Process — how engagements actually work.
The honest description, not the marketing diagram.
Most studio process pages are abstract: discovery, strategy, design, build, launch. Five steps in a colourful diagram. They tell a buyer almost nothing about what working with the studio is actually like — and they’re identical across every studio that has one.
This page is the opposite. It describes the actual rhythm of the work — what happens in week one, what happens in month three, when I say no, and what I ask for from you. It exists to help you decide whether we should work together before either of us spends an hour on a discovery call.
The discovery call
Thirty minutes. Free. No deck.
You book the call via Calendly. Before the call, I read whatever public surface you have — site, LinkedIn, recent press, your existing case studies if you’re an agency. I come prepared with three or four specific things rather than a generic intake template.
The call has one purpose: figure out whether the studio is the right fit for the problem. Sometimes the answer is “no, but here’s who is” — I’d rather refer you out than take work I’m not the right person for. Sometimes the answer is “yes, here’s what the engagement would look like.”
Either way, you leave the call with a concrete next step. No follow-up sequence, no nurture funnel, no “let me send some thoughts.” The work starts on the call or it doesn’t.
The audit (paid)
If we’re a fit and the work involves WordPress, the next step is usually a paid audit. £1,950 fixed fee. The audit produces a written diagnosis — server logs, database health, mail authentication, performance, security posture, and concrete recommendations prioritised by impact.
Three things matter about the audit:
The fee is deductible against the first three months of an Operations retainer at Orbit or Apogee tier. If we move forward, you’ve effectively prepaid the first chunk of the engagement.
The audit is the deliverable — not a sales document. The written diagnosis is yours regardless of what comes next. Some clients take the audit, fix the issues themselves, and come back six months later. That’s fine.
The audit is the qualifier. By the end of it, both of us know whether ongoing work makes sense, what tier fits the operational reality, and what the realistic outcomes are. No proposal-by-instinct.
For brand, plugin development, and AI engagements, the equivalent is a paid scoping engagement (typically £750–£1,500) producing a written scope document with fixed-price quotes for the actual build. Same logic: the scope is the deliverable, the engagement is qualified by it.
The proposal (or the referral)
After the audit, one of three things happens:
You get a proposal. Fixed scope, fixed price for project work, monthly rate for retainers. No surprise scope creep clauses, no tiered upsell structures designed to pressure you into the higher tier. The proposal reflects what was discovered in the audit.
You get a referral. If the audit reveals work I’m not the right person for — high-volume e-commerce, native mobile, infrastructure work outside WordPress — I’ll refer you to someone who is. I keep a small list of people I trust for specific work types.
You get a “you don’t need ongoing work.” Some audits reveal that the site is in fine shape and the client’s existing in-house team can handle maintenance. In that case, the audit is the engagement. We part on good terms.
The third outcome is rare but it happens. It’s also why the audit is paid up-front — if it weren’t, the incentive would be to find ongoing work whether the client needs it or not.
Kickoff
If we move forward, kickoff happens within two weeks of proposal acceptance.
For retainer work (WordPress Operations, Growth Partnership), kickoff is a one-hour onboarding call: access handover, baseline measurement, agreed cadence (most clients land on monthly Loom + written review with quarterly in-person if Hertfordshire-based or London-adjacent). The first month establishes the rhythm; nothing dramatic should happen in month one.
For project work (plugin development, brand engagements, AI implementations), kickoff is a longer working session — usually 90 minutes — to align on scope detail, agree milestones, and surface anything that emerged between audit and signed proposal. Project work then runs to its agreed timeline.
I don’t do “discovery week” theatre. The audit was the discovery. Kickoff is the start of the work.
The work
Here’s what the rhythm actually looks like, by engagement type:
Operations retainers — monthly written review delivered as a PDF with a Loom walkthrough. The PDF is structured: what changed this month, what was diagnosed and resolved, what’s queued for next month, what risks I’m watching. Boost tier delivers a short summary; Orbit and Apogee deliver progressively deeper diagnostics. Apogee includes quarterly in-person reviews where applicable.
Plugin development — milestone-based with a working preview at each milestone. You see the plugin functioning before you sign off on it, not after. Documentation and handover ship with the final milestone, not as an afterthought.
Brand engagements — three rounds of revision built into the scope. Beyond three rounds means we’re solving the wrong problem and need to pause and re-align rather than iterate harder. Most engagements use one or two rounds.
AI & Automation — split into discovery (understanding your voice and team workflows), build (custom GPTs, prompt systems, content ops infrastructure), and embedding (training your team to use what was built). The embedding phase is non-negotiable — AI tools that aren’t adopted are worse than no AI tools.
Across every engagement: weekly brief written update, response to substantive emails within 24 hours, meetings only when meetings are the right format. Most things get resolved in writing.
Handover
Every engagement ends with a structured handover. The format depends on the engagement type:
For project work: source code in your GitHub, full IP transfer in writing, written admin documentation, training videos where useful, a 60-minute live training session if requested.
For retainers: 30 days of transition support if you’re moving the work in-house or to another partner. I don’t make handover difficult. The relationship continues only if it’s mutually useful.
The studio’s reputation is built on what clients say after the engagement ends, not during it. Making handover frictionless is the work.
When I say no
Some honest filters that mean we’re probably not the right fit:
- Adversarial relationships from the start. If kickoff feels like a negotiation rather than a collaboration, it usually doesn’t get easier.
- “Beat the previous quote.” Studios that compete on lowest price race each other to bad work. I’d rather refer you to someone who fits your budget than match a price that doesn’t reflect the work.
- Demands for guaranteed outcomes I can’t actually guarantee. Conversion rates, traffic numbers, ranking positions — I’ll commit to honest effort, not arbitrary numbers I can’t control.
- Clients who fired the last three vendors. If the same problem keeps surfacing across vendors, the problem may be on the client side. Worth a candid conversation before signing.
- Ethics misalignments. Specific industries I won’t work in, specific tactics I won’t deploy. We’ll surface these in the discovery call, not during the engagement.
This isn’t gatekeeping. It’s the honest version of what every studio knows but most won’t say out loud. If we discover any of these on the discovery call, we both save weeks of misalignment.
What I ask for from you
Three things:
Direct feedback. I’d rather hear “this isn’t working” in week two than discover it in month four. Studios who can’t take honest feedback aren’t worth working with; the same applies in reverse.
Trust on the engineering judgements. Most clients don’t want to spend their afternoon learning what wp-cron does or why your database query log matters. They want the problem solved. Trust the judgement, and the relationship works. Question every technical recommendation, and we both burn out.
Reasonable response times on review cycles. If a project stalls because feedback takes three weeks per round, the project costs both of us. The proposal sets expectations on response cadence; sticking to them keeps engagements profitable for me and on-budget for you.
That’s it. Everything else, I work with.
The next step
If this page reads like the kind of working relationship you want — direct, honest, engineering-led, no theatre — book the discovery call.
If anything on this page made you uncomfortable, we’re probably not the right fit, and I’d rather know now than after a contract is signed.
Your project next?
Thirty-minute discovery call. No slides, no fluff — leave with a concrete next step whether we work together or not.