Commercial

What we need from you, and when we need it

People ask what do I need to give my marketing agency and expect a form. It is a list, it is short, and it is short on purpose. Most of what an agency asks for in week one it asks for because nobody ever checked whether it was needed.

Everything below is delegated access to accounts in your name, plus a handful of answers only you can give. None of it is a password emailed to a stranger.

Before we start

• Registrar access for your domain, or a DNS record we can point. You keep the account. We do not need to own your domain and we will not ask to.
• Manager access to your Google Business Profile, if you have one. If you do not, we create it in your account rather than ours.
• Your Google Analytics and Search Console properties, or permission to create them under your email address.
• Logos and brand files if they exist. If they do not, say so, and we work with what is actually there.
• One decision maker with authority to approve copy. One. A committee turns a two week build into a two month one and the build is the same build.

In the first week

• Thirty minutes on a call about how the business actually makes money. Not your market in general. Yours, with the margins.
• The five questions customers ask you most often, in the words they use rather than the words the industry uses.
• What you will not say in public: pricing you do not publish, work you cannot name, claims somebody has already told you not to make.
• Photographs of real work, real premises and real people, if you have any. Phone photographs are fine and are better than stock.
• The services you want to be found for, ordered by what they are worth to you rather than by what sounds impressive.

What we do not need from you

We do not need the admin login for your old website, because we are not working inside it.

You keep the domain. We rebuild the site, it is inside the $2,500 rather than on top of it, and you own the code.

We do not need a keyword spreadsheet from a previous agency, a content calendar you wrote at midnight, or a strategy document. We will read all three if they exist. We will not wait for them, and we will not charge you to rewrite them.

We do not need a deposit. Website builds are paid in full upfront and retainers are billed monthly, so there is never a half payment sitting between us while the work is unfinished.

How the access is handled

Every item on the first list is delegated access to an account in your name. You add us, you can remove us, and removing us does not take anything with it. We do not create your assets inside our accounts and hand you a login later, because that is how a business ends up renting its own Google profile back from an agency.

Credentials never travel by email or text message. Where a platform supports delegated access we use it. Where one does not, we use a shared vault entry that you control and can revoke without telling us first.

What happens if you are slow with it

The build starts anyway. We do not hold a project hostage over a missing logo and we do not bill you for waiting. What we will do is tell you in writing which specific item is blocking which specific deliverable, so a delay is never something you discover in month three.

The honest version is this. The accounts on the first list are the difference between a page going live and a page going live and being found. Get them to us in the first week and the initial term spends itself on the work. Get them to us in week four and you have paid for three weeks of waiting with your own quarter.