Most help starts with a brief. This starts with a shift.
A 90-day pilot runs in five steps. Nothing here is a secret, and none of it works if we skip the first one.
1. We work before we write
Before we make anything, we spend time inside the business. A shift on the truck. A Saturday behind the counter. A morning on the job site.
We watch how you and your team actually work: who does what, where things get handed off, what lives in someone's head. We make note of where the result falls short of what you expected. The order that went out wrong, the post that never got made, the question that gets answered from scratch every time.
We're also looking for what never makes it into a brief: what sells at 2pm and dies at 7, the item people order without reading the menu, the question customers ask every single day, what the regulars call you when nobody's being formal.
The best line in the finished work is usually something you already said to us in passing. Our job is to notice it.
2. We find out who's actually in the room
Then we look at your customers: the ones you have, not the ones a category report says you should.
Who's buying, which communities they come from, which generation they're in, and which language they're thinking in when they decide. Where they already spend time online and who they already trust there. It comes from your sales, your reviews, your DMs, your staff, and the people standing in front of us.
Where customers are multigenerational Latino, we work in English and Spanish, whichever one the answer arrives in.
3. We pick one number before we make anything
We agree in writing on the single number the pilot is meant to move. Covers in the door. Catering inquiries. Repeat orders. Quotes requested. Orders shipped without a fix. Hours back in your week. Something that shows up in your bank account and not just your notifications.
Everything we make gets pointed at that number. If we can't explain how a piece of work moves it, we don't make it.
4. We systemize what keeps failing
Every business has one or two things that go wrong again and again, no matter how hard people try. We work with you to turn those into a simple, written process, with the right tool behind it if one's needed, so it stops depending on someone remembering. If a failing process isn't in the way of the number, it waits. You keep your attention on the things you do best.
Anything we set up lives in your accounts, and we teach it to you or someone you choose.
5. We publish what happened
At 90 days you get the run of content, the strategy, the written processes, the raw files, and a straight read on the number, including if it didn't move.
Then we publish it. Your name, real figures, both directions. That's the trade while we're new: you get the pilot rate, and we get a case study we didn't write about ourselves.
When it's marketing: why social and search, not a billboard
A billboard sells you a road. Direct mail sells you a zip code. Neither one can tell the difference between the household that's been here four generations and the one that arrived last year, so you pay to reach everyone and end up speaking to no one. That's the same problem as before, this time in the media buy.
Word of mouth is how most of these businesses got built. It works because it's a specific person vouching in a specific voice. It also has a ceiling: it only travels as far as the people who already know you. Short video is word of mouth with distribution.
And it reports back. Two weeks and the price of a tank of gas will tell you whether a message is landing. A billboard won't tell you anything for a year, which is another way of saying it can't be graded.
Some businesses really do belong on the radio or in the mail. If yours is one of them, we'll say so.
What we don't do
- Translated campaigns. Running English copy through Spanish isn't a strategy, and your customers can tell.
- Follower counts as a deliverable. We'll grow them where it serves the number. We won't hand them to you instead of it.
- Work you can't take with you. No accounts in our name, no files we hold hostage, no arrangement that's hard to leave.
- Everything. We say no to jobs that aren't a fit. National campaigns, industries where regulation dictates what you can say, anything past what we do well: we'll tell you plainly and connect you with someone who's right for it. A good referral beats a bad yes.
- Businesses that want to look like the neighborhood without being part of it. That's the one we turn down outright.