What Actually Happens
After You Say Yes.
Six steps, two of them yours. Published dates we hit. Every rule that governs the build, written down before you pay rather than argued about in week six.
This is the operating manual, not the sales page. Read it before the call if you want to know exactly what you are signing up for.
Next available build start date is Sept. 28, 2026
Twenty minutes, five questions
Before anything: the fit call
One call, and you leave knowing which engine, what it costs and when we could start. There is no second call to reveal the pricing, because the pricing is already published.
The agenda
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What do you sell, and what is one customer worth?
Decides the engine, more than anything else you tell us. Under about $400 a job with no repeat business and the arithmetic does not work for either of us.
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Where do customers come from today?
Tells us what is already working so we do not replace it by accident. If you cannot say which channel produced last month’s work, that is the actual problem.
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How many leads do you handle, and how many could you?
The gap between those two numbers is the whole business case. If there is no gap, you need capacity, not marketing.
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Who signs off?
More than two people and our timelines stop being real. We would rather say that now than discover it in week six.
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What date do you need this working by, and why that date?
A season, a truck wrap, a lease, a tour. The reason matters more than the date, because it tells us what happens if we miss it.
How it ends
An engine, a price and a start date. All three on the call, and the date is held while you decide.
Said on the call, with a specific suggestion of what to do instead. No follow-up sequence, no chasing. About one call in five ends here.
Answer honestly and you may well talk us into a smaller engine.
We would rather sell you the right one twice than the wrong one once. If Presence is the answer, we will tell you, even though Foundation pays us more.
Come with these to hand
- Your average job value, roughly
- Your current website URL, if any
- What you are trying to fix
- A real budget range
- A real timeline
You do not need a brief, a spec or a deck. If you have one, great. If not, that is what the call is for.
How we decide when we can start
Three builds run at once. Never four. Every date on this page is arithmetic from that one number.
A shop that takes every job cannot promise a date, which is why most quote a range and then miss it. Each engine costs a known number of weeks in a lane, so a month holds a fixed number of builds rather than a hopeful one. When the lanes fill, the next kickoff date moves here, in public, rather than quietly in an email after you have paid a deposit.
- Presence2 weeks
- Marquee3 weeks
- Foundation6 weeks
- Growth12 weeks
One Growth build costs the same lane time as 6 Presence builds. When the lanes fill, the next kickoff date moves.
Where those lanes stand today
- Lane 01In buildFoundation
- Lane 02In buildPresence
- Lane 03OpenAvailable
3 builds run at once. When one wraps, the next starts the following Monday.
Start 28 Sep 2026 and you are live by
- 2wPresence12 Oct 2026
- 3wMarquee19 Oct 2026
- 6wFoundation9 Nov 2026
- 12wGrowth21 Dec 2026
The trade-off, stated plainly.
The date on the board is the date you get. It is also a date that can be gone by the time you decide, and we will not hold it for you without a deposit. Both of those are true because of the same cap.
We do not sell chaos. If we cannot hit your date, you hear it before you pay a deposit, not in week six.
The six steps
Two are yours. The other four are ours, and you get your time back during them.
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1 Kickoff and access
One call and one form. We collect your content and the access we need in a single pass, because chasing credentials one at a time is the most common reason a build slips. The full access list is below, and you can start gathering it before you even book.
Your deposit is due here, and your asset deadline gets set here, in writing, with the launch date it protects.
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2 Structure and design
Sitemap first, then the design direction, then a designed home page and one interior page. You see all of it before a single page of the real site gets built.
This is where you push back hard. Changing a direction at this stage costs an afternoon. Changing it after launch costs a rebuild, and we will quote it as one.
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3 Build
We build against a performance budget set before design started, which is why the speed numbers hold after launch instead of being chased afterwards with a caching plugin.
You will not hear from us daily during this. That is deliberate. You get a check-in at the halfway point and the staging link at the end.
