Your options, argued fairly.
Hiring us is one of five reasonable choices, and for a lot of businesses it is not the right one. Each page below makes the honest case for the alternative before making ours, including the situations where you should walk away from this website and go do something else.
Which of these is actually you.
| If this is your situation | Read this |
|---|---|
| You have time and want to do it yourself | DIY vs handing it off |
| You have been burned by an agency before | vs the typical agency |
| You are considering hiring a marketing person | In-house vs agency |
| You are buying leads from Angi or Thumbtack | vs lead-gen platforms |
| You are shopping for marketing software | vs HubSpot |
No straw men.
Doing it yourself
Most of the high-value work is free and public, and we say exactly what to do. The constraint was never knowing how, it is doing it every month for a year.
Often the right answerThe typical agency
A quarter of buyers cannot tell what they are paying for and industry NPS is zero. Four commitments in writing, plus five questions to ask anybody, us included.
Including where they winAn in-house hire
Local marketing is five disciplines and almost nobody is strong at all five at a single-location salary. When in-house genuinely wins, and the hybrid most people miss.
Scale changes the mathLead-gen platforms
The FTC fined the largest one $7.2 million over lead-quality claims and contractors got about thirty dollars back. The full record, with sources.
The strongest caseHubSpot and similar
Software you operate versus a service that operates for you. Different products entirely, and the answer depends on whether you have someone to run it.
Tools vs peopleTeaching outperforms pitching, and it is measurable.
Research across more than 700 actual B2B purchases found the single biggest separator between the winner and the runner-up was educating the buyer with new ideas and perspectives, done three times more often by the winner. Separately, across 822 buyers, cost decided the selection only 8% of the time. Price gates who gets considered; expertise decides who wins.
There is a third finding that shaped these pages more than either. Analysis of 2.5 million recorded sales conversations found 40 to 60% of deals are lost to indecision rather than to a competitor, and that pushing harder against the status quo backfired 84% of the time.
So the enemy is not the agency down the street. It is a burned contractor doing nothing because every option looks like the last one that disappointed him. Comparison pages that pretend the alternatives are stupid make that worse. These try to make the decision easier even when the decision is not us.
See exactly where you stand first.
Free 30-second check across Google, the map pack and the AI tools. Useful whichever of the five options you pick. No sales call.
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