productive and focused, so we’d rather spend the time working on your growth. We like to have monthly meetings with a set agenda, additional ad-hoc ones as required, plus regular email communications in between.
The first month will be spent gathering information, getting access to everything, and having meetings to learn more about your business. From there we will formulate a high-level growth roadmap, start finding freelancers, and overseeing the execution of campaigns and projects. Low-hanging fruits always come first.
Yes, of course. Our standard contract includes mutual NDA clauses.
You run a small, forward-thinking business, with anywhere from 1 to 50 people. Perhaps you’re a startup or are bringing new products to the market. You might be an established player that wants to reinvigorate your digital presence. Your annual revenue is in the range of 500K to 5M. You are a decision-maker and do not need sign off from somebody else. You’ve done various forms of digital marketing with mixed results. You are willing to engage, listen, and then implement with gusto. You are open to different perspectives but would want to validate before diving in fully.
We generally don't do detailed proposals because that requires a lot of time and effort that we could spend elsewhere. We will instead spend time answering questions by phone or email to give you a comfort level on how we’ll approach working for you. We can also prepare a high level outline proposal for you.
This can be hard to itemise due to the consultative nature of the work and the large number of variables involved. But as a guideline, our main deliverables are providing you with transformative growth advice, impartial marketing direction, sourcing freelancers (with no markup) and helping to oversee projects and campaigns. This is based on our wealth of experience running campaigns, consulting for high-growth startups, working at agencies, working in-house, building products, continuous learning and being freelancers ourselves.
The focus is not on long reports, and most of our recommendations are short, concise, and only in outline form. We can then expand where that would be helpful.
One of the first things we will do is benchmark your current situation, define some goals and formulate a growth roadmap.
We would prefer not to negotiate on our fees.