Marketing Consulting
Marketing Consulting for Business Owners
Teaches the owner to read reports and judge vendors without help
- Timeline
- Six to nine months at a session every two weeks, roughly twelve to eighteen sessions
Call (714) 823-3164 or ask a question. Clear recommendations, even if we never work together.
Marketing consulting for owners is one on one coaching for the person who signs the checks. It teaches you to read your own marketing numbers, judge vendor proposals, and ask the right questions on a sales call. You learn to decide what to fund, so the decisions stop depending on outside opinion.
The problem
Most owners of service businesses learned a trade or a profession, not marketing, and the industry has quietly benefited from that. Reports get written in a vocabulary nobody explains. Impressions, sessions, and conversions get used interchangeably. A proposal quotes a monthly fee that turns out to include the ad budget. An owner who can install a rooftop unit or run a dental practice is made to feel unqualified to ask whether twenty seven hundred dollars a month is producing anything. So they either stop asking, which is expensive, or they distrust everything, which is also expensive because it means never committing long enough for anything to work.
What it is
This is teaching, done inside your own accounts. We meet every two weeks and work through the material in the order an owner actually needs it. First, the numbers: what a lead costs, what a booked job costs, what close rate does to both, and which three numbers matter out of the twenty on your dashboard. Second, reading reports. You open GA4 and your ad account yourself, find the search terms report, spot a conversion count inflated by duplicates, and see which pages produce calls. Third, judging vendors: what a fair fee structure looks like, which contract terms to refuse, what questions expose a thin proposal, and how to tell a specialist from a reseller. Fourth, deciding. How to set a budget from your own economics, how to run a real test with a stop rule, and when to walk away from something that is not working. We use your accounts and your invoices the whole way, because generic training does not transfer. The goal is that after six to nine months you do not need us for this, and we will say when you are there.
Signs you need this
- You approve marketing invoices without knowing what you got
- Vendor reports use words nobody has ever explained to you
- You have been sold something twice by the same kind of pitch
- You are considering hiring a marketing person and cannot evaluate candidates
What is included
- Biweekly one on one sessions of about an hour, using your own accounts
- A short list of the three to five numbers your business should watch
- Guided walkthroughs of GA4, Search Console, and your ad accounts
- Report reading practice on your real vendor reports, defects included
- Vendor evaluation checklist with the questions that expose weak proposals
- Contract red flag list covering fees, ownership, and cancellation terms
- Budget setting worksheet built from your job value and close rate
- Written recaps after each session so you can review without notes
Our process
Find the gaps
Session 1First session is diagnostic. We open your accounts together and see what you can already read and where it goes fuzzy. Owners usually know more than they think about their own numbers and less than they think about how the platforms report them.
Learn your own economics
Sessions 2 to 3Job value, close rate, gross margin, repeat rate, and what those imply about the most you can pay for a lead. Once an owner can do this arithmetic in their head, most bad proposals become obvious within a minute.
Read the platforms directly
Sessions 4 to 7Hands on time in GA4 and your ad accounts, finding the reports that matter and ignoring the rest. You drive, we point. Doing it yourself is the only version that sticks, and it means you can check a vendor claim without asking anyone.
Practice judging vendors
Sessions 8 to 11We work through real proposals, yours or anonymized ones, and identify what is solid, what is padded, and what is a red flag. You also practice the sales call, including the three questions that most reveal whether a vendor knows your industry.
Decide and hand over
Sessions 12 to 14Final sessions cover setting your own budget, running a test with a stop rule, and building a simple monthly routine you can maintain in thirty minutes. Then the engagement ends, which is the intended outcome rather than a lost client.
Realistic timeline: Six to nine months at a session every two weeks, roughly twelve to eighteen sessions. Owners who already read financial statements comfortably tend to move faster, often finishing in five months. The engagement is designed to end, and we will tell you when you have what you need.
Vendor Words, Translated
Half of feeling unqualified is vocabulary. Here is what the common words count, why each one can mislead, and the question to ask when you hear it.
| The word | What it counts | Why it can mislead | Ask this |
|---|---|---|---|
| Impressions | Times your ad or listing appeared | Nobody had to look at it | How many became clicks |
| Sessions | Visits to the site, not people | One person can be four sessions | How many were new visitors |
| Conversions | Whatever got set up as a goal | A page view can be a conversion | Show me the goal definitions |
| Reach | How many accounts saw a post | It measures nothing you can bank | How many called or booked |
| Ranking | A position for one term, somewhere | It shifts by location and device | Which terms bring us calls |
| Leads | Whatever the vendor calls a lead | Job seekers and spam are included | How many were real buyers |
| Managed spend | Their fee plus your ad budget | It hides the real management fee | Split the fee from the budget |
You are not behind for asking. These words get used loosely because nobody is made to define them.
Numbers to Know Cold Before the Next Sales Call
You do not need a finance degree for this. You need seven numbers in your head. Once they are there, most pitches answer themselves.
Average job value
What one completed job bills, averaged across the last twelve months.
Gross margin
What is left after labor and materials, written as a percent.
Close rate by source
How many quoted leads become jobs, split by where the lead came from.
The most you can pay for a lead
Margin per job, divided by leads per job, then a share of that.
Repeat and referral rate
How much of a customer's value shows up after the first job is done.
Current cost per booked job
Marketing spend divided by the jobs it produced, one channel at a time.
Your slowest month
The month you most need leads, which decides when the money should go out.
The Arithmetic That Ends Most Bad Proposals
One calculation does most of the marketing consulting work. Say an average job bills 900 dollars and your gross margin is 40 percent. That leaves 360 dollars of margin on the job.
If you close one in three quoted leads, then three leads have to share that 360 dollars. Spend a third of the margin on marketing and you can pay about 40 dollars a lead.
Now a proposal arrives at 2,000 dollars a month promising 25 leads. That is 80 dollars a lead, double what your numbers support. It is not an automatic no. But the conversation is now about why those leads would close better, and that is a hard question for a salesperson.
Do this once on paper and it turns into a thirty second check you can run in a supply house parking lot. Owners who can run it stop being sold to and start buying.
Messy Numbers and the Habit Afterward
What if my numbers are messy or missing?
How do I keep this up once the sessions end?
A vendor who cannot explain a number to you in plain words either does not understand it or does not want you to.