Everyone shows you the funnel. Nobody shows you the leaks.
The people spilling out of the sides were already yours — you had paid to put them there. Media buying, creative and lifecycle run as one plan, judged on what reaches the bottom.
Three open sides: Retargeting, Search, Email & SMS. The people spilling out already cost you money once. Buying more traffic refills the top and widens the puddle.
Three failures that look like a traffic problem and are not.
01
Creative fatigues faster than any team can replace it
A set that worked in week one is tired by week four, and the answer is never one better ad — it is enough concepts in rotation that the next winner is already in test when the current one dies. Most stores are structurally unable to produce at that rate, so performance is a sawtooth nobody planned.
02
Every platform is grading its own homework
Meta claims the sale, Google claims the same sale, and the email that actually closed it claims it too. Add the dashboards together and you have sold more than you shipped. Until one number reconciles with your bank, every optimisation decision is a guess wearing the costume of data.
03
The cheapest revenue in the business belongs to nobody
The second order costs a fraction of the first, yet email, WhatsApp and SMS are somebody’s side-of-desk task. Acquisition is asked to carry growth alone, which is exactly why the CAC keeps climbing and the margin keeps thinning.
Every order tells you the truth. Nobody reads it.
A hundred dollars through your checkout, itemised the way your accountant sees it rather than the way the dashboard reports it. Move your own three numbers and watch the only line that matters move with them.
At these numbers a hundred dollars of revenue leaves you $3.50. That is why a campaign is never judged on revenue here, and why we ask for your margins before we quote you anything.
What we would report on, and what each one is for.
You already watch these. The difference is that they are managed together, on one definition, so improving one does not quietly damage another.
Blended ROAS
Total revenue divided by total ad spend, across every platform. The only ROAS that reconciles with your accounts, and the one we are accountable for.
Contribution margin after ad spend
What is left once COGS, shipping, payment fees and media are paid. It decides whether a given ROAS is worth having at all — some 3× is profitable and some is not.
Average order value and units per order
The lever that turns a mediocre ROAS profitable without touching the ad account. Bundles, thresholds and post-purchase offers move this.
New-customer CAC, held apart from blended
What it costs to buy a stranger, separated from what it costs to re-sell someone you already own. Blending the two hides the moment acquisition stops working.
Repeat rate and time to second order
Whether you are building a customer base or renting traffic. It is the number that decides what you can afford to pay for a first order.
Creative win rate and time to fatigue
How many concepts beat the control, and how long a winner lasts before it decays. It sets the production rate the account actually needs — the rest is guesswork.
Tick what is true. Three or more and this is your stage.
The stage you need is decided by what is already working, not by budget. Switch stage below and the list changes with it.
Tick the ones that are true.
Nothing is submitted and nothing is stored — this is here so you can rule the stage out as easily as rule it in.
Tick the ones that are true.
Nothing is submitted and nothing is stored — this is here so you can rule the stage out as easily as rule it in.
Tick the ones that are true.
Nothing is submitted and nothing is stored — this is here so you can rule the stage out as easily as rule it in.
Foundation for E-commerce, line by line.
Every line links to the service page it comes from, with its standalone price, so you can check the arithmetic rather than take our word for it.
Excludes ad spend, which you pay directly to the platforms.
Your first consistently profitable paid channelScale across channels without cannibalisationThe full-funnel revenue machine
Media buying on one platform
Up to $7,500 a month in ad spend, on whichever platform your buyers are actually on. One platform run properly beats three run thinly, and at this budget that is not a preference, it is arithmetic.
Part of Media Buying → 02Two static ad sets a month
Eight designed ads, sized for every placement. Enough variation for the algorithm to have something to choose between, which is the difference between testing and guessing.
Part of Performance Creative → 03Conversion tracking set up and monitored
Before anything is optimised we make sure the numbers are real, checked against your own order records rather than the platform's word for it.
Part of CRO & Analytics → 04Live dashboard and a monthly report
The same numbers we look at, available to you the whole time — not a slide deck assembled the day before the call.
Part of Media Buying → 05A monthly strategy call
Thirty minutes with the person actually running the account, not an account manager relaying it.
Part of Media Buying →Media buying across two to three platforms
Run as one account rather than three, with budget moved between them on blended performance instead of each platform's opinion of itself.
Part of Media Buying → 02Creative Retainer: eight statics and four videos a month
The production rate that keeps a winner in rotation while the next one is already in test. This is the single biggest lever on performance at this stage, and the reason most accounts stall without it.
