The situation
Your buyer decides whether you’re worth contacting before you ever speak to them.
They arrive from a referral, a search result or an RFP longlist, and form a view before they read a word about what you do. The ones who decide against you never make contact, so you never find out you were being considered.
Where it fails
Nothing on it is broken, which is why it stays that way.
A buyer arrives knowing roughly what they want, then has to find it. Your range runs to four hundred items, or your services don’t fit on one page, or the case that matches theirs sits three clicks down under an industry term they don’t use. They open two pages, find a PDF dated 2019, and call someone else. Nobody reports it. The enquiry just doesn’t arrive, and the month looks like a slow one.
And you already know. You send the link to a prospect with a line apologising for it. You’d rather they saw the workshop, the client list, or twenty minutes of you explaining how the work actually gets specified. The site is the one part of the business that doesn’t sound like the business.
That gap isn’t a marketing problem. It’s a representation problem, and it fails in a particular direction. The buyers most likely to be put off are the careful ones: people who research before they call, compare three suppliers, and are spending real money they’ll have to answer for. The work is good. It just isn’t what’s being judged.
You’re being screened out before anyone gets close enough to see how good you are.
Your situation
What that looks like depends on what you sell.
Family business and B2B
Manufacturing, distribution, industrial services
They are comparing you against three suppliers and a catalogue they already have.
Showrooms and studios
Venues, caterers, custom builders, private clinics
They have decided how good you are from six photographs.
Consultants and advisors
Fractional executives, independent architects
They are working out whether they can put their own name behind you.
Practices and practitioners
Medical specialists, attorneys, executives
They have a case to refer or a seat to fill, and they are deciding on what they can find.
How it works
Every stage ends with something in your hands, and a decision that is yours.
Four stages, in that order. You can stop after any one of them and keep what it produced.
- 01
The first conversation
You write, through the contact page or straight to my inbox. I read it myself, and nothing drops into an address nobody owns. If what you need is not what I do, I say so and point you somewhere better. Nothing is booked, nothing is quoted, and you are not added to anything.
You keepA reply from me, not from an autoresponder.
- 02
What the site has to do
We talk for some time to understand how the work actually gets won: who calls, what they ask first, which objection ends it. Then I write that down, naming who is deciding, what they are weighing, and the argument the site has to carry to survive them. You read it before a single page is designed.
You keepA written brief, yours whether or not we go on.
- 03
Design and build
Strategy, design and build stay in one pair of hands, so nothing is lost in the handover between them. There isn’t one. You review the site in a browser, on your own phone, with your own words in it, rather than as flat pictures of a site. Revisions happen twice, at points set in advance.
You keepA staging link you can open, and send to whoever else decides.
- 04
Launch, and what you keep
It goes live in your accounts: the domain, hosting and the words. I show you how to edit the things that change, like prices, people and recent work, and if you would rather not do that yourself, I can look after it monthly. You can stop that whenever you like and nothing breaks.
You keepEvery account in your name, and a recording of how to run it.
You are never asked to commit to a stage before you have seen the one before it.