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4 Your review
A private staging link and a deadline. You send one consolidated list. We would rather have a real list on day four than a trickle of one-line emails over three weeks, and so would you, because the second one is what turns a 6-week build into a 12-week build.
What a good list looks like is spelled out below. It is worth two minutes.
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5 Launch
We point the domain, put redirects in place so nothing 404s, and verify that tracking and forms are actually firing before we call it live. Then we submit for indexing.
We do not launch on a Friday afternoon.
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6 Handover
Site, logins, and a pattern library you can build new pages from yourself, plus a walkthrough. Everything in your name, from the domain to the ad account.
You own it outright from day one. The monthly is care, not rent, and there is no minimum term.
Gather this before kickoff
What we need on day one
Half of all slipped launch dates start as a missing login. Nine things, in three piles.
Access we need
- Domain registrar loginTo point the domain and set DNS at launch. Prefer not to share it? We send the exact records to paste, but launch day then depends on you being free.
- Current hosting and site adminTo migrate content, preserve URLs and build the redirect map. Without it, everything that ranks today 404s on launch day.
- Google Business ProfileManager access, not owner. You stay the owner, always.
- Analytics and Search ConsoleTo keep your history rather than starting your data over at zero.
- Ad accounts, Growth onlyGoogle and Meta, via partner access. The account stays in your name and your billing.
Material we need
- Logo files and brand assetsVector if you have it. A JPEG off a business card is a conversation, not a blocker.
- PhotosReal ones of your work, your trucks, your team. The single biggest difference between a site that looks like yours and one that looks like a template.
- Service list and pricingWhat you actually do, in the words your customers use.
Where things go
- Where leads should goWhich inbox, which phone, who gets the alert at 7pm.
You keep ownership of everything.
We ask for manager or partner access, never ownership transfer. If we part ways, we remove ourselves and nothing has to move.
Two minutes to learn
How to give feedback that does not cost you two weeks
This is the one step where a client can genuinely make or break their own launch date. Three habits separate a review that takes an afternoon from one that takes a fortnight.
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Habit 01
Say where it is
Works“Home, hero: change ‘Serving Oakland County’ to ‘Serving Oakland and Macomb.’”
Costs a week“Not feeling the homepage.” We now need a call to find out which part.
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Habit 02
Say what it should be instead
Works“Services page, third card: wrong photo, use IMG_4471 from the folder.” Or: “About, second paragraph: we started in 2009, not 2011.”
Costs a week“Can we see it in blue?” A change with no destination turns into three rounds of guessing.
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Habit 03
Send it once
WorksOne list, one send, one deadline. Gather everything, including the things other people want changed, then send.
Costs a week“One more thing” sent four hours after the last one, six times. Each one restarts the work.
If something genuinely is not working, say that.
“The homepage does not feel like us” is a real problem and we want to hear it. Just say it at step 2, when it is a design conversation, rather than at step 4, when it is a rebuild. That is the entire reason we show you the design before we build the site.
Written down, never a surprise
What moves your launch date
Three of these are on your side of the line. The fourth is on ours, and it is handled differently.
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Your assets miss the deadline
Your launch date moves. The next build starts on schedule and we will not compress it to absorb a delay. We set the deadline with you at kickoff and send a reminder before it becomes a problem.
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Your review round misses the deadline
Your launch date moves. Same rule, same reason.
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You add scope mid-build
The date moves, and you see the new one first. Quoted before the work starts, with the new date attached. You always see both numbers, the price and the date, before you say yes.
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We are late
The date holds. We absorb it. It has to be said, so: if the delay is ours, it is ours. That is what the intake cap is for.
None of this is punitive. It is the mechanism that lets us publish start dates at all, and the reason the client after you gets the date they were promised.
The monthly starts on launch day, not signing day
After you launch
Here is what it buys, and exactly where the line sits between a change that is included and one that is quoted.
