How We Work
How We Work
Every engagement moves through four phases: Roadmap, Messaging, Content, and Campaigns. They're phases of work, not products you buy one at a time — a retainer covers whichever phases your business currently needs. Most clients start with a $2,500 Growth Roadmap, then move into an ongoing retainer where the remaining three run continuously.
Minimum term is six months, because that's how long the work takes to pay off.
What are the four phases?
1. Roadmap
Before recommending anything, we need to understand how your business makes money — job values, close rates, capacity, seasonality, and where leads currently come from.
You get a market and competitor analysis, a channel plan, a budget model, and a 12-month roadmap. It runs 2–3 weeks and costs $2,500, credited in full against your first 90 days if you retain us.
If you take the roadmap and run it yourself, that's a legitimate outcome. Some clients do.
2. Messaging
What you say matters more than where you say it. This phase covers customer research, positioning, and the specific language that goes into ads, landing pages and content.
Most service businesses sound identical to their competitors — same claims, same guarantees, same stock photography. Fixing that costs nothing in media and improves every channel simultaneously.
3. Content
The assets everything else runs on: service pages, landing pages, blog content, case studies, video. This feeds SEO, gives paid campaigns somewhere to send traffic, and increasingly determines whether AI assistants cite you.
This used to be sold as a separate $25,000–$50,000 project. It isn't anymore — it's included in retainers at a pace your budget supports, because very few businesses in our range can or should write that cheque up front.
4. Campaigns
Running and optimising the channels. Two kinds of work, always:
- Capture demand — paid search, Local Service Ads, local SEO. People already looking for what you sell.
- Create demand — Meta, YouTube, content, email. People who'll need you but aren't searching yet.
Most businesses over-invest in the first and neglect the second, then wonder why growth stalls when the market softens.
Are we a good fit for your business?
Yes, if you:
- Do $500,000 to $10 million in annual revenue
- Run a service business or law firm — home services, legal, healthcare, or B2B
- Can share real numbers: job values, close rates, capacity
- Answer your phone, or want help fixing the reason you don't
- Can commit six months and a media budget of at least $1,000/month
- Want a partner, not a vendor
No, if you:
- Are under $500K — use our free playbook instead, honestly
- Want the cheapest option available
- Need results from SEO inside 30 days
- Can't or won't share performance data
- Want someone to run ads without any strategic input
- Are above $25M across multiple markets — you need a bigger team than ours
Roughly half the businesses that read this page will conclude we're not the right fit. That's the page working.
What do we need from you?
Marketing engagements fail on inputs more often than execution. Here's what's genuinely required.
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Your numbers | Average job value, close rate, and capacity. Without these we're optimising for leads instead of profit. |
| CRM access | Or willingness to set one up. We can't connect spend to revenue through a spreadsheet. |
| Fast lead response | Speed-to-lead beats almost every other variable. If leads sit for hours, more of them won't help. |
| A monthly hour | One call to review numbers and decide what's next. |
| Six months | Paid moves in 30 days. Organic takes 2–5 months to show and compounds around months 8–9. |
| Honest feedback | If leads are junk, say so in week two rather than month five. |
What does a typical month look like?
| What happens | |
|---|---|
| Week 1 | Previous month's numbers reviewed; budgets paced against seasonality and pipeline |
| Ongoing | Campaign management, content production, SEO work, lead dispute filing, review generation |
| Mid-month | Testing — new ad creative, landing page variants, keyword and audience expansion |
| Month end | Reporting on leads, cost per lead, and revenue. Not impressions. |
| Monthly call | 45 minutes. What worked, what didn't, what changes next month |
Bi-weekly calls on the Scale tier. Quarterly on Foundation.
How do we measure success?
Marketing-sourced leads and the revenue they produce. That's it.
Rankings, impressions, click-through rates and engagement are diagnostic — useful for figuring out why something is or isn't working. They are not the goal, and a report built around them is usually hiding something.
Concretely, we track cost per lead by channel, lead-to-customer rate, cost per acquired customer, and marketing-sourced revenue. You'll see the same dashboard we do.
What about pricing?
Retainers are $1,500, $3,750 or $6,500 per month, priced by scope — how many channels, locations and campaign groups we're running. Never by how much you spend on media.
We take no percentage of your ad spend. Full detail, including every individual service price, is on the pricing page.
Frequently asked questions
Do I have to buy the phases in order?
No. The four phases describe the work, not a purchase sequence. A retainer covers whichever phases your business needs right now. Most clients start with the Roadmap because it makes everything after it cheaper and better-aimed, but it isn't mandatory.
Can I just buy the Roadmap?
Yes. It's $2,500, takes 2–3 weeks, and you own the output whether you continue or not. If you do retain us, it's credited in full against your first 90 days.
Why a six-month minimum?
Because that's when the work starts paying off. Paid channels generate leads in the first 30 days, but SEO and content show early movement at months 2–5 and compound around months 8–9. A three-month engagement would take your money before the compounding starts.
What happened to the $25,000–$50,000 content phase?
We stopped selling it that way. Almost no business in our client range can justify that cheque up front, and gating campaigns behind it meant good companies never got started. Content now runs inside retainers at a sustainable pace.
Who actually does the work?
Jared leads strategy and stays your point of contact on every account. Specialist execution — ad builds, technical SEO, video — runs through a small bench of long-term contractors.
What if it isn't working?
We tell you, with the numbers, and change it. If a channel isn't producing after a fair test we move the budget rather than defending the decision. After six months you're month-to-month, so leaving is easy if it comes to that.
Do you work with competitors in the same market?
No. We won't take two clients in the same service category and geography — it's a conflict we can't run honestly.
How quickly can we start?
Roadmaps typically begin within two weeks. If you're going straight to a retainer, campaigns are usually live in 2–3 weeks — except Local Service Ads, where Google's verification takes 3–4 weeks on its own.
Ready to see if this fits?
Thirty minutes, free, no deck. We'll tell you what we'd do, what it would cost, and whether you should be spending money on this at all yet.
Schedule a consultation · (615) 669-0707
Written by Jared DeValk, founder of Nashville Digital. Last reviewed September 2026.