Define your position
Plan your execution

Marketing audits diagnose what is wrong. Traditional strategy consultancies tend to focus on corporate strategy or transformation. Discovery and Strategy sits in between: it diagnoses your visibility problem at the source (positioning, messaging, content architecture), defines the strategic foundation to fix it, and produces a 90-day execution plan you can act on immediately. It is grounded in the Reputation with Purpose framework, a proprietary, codified methodology first published in 2018, and structured around the Founder Visibility Stack™.

Probably, if your existing strategy was written before the AI search era, focuses primarily on demand generation rather than reputation-led visibility, or has not been revisited since a major change in your business. The Founder Visibility Stack™ is a different architecture from traditional marketing strategy because it works across both the online and real-world layers of reputation, and because it is designed for the AI search and peer-validation environment that B2B buyers now operate in.

Two to four weeks. The exact pacing depends on the size of your business, the number of stakeholder interviews involved, and how quickly we can schedule. Most projects complete within five weeks of kickoff. Founders who are unusually busy and need flexibility on meeting schedules sometimes run longer, but rarely past four weeks.

Yes. The strategy document and the 90-day plan are written to be portable, with named deliverables, sequencing, and enough detail for any competent in-house team or external provider to act on. Most clients continue with Foundation or Growth because the person who built the strategy is best placed to execute it, but you are not committed to either.

A single integrated document structured into four parts: positioning (who you are and who you serve), messaging (what you stand for and how to talk about it), content architecture (how you will be found across the Founder Visibility Stack™), and the 90-day execution plan (what to do, in what order, by when). The supporting analysis (competitor benchmarking, the deeper AI visibility audit, content theme architecture, stakeholder interview synthesis) sits in the same document, not in a separate annex.

The founder / CEO must be involved directly; the work cannot be delegated. Most projects also include two to three key team members or trusted advisors of the founder's choosing, who are interviewed during the Discovery stage. The founder's time commitment is roughly two to four hours of meetings spread across the project, plus some review time on draft documents. Other stakeholders typically commit one hour each.

Fixed fee, scoped on a call, agreed up front, and paid in two instalments. Each It's a Shovel service is a standalone engagement, priced and paid for separately; there is no long-term commitment beyond Discovery and Strategy, and continuing to Foundation or Growth afterwards is a separate decision with its own scoping and pricing.

That is fine. The strategy document and the 90-day plan are the deliverables. You leave with everything you need to act on them yourself, with your own team, or with any external provider. Some clients return a few months later to discuss Foundation or Growth, when their circumstances or capacity have changed.