Part of Performance Creative → 03Tracking integrity monitored, not assumed
Server-side conversion tracking and a standing check that it is still telling the truth after every platform update.
Part of CRO & Analytics → 04A quarterly strategy sprint
A working session on the next ninety days: what to stop, what to scale, and what to test — with the numbers in front of everyone.
Part of Media Buying → 05Live dashboard, monthly report, monthly call
Unchanged from Foundation, because transparency is not a feature you upgrade into.
Part of Media Buying →Full multi-platform media buying
Every platform your buyers use, run as one account with one budget and one blended target.
Part of Media Buying → 02Creative Retainer: eight statics and four videos a month
The production line that keeps every platform supplied without cannibalising the others' assets.
Part of Performance Creative → 03Email and WhatsApp lifecycle management
Welcome, abandoned cart, post-purchase, win-back and VIP journeys, managed monthly with revenue attributed back to each flow.
Part of Lifecycle & Retention → 04CRO Program: two experiments a month
Structured tests on the pages the traffic already lands on, with statistical readouts rather than opinions about which button won.
Part of CRO & Analytics → 05A daily AI performance monitoring agent
Watches every account daily for spend spikes, conversion drops and tracking failures, and alerts with a recommended action rather than a notification.
Part of AI Automation → 06Bi-weekly strategy calls
Every two weeks, because at this budget a month is long enough to waste real money.
Part of Media Buying →What this would cost you separately.
Read this honestly: at $1,340 of fixed lines against $1,450, you are not buying a discount here. You are buying one team, one plan and one person accountable for whether the numbers add up, instead of three invoices and nobody who owns the result. Figures on the left are the closest equivalent line from the à la carte menu; a line inside a stage is never an exact copy of a standalone service, so treat this as a fair comparison rather than an identical one.
The Creative Retainer alone is $1,200 a month. The rest of the price is multi-platform media management, which à la carte runs at 12% of spend once you pass $7,500 — on a $15,000 budget that is $1,800 on its own. Bought separately those two lines already exceed $2,950, and they would still be two suppliers optimising against each other. Figures on the left are the closest equivalent line from the à la carte menu; a line inside a stage is never an exact copy of a standalone service, so treat this as a fair comparison rather than an identical one.
The fixed lines alone come to $3,750 a month against a price of $5,400 — and that is before the media management fee is counted at all, which on a $40,000 budget would be $4,000 by itself. At this stage the arithmetic is not close, which is the honest reason to consolidate rather than the persuasive one. Figures on the left are the closest equivalent line from the à la carte menu; a line inside a stage is never an exact copy of a standalone service, so treat this as a fair comparison rather than an identical one.
What this stage leaves out, on purpose.
Named here rather than discovered in month three. Each can be added, and each links to what it costs.
A website or landing page
Foundation assumes you already have somewhere for traffic to land. If that page is the weak link, adding traffic multiplies the problem rather than solving it.
Add a landing page — $450 one-time →A conversion testing programme
Testing needs volume to reach significance. At Foundation budgets you usually do not have it yet, and we would rather say so than sell a programme that cannot answer anything.
CRO Program — $1,200/mo →Email and lifecycle
The cheapest revenue in the business, and deliberately not here. One channel has to work first, or lifecycle is just re-mailing an audience you have not built.
Lifecycle Management — $800/mo →Email and lifecycle
Still out at this stage. Structure is about making acquisition scale cleanly; retention is the next compounding layer, not a distraction to half-build now.
Lifecycle Management — $800/mo →A conversion testing programme
Included from Ecosystem. Below that spend level, most tests never reach significance and the result is confident nonsense.
CRO Program — $1,200/mo →Daily automated monitoring
Structure is watched weekly by a person. The daily AI agent is an Ecosystem line because it earns its cost against a bigger budget.
Performance Guardian — $4,500 one-time →SEO and content
A separate discipline on a separate timeline. It compounds, it does not respond, and pretending otherwise inside a performance retainer helps nobody.
SEO Growth — $1,600/mo →A replatform or a new store build
We will tell you when the store is the constraint. Building it is a project with its own scope and its own price, not something absorbed quietly into a retainer.
E-commerce Store — from $2,500 →Organic social management
Ecosystem covers paid, creative, lifecycle and testing. A daily content operation is a different team and a different rhythm.
Social Growth — $1,400/mo →What we will not do, whatever you pay us.
01
We will not quote you a ROAS before we have seen your margins
A number promised before we know your COGS is a number invented to win the meeting. What counts as a good ROAS for you depends entirely on what is left after the product, the shipping and the fees.
