Discovery & Audit. Week 1–2.
The most expensive mistake in marketing is starting with tactics before understanding the business. We spend two weeks doing what most agencies skip — reading your P&L, talking to your customers, and telling you the truth about what's already running.
Business, not marketing
We start with your P&L, unit economics and the last 12 months of revenue — not your brand book.
Customer conversations
Ten to fifteen customer / prospect calls. Recorded, transcribed, summarised into what people actually think.
Honest audit
Everything running today gets an honest score. We show the receipts — screenshots, dashboards, spend, response rates.
Week by week.
- 01Kickoff & data access
Two-hour kickoff, access to analytics, ad accounts, CRM, and a shared war-room doc. NDAs signed on day one.
- 02P&L and unit-economics read
We read the business the way a serious operator would — revenue lines, gross margin, CAC, LTV, cash runway. This is the anchor for every recommendation.
- 03Customer conversations
10–15 calls with customers, prospects, churned users and internal stakeholders. Transcripts and a synthesis memo delivered.
- 04Competitive teardown
Six competitors, teardown across positioning, product, pricing, funnel, paid, SEO, and social. Screenshots and side-by-side comparisons.
- 05Category & search intent map
How the category is searched, discussed and bought — including LLM answer patterns for the queries that matter.
- 06Honest audit report
A 25–40 page audit report scoring everything currently running. The 3–5 things that are actually broken, ranked by leverage.
- ◆Kickoff pack and shared war-room doc
- ◆P&L and unit-economics read (written)
- ◆Customer conversation synthesis memo
- ◆Competitive teardown deck (6 competitors)
- ◆Category & search intent map
- ◆Honest audit report (25–40 pages)
- —Skipping customer calls to save time
- —Auditing only what makes us look useful
- —Recommendations you cannot afford or execute
- —One-page 'brand health' scorecards with no numbers
Common questions about Discovery & Audit.
Two weeks feels long. Can we compress it?+
You can, and we've done one-week versions for pre-launch startups. But every week you cut here, you pay back later in tactics that miss.
Do we need to give you our P&L?+
Yes. If you can't share the P&L, we can't do the work honestly. It stays inside an NDA and never leaves our team.
What if the audit says our current agency is doing fine?+
We say so, in writing. We've closed engagements at Phase 01 because the honest answer was 'you don't need us right now.'