Nineteen people who have done this before
No juniors, no account managers relaying messages, and no handing your account to someone cheaper once the contract is signed.
Most agencies are shaped like a pyramid. Experienced people win the work, then it drops to whoever costs least to keep on staff, and the client finds out in month three when the answers stop making sense. We are shaped the other way. Nineteen specialists across ad management, SEO, design and development, every one of them senior, most with more than a decade in the work. Nobody here is learning on your account. That is the reason we take fewer clients than we could. There is a limit to how many accounts nineteen experienced people can look at properly, and taking more than that would mean hiring people who cannot do the job yet.
How this happened
It started in 2013 as one person running ad accounts for local businesses. No plan to build an agency, just work that kept arriving because the last client told somebody.
That is still how most of it arrives. Eight in ten clients come by referral, which sounds like a nice line until you consider what it actually forces. You cannot recover from a bad quarter by buying more leads. The only way to keep the pipeline full is for the current clients to be happy enough to say your name out loud, so the work has to be good before it can be sold.
Twelve years of that produced two things. Nineteen senior specialists, hired one at a time as the work demanded, across ad management, SEO, design and development. And a habit of turning down accounts we cannot help, because a client who leaves unhappy costs more than the fee was worth.
The medical concentration was not a strategy. One vein practice went well, a second came through the first, and specialist medicine turned out to suit how we work: high value patients, long decision cycles, and procedures most people have never heard of. We still run accounts for contractors, law firms and local retailers, and the method does not change much between them.
What we think the job is
An agency's job is not to spend your budget. It is to tell you whether spending it will work, and then to be right often enough that you keep asking.
That means saying no more than most agencies are comfortable with. We turn down accounts where the numbers do not support the fee. We tell practices their website has to be fixed before we will point traffic at it. We have talked clients out of channels they arrived asking for, and out of budgets they were ready to spend.
Every one of those conversations has cost us work. They are also why eight in ten clients arrive already knowing somebody who trusts us, and that trade has been worth making every time.
Dragan, founder
What you can expect
Whoever explains the plan is the one who executes it. Nothing gets reassigned once you sign, and there is no account manager translating between you and someone you have never met.
If the numbers do not support the spend, you hear it on the first call. If the site cannot convert the traffic, you hear that too.
Ad accounts, analytics, tag manager, search console, the website itself. We never run campaigns through our own accounts, because the data belongs to your business. If we part company you keep all of it and nothing needs rebuilding.
Nineteen experienced people can only look at so many accounts properly. Growing past that would mean hiring people who are still learning, and putting them on your account. We would rather stay this size.
Named clients, not anonymous logos
What people ask before the first call
The ones that come up often enough to be worth answering here.
Nineteen people, all senior, across ad management, SEO, design and development. Most have more than ten years in the work. There are no juniors. That is deliberate rather than a stage we have not reached yet: the pyramid model, where experienced people sell and cheaper people deliver, is the single most common reason agency relationships go quiet after a few months. We hire one specialist at a time, when the work genuinely requires it, and take fewer accounts than we could sell.
The person who pitched the work, throughout. Nothing gets handed over once the contract signs. For most accounts that means one senior lead with specialists alongside them, so the person building your site is talking to the person running your ads. That matters more than it sounds. The search terms that convert in a paid account are the ones worth building pages around, and that only happens when the same people can see both.
No, though it is where a lot of the work is now. It happened by referral rather than by plan: one vein practice went well, the next came through them, and specialist medicine turned out to suit how we work. We also run accounts for law firms, contractors, home service companies and specialist retailers. The method barely changes. Somebody has an expensive problem they only solve once, they are nervous about choosing wrong, and they call whoever answered their question rather than whoever shouted loudest.
Because eight in ten of our clients arrive by referral, and that only keeps working if the current ones are happy. An agency that grows on cold outreach can absorb unhappy clients. One that grows on word of mouth cannot. So if a budget will not clear the cost of a customer in your category, or the site cannot convert the traffic we would send it, taking the fee would buy a few months of revenue and cost the thing that actually fills the pipeline.
You keep everything. Ad accounts, conversion history, analytics, tag manager, search console, the website. All of it is in your name from the start and none of it moves. We never run campaigns through our own accounts. Plenty of agencies do, and the reason is usually that it makes leaving expensive. We would rather you stayed because the work is good.
High volume, low value ecommerce. Different discipline, different tooling, and there are agencies who do it far better than we would. We also do not sell services a client does not need. If you arrive asking for SEO and your fastest route to patients this quarter is paid search, that is what we will tell you, even though the SEO retainer would have been worth more to us.
Not a fixed one, but there is a point below which paid advertising cannot work, and it varies enormously by category and market. For most single location businesses it sits somewhere around 2,500 dollars a month in ad spend. Below roughly 1,500 the account never gathers enough data to improve. You can model your own numbers before speaking to anyone, and if the figure that comes out is more than you want to spend, we would rather tell you that than take the account and hope.
Eight in ten arrive because somebody told them to. A previous client, a practice down the road, occasionally a competitor who liked the work. The rest find us through the sort of thing you are reading now. Both routes end in the same place: a call where we look at your numbers and tell you honestly whether we can help.
Anything else worth asking before a call? Send it over. We would rather answer it now than in month three.
Get a proposalSee what your budget can actually buy.
Model your campaign before you commit a dollar, or send us the account and we will tell you what we would change first.