02
We will not report platform-claimed revenue as results
Adding up what Meta, Google and TikTok each say they produced is how agencies show growth that never reached the bank. You get blended figures, reconciled against your own orders.
03
We will not route your ad budget through our account
It goes from your card to the platforms. We never hold it, float it, or take a percentage of it as margin. Management up to $7,500 a month of spend is a flat $900 — scaling your budget does not inflate our invoice.
Signature to first launch: 5 to 10 business days.
What happens, and what we need from you at each point. The second column is the one most agencies leave vague.
We take access to the accounts that already exist, in your name, and audit what is actually running — including the things nobody remembers switching on.
Approve access requests from your own logins. No shared passwords, ever.
Tracking is verified against your real order records before anything launches, so month one is measurable rather than retrospectively explained.
Point us at whatever holds your real numbers: the payment processor, the store back end, or the CRM.
First campaigns, first creative and the reporting dashboard are built. You see the plan before it spends anything.
One round of comments, from whoever knows the customers best.
Launch, and the first week is watched daily rather than reported monthly — the early days are where the expensive mistakes happen.
Nothing. This part is ours.
First full report and the strategy call. It states what we got wrong as well as what worked, because the second month depends on the first being read honestly.
45 minutes, and a decision on what changes.
What you are committing to.
The same terms apply to all three stages and every service on the site.
- Invoiced monthly in advance. Three-month minimum, then month-to-month with 30 days’ notice. Three months is the shortest honest term for anything measurable.
- Ad budgets are paid by you, directly to the platforms. We never hold, route or mark up your media spend, and the management fee is the only thing we are paid.
- Platform subscriptions stay on your billing. Advertising accounts, email platform, messaging, hosting — all in your name, so none of it is hostage to the relationship.
- You own every account, asset and piece of data created during the engagement, including after we part ways. That is not a courtesy at the end; it is the arrangement from day one.
- Onboarding is 5 to 10 business days from signature to first launch, depending on which services are in the plan.
- Custom scopes are always available. If none of the three stages fits, tell us the goal and the budget and we will price the actual work rather than sell you the nearest box.
- The $95 strategy session is credited in full toward your first invoice, so if we work together the session costs you nothing.
The questions that decide it.
Can I not just run the ads myself?
You can, and some owners should. The question is whether you can do it while also buying inventory, running operations and producing creative at the rate the platforms now demand. What you cannot do from inside one ad account is see the cross-platform truth — which is where most of the wasted spend hides.
The last agency burned my budget. Why would this be different?
Because nothing is scaled until the tracking is verified against your real orders, and because everything lives in one dashboard you own from day one. You see the same numbers we do, in real time, including the weeks that go badly.
Percentage-of-spend feels like a tax on my own growth.
It is, which is why up to $7,500 a month of spend our management is a flat $900. Above that a percentage applies, and it steps down as you scale — 12%, then 10%, then 8%. Your ad budget is always paid by you, directly to the platforms.
How long before I know whether this is working?
Tracking integrity in the first week, first campaigns live inside ten business days, and a full report with a strategy call at day 30 that states what we got wrong as well as what worked. A fair read on a channel takes about ninety days.
What happens if we stop?
You keep everything — the ad accounts, the creative, the flows, the dashboard, the data. All of it was built in your name. Three-month minimum, then month to month with 30 days' notice.
Who this works for, and who it does not.
A good fit if
Most of this work looks like the following.
- You are doing roughly $500k to $10M a year and the margin, not the revenue, is what keeps you up.
- At least one channel is live and spending, so there is something real to read.
- You can fund both the fee and the media the stage assumes.
- You will give access to the ad accounts, analytics and the system holding your real orders.
- You accept that creative volume is a cost of scaling, not an optional extra.
The wrong choice if
Said plainly, so nobody spends a call finding out.
- You are looking for a ROAS promised before anyone has seen your numbers.
- The creative budget is the first thing to be cut.
- The business only works while it is discounting.
- You want the ad spend routed through us so it looks like one invoice.
- You need results before you commit any budget at all.
A paid strategy session, credited back.
45 minutes. $95, credited in full toward your first invoice.
Bring your last three months of spend and revenue. We will reconcile what the platforms claimed against what actually landed, and tell you which stage fits — including if the answer is none of them yet.
- One blended ROAS calculated on your own numbers, not a dashboard's
- The channel we would fund first, and the one we would switch off
- An honest read on which stage fits, or that none of them does yet