The two prices of depth: few clients, and your hours
Two lines in my proposal make accomplished people pause.
I take a small number of clients at a time. And I need five to eight hours of yours.
Both are prices. Both are paid for the same thing, and the sales page states them without arguing them. Here is the argument.
Most providers compete on the opposite of both
Look at how marketing help is sold and you find two promises repeated everywhere.
The first is scale. A larger roster reads as stability, and a firm with many clients looks like a firm that will still be there next year.
The second is convenience. Vendors advertise how little of your time they need, and content services describe producing months of material with almost no ongoing input from you.
Both promises make sense when the product is production. Somebody else can write copy, place ads, and schedule posts, and your calendar stays clear.
They stop making sense when the product is your expertise. Nobody can supply that on your behalf, at any headcount, for any fee.
The first price is the roster
A small roster buys attention that has nowhere else to go.
Your whole brand stays in one head at the same time. Your positioning, your buyers, your objections, your way of explaining things. Nothing has to be paged back in from a briefing document each Monday.
It also buys speed on the small things. You send a note about a line you dislike, and the fix happens the same day, because there is no queue of eleven other accounts ahead of you.
And it buys generosity inside the scope. When a system already knows a brand, producing the tenth asset costs a fraction of the first, so a scope that promised nine social pieces can deliver twenty without anyone's standard dropping.
The cost of a small roster is a calendar. When the engagements in front of you are running, your build starts on a date rather than on Monday. I give you the date, and the person you evaluated is the one who then does the work.
The second price is your hours, and here is where they go
Five to eight hours is the whole ask for a build, and it breaks down like this.
- One hour, the first conversation. Your services, your customers, your goals, and whether this is a fit at all.
- Three hours, recorded interviews. Questions drafted for your business in advance, run as live conversations or as guided monologues if you would rather talk alone.
- About an hour of follow-up questions once your assets exist, on the specifics that turned out to matter.
- About an hour at the end, reviewing everything together and taking your notes.
The three hours in the middle are the ones people ask about, so here is what they are for.
Everything published under your name is written from what you said in them. The brand guides, the website copy, the posts, the emails, and one day the chapters. What comes out of an interview cannot be researched, because it lives in your memory and nowhere else.
The depth of those hours sets the ceiling on everything built afterward. That rule holds whoever you hire, and it makes you the bottleneck in your own marketing.
Three hours is not arbitrary. The advice you give against the textbook often arrives in the first twenty minutes, because it is the position you are used to defending.
The cases take longer. Each hour past the first turns up more engagements, more of the numbers you quote from memory, and more of the exceptions you have learned to watch for. Those specifics are the part a stranger could never assemble from your website.
Thin input is visible from the outside
Buyers already sort the two piles, and they are not impressed with the larger one.
In the 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn research, fewer than half of decision-makers rated the quality of the thought leadership they read as good, and 15% called it very good.
Most of that material was produced without much of an expert's time in it. It reads as competent and general, because assembling something competent and general is what remains possible when nobody sat down with the person who knows.
Your hours are the difference between the two piles. There is no version of this where somebody else supplies them.
After the build, the hours change shape
The five to eight hours cover the build. What follows is a rhythm rather than a one-time ask.
Clients on the ongoing engine give four hours a month to recorded monologues or scheduled interviews. Most of that time goes to answering questions I supply, so nobody sits in front of a blank page. Four hours is enough new material to publish in every format, and the returns thin out above it.
That monthly engagement runs at $2,000 a month, and what it buys is my continued involvement: the capture, the production, and strategy from a system that knows your company. The brand guides and the trained system belong to you outright, and you can run your own marketing with them for no monthly fee.
Stop feeding the system and nothing breaks the following week. The published work drifts back toward what anyone could have written, one piece at a time.
When these two prices are wrong for you
The trade does not suit every business, and here is where it fails.
If you want one asset produced and nothing else, the interview hours are more than that job needs.
If your calendar cannot hold three hours inside a few weeks, the build stretches to match it, because I do not start building until the capture is complete. At one hour a week, a launch that takes two weeks takes six or more.
And if what you want is for marketing to leave you alone entirely, this model will disappoint you. It asks for you at the start, and then it asks for a little of you every month.
What the two prices buy
Few clients, so the person who knows your business has room to think about it. Your hours, because the material lives in you.
Both prices are paid for the same thing: A body of published work that only you could have produced.
That is what I am asking for, and it is the only way I know to get there.
