Before the call
We ask for read access to analytics and ad accounts, and we ask for it in advance so the thirty minutes is spent on findings, not on screen sharing and navigation. If you would rather not grant access before a first conversation, that is entirely reasonable and we will work from a screen share instead.
We also ask two questions in writing: what does a customer contribute after all variable costs, and what is your current monthly acquisition spend across everything including salaries. A surprising number of companies don't have the first figure to hand, and finding that out before the call changes what the call is about.
The order we check things in
The sequence matters, because each step determines whether the next one means anything.
1. Measurement integrity
Is conversion tracking firing, deduplicated, and pointed at an event that correlates with revenue? If it isn't, every number after this is unreliable and we say so before drawing any conclusion from it.
2. Unit economics
Contribution margin, blended CAC, payback period. This sets the ceiling on everything else. It's what decides whether a given cost per acquisition is good or ruinous.
3. The funnel, back to front
Conversion rate before traffic. Doubling traffic into a page converting at 1% doubles the waste, so we look at where people leave before we look at how they arrive.
4. Channel efficiency
Only now do we open the ad accounts properly: structure, creative volume, wasted spend, and whether brand and non-brand are reported separately.
5. Compounding assets
Organic, email, retention. Whether anything you're building keeps working when spend stops.
What you get
A written summary within one business day: the three largest revenue leaks with rough dollar values, what we'd fix first, and what we'd leave alone. Not a proposal. A set of findings that stands on its own.
It's yours regardless of what happens next. Several companies have taken those findings, implemented them internally, and never spoken to us again. That's a good outcome and we'd rather it happened than have people sit through a pitch to get information they could act on themselves.
If it turns into a proposal, that comes separately and afterward, so the findings aren't shaped by what we'd like to sell.
If an agency won't tell you what's wrong until you've signed, they're not auditing you. They're qualifying you.
The cases where we say no
About one inquiry in four ends with a recommendation not to hire us, and usually not to hire any agency yet. The patterns are consistent enough to list.
Media spend under roughly $10k a month
Our fee would consume too large a share of your total budget to be honest value. A specialist freelancer is better, and we'll usually suggest what to look for.
Pre-product-market-fit
If you don't yet know who gets value from the product, the constraint is customer discovery, not distribution. Spending on demand generation here burns runway you'll need later.
Runway shorter than the payback
SEO takes quarters. If you have nine months, that money belongs in a channel that pays back inside the window you actually have.
Unit economics that can't support paid acquisition
Sometimes the answer is pricing, order value or supply chain, not marketing. We've turned away brands whose contribution margin made profitable paid acquisition arithmetically impossible.
Why we do it this way
The self-interested reason is that it qualifies harder than any sales process could. By the time someone has watched us find problems in their own account, both sides know whether the fit is real.
The less self-interested reason is that the alternative wastes everyone's time. A third of our discovery calls used to end with 'that's outside our budget'. That's thirty minutes both sides could have skipped, and it's why we quote in writing before any call instead of gating the number behind one.
And a proportion of the findings get implemented without us, which we count as fine. An agency that only creates value inside a contract isn't creating much.
Weighing the decision?
Terms used in this piece
We do this for a living
If you'd rather not build this yourself, these are the services where it lives.