Every engine, every price
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Hosting and security
CDN, SSL, firewall, DDoS and malware monitoring.
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Daily backups
90-day retention, so a bad week is recoverable rather than final.
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Updates, tested
Plugin, theme and core updates applied deliberately, not blindly.
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99.5% uptime, with credits
Monitored so we usually know before you do, and a published commitment that pays out automatically if we miss it. Read the SLA
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License fees
Every shared tool we reuse across clients is carried by us.
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Add pages yourself
From the pattern library, free, forever.
Where the line sits
A phone number, a price, a paragraph, a photo swap. The small changes a business actually needs month to month.
A new section, a layout change, a new integration. Beyond your monthly allowance, $350 buys up to two hours, scheduled within five business days.
Most months you will not need any of it. That is deliberate.
We do not want you calling us for a $350 update every time you add a service. An agency that profits from your dependence builds you a site you cannot edit. We build you one you can.
Every charge, in order
How billing works
When money actually moves, from kickoff to cancellation. Nothing here turns up on an invoice you did not see coming.
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At kickoff
Half the build fee for Marquee, Presence and Foundation. A third for Growth.
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Day 45, Growth only
The second third of the build fee.
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At launch
The balance, or on the published launch date, whichever comes first.
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Launch day onward
Care starts, billed monthly, month to month. Not the day you sign.
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Monthly, Growth only
Ad spend billed by Google and Meta straight to your card, on your account. Never marked up, never touched by us.
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As needed
Client-specific paid plugins at cost plus 5% processing, listed before we buy anything. Shared tools we reuse cost you nothing.
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30 days notice
A clean exit at the close of the billing cycle. You keep the site, domain, ad account and data.
Straight answers
What if I miss my asset deadline?
Your launch date moves, because the next build starts on schedule. We agree the deadline with you at kickoff, in writing, alongside the date it protects, and we send a reminder before it becomes a problem. It is the same discipline that lets us publish start dates at all.
What counts as “finished”?
The build is complete when the structure, the features and the integrations are built and working, even if some of your content is still coming. That is written into the terms, and it is there so a build cannot sit unfinished for months waiting on three photos and an About paragraph.
In practice it rarely bites, because we launch with what you have and you add the rest yourself from the pattern library. But it is the reason a launch date can be met even when your content is not entirely ready, and it is better said now than discovered in week eight.
Do I get more than one round of revisions?
One consolidated round is what the build fee covers, and it is deliberately generous in scope: a real list, not three notes. If something is genuinely wrong we fix it regardless. If you want a second full pass because you changed your mind, that is quoted, and we will tell you the price before we start.
Can I see progress during the build?
You see the design before we build, a check-in at the halfway point, and the staging link at the end. We do not do daily updates, because writing them costs build hours that come out of your launch date.
Do you take ownership of my Google Business Profile?
Never. We ask for manager access and you stay the owner. Same with ad accounts: partner access, your billing, your name. If we part ways we remove ourselves and nothing has to move.
What happens to my current site’s rankings?
We map every existing URL and redirect it before launch, keep your Search Console history, and verify nothing 404s on launch day. Rankings usually dip briefly and recover. Anyone who tells you a migration carries zero risk has not done many.
Can I add pages myself afterwards?
Yes, free, forever. Every build ships with a pattern library, so adding a service page later costs you nothing and does not require us.
Can I upgrade later?
That is how this is built. Presence to Foundation when you need to rank, Foundation to Growth when the offer is proven. You pay the difference in build, not a second build.
What if I want to leave?
30 days notice, clean exit at the end of the billing cycle. You keep the site, the domain, the ad account and the data, and we hand over what you need to take it somewhere else. We will not lease you your own website.
Twenty minutes, straight answer
Five questions, then we tell you which engine fits, what it costs and when we could start. Or we tell you we are not the right shop and point you somewhere better.
Or call +1-248-205-6977 Mon to Sun, 9am to 9pm ET
