Pricing
What this costs, before you have to ask.
Three shapes, three numbers. Most consultancy sites make you book a call to find out whether you can afford them, which wastes your time and mine.
Every figure below is a starting point rather than a ceiling, and the section on what moves them is the honest part of this page.
Audit and roadmap
I look at what you are running now, find what is structurally broken as opposed to merely underperforming, and hand back a prioritised plan you could execute without me. Most engagements start here.
From £3,000
Ongoing retainer
Strategy plus execution across the channels that matter for your stage. Two or three disciplines working together rather than all five at once.
From £4,000
Advisory
For teams with people in place who need someone senior to pressure-test the plan, review the work, and say the unpopular thing.
£450 per day
What moves the number
Four things, in roughly the order they matter.
Scope, not seniority
You get me either way. The number moves with how much ground the work has to cover, not with who turns up to do it.
How much is already in place
A team with clean analytics, a working site and a clear proposition needs less of my time than one where those have to be built first.
Pace
Compressing a four-week audit into two costs more, because it displaces other work rather than fitting alongside it.
Regulatory load
Financial and regulated categories carry review cycles that ordinary marketing work does not. That is real time and it gets quoted.
What I don’t charge for
Billing for these is how consultancy gets a reputation.
- The first conversation, however long it runs.
- Scoping, and writing the proposal that comes out of it.
- Being asked a question between sessions.
- Re-explaining something I did not explain well the first time.
Common questions
No. Hourly billing rewards the wrong thing — it pays for time spent rather than the problem going away, and it makes people hesitate before asking a question. The rate is £450 a day, and thinking time is part of the day.
Almost always the audit and roadmap. It is fixed-fee, it runs three to four weeks, and it ends with a plan you could hand to someone else and execute without me. That is deliberate: if the honest answer is that you do not need ongoing help, the audit should tell you so.
No. Thirty days’ notice, in either direction, from the first month. If the work is worth continuing you will want to continue it, and a contract is the wrong reason to stay.
Roughly two days a week, spent on priorities we agree at the start of the month and review at the end of it. You deal with me directly — there is no account manager, and nobody more junior doing the work under my name.
Yes, and most of the work on this site was. The engagements written up here span global SEO and paid across multiple markets, a US-headquartered platform, and protocol launches with no single home market. Rates are the same wherever you are.
If none of these shapes fits what you need, say so — the useful conversation is usually the one about scope, not the one about price.