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How we work
The operating rhythm, published as a commitment
Capability slides are easy to write. What clients actually stay for is the cadence underneath them, so we state ours as specific obligations you can hold us to rather than as a description of our culture.
Every Monte Vista engagement runs on the same five commitments: one named account lead who answers within 48 hours, a written update every week, a capped 30-minute strategy call every two weeks, one monthly report covering all channels rather than one per channel, and a live shared calendar the client can open at any time.
01 · The five commitments
What you are entitled to, every month
One named account lead
One person owns your account and answers every message within 48 hours. No rotating account managers, no ticket queue, no being reintroduced to your own strategy every quarter.
A daily automated check on every account
Before the working day starts, every account you have with us is scanned for billing holds, campaigns that stopped serving, disapproved ads and keywords, and budget pacing off plan. A separate check confirms your lead form is still producing leads. We find out the same morning, not at the monthly call.
A written update every week
One email: what launched, what is in progress, what needs a decision from you. It costs us fifteen minutes, it eliminates every status chase, and it leaves a dated record of the work.
A 30-minute strategy call, biweekly
Capped at thirty minutes, with the account lead and the strategist in the room. A meeting with a hard stop respects your calendar and forces an agenda.
One monthly report, all channels
Not one report per channel, which lets every channel grade its own homework. One document that forces the honest cross-channel comparison, readable in three minutes.
A live calendar you can open anytime
Status, approval state and publish date, visible without asking anyone. No black boxes is not a slogan here, it is a file you have the link to.
These five are written into the SOW as obligations, not described in a slide as values. If we miss one, you have something concrete to point at.
02 · The engagement
Four steps, in this order, every time
Audit
We start with a free written audit of what is live: site, tracking, search, ads. You get a real diagnosis with an owner and an effort on every line, and you own it whether or not you hire us.
Plan
A 90-day plan with channels, budgets, owners and the numbers we expect to move. You sign off before anything goes live, and the plan says plainly what stops if budget stops.
Build
Tracking gets wired before media gets bought. Then we ship: campaigns, content, code and creative, with a written change log so you always know what moved and when.
Compound
Test, retire what is not working, scale what is. One monthly cross-channel report, one biweekly call, one weekly written update. Marketing is a habit, not a project.
03 · The reporting standard
Honest numbers, including the ones that are estimates
Where a platform will not expose a figure, we say the number is estimated and explain exactly how it was derived. Disclosing the limits of one number is what makes the other nineteen believable.
It also means our reports occasionally say a channel did not work. That is the point of putting every channel in one document instead of six.
One report, all channels
Per-channel reporting lets every channel grade its own homework. One document forces the comparison that actually decides a budget.
A dated file, not a login
Self-contained, emailable, works in five years, and a permanent record of what was true that month.
Findings first
Plain language at the top, data underneath. Three minutes to the story, or the report has failed.
Method stated
Every estimated figure carries how it was calculated and why the exact number is unavailable.
04 · How we measure brand spend
Proof that lives in a report you already read
Any top-of-funnel spend we propose comes with a geo holdout attached: branded search volume and non-brand cost per click in exposed ZIP codes against a matched holdout, read out of your own Google Ads account.
We do this because proof of brand media should never depend on our dashboard. If any agency proposes brand spend without a measurement design, that alone is a reason to decline it.
The terms, up front
Published, not discovered later
The clauses that usually surface when a relationship ends are the ones we put at the start of it. These are the same terms that go into every SOW we write.
Term
Retainers run month to month after an initial 90 days. Projects are fixed-scope with a defined end date.
Notice
30 days in writing, either direction, no penalty and no clawback.
Ad spend
Paid directly by you to the platforms, in your own accounts, on your own billing. Never included in our fee and never marked up.
Ownership
You own the ad accounts, the analytics, the CRM data, the content, the raw footage and the project files. Written into the SOW.
Overage
Quoted at our published hourly rate and approved by you in writing before the work happens. No surprise invoices, ever.
Onboarding fee
None.
Exclusivity
We will not take a direct competitor in your primary service area while we work together.
Working together
Who will we actually be talking to?
One named account lead, the same person throughout. They answer every message within 48 hours. The strategist joins the biweekly call. We do not rotate account managers and you will not be reintroduced to your own strategy.
How much of our time does this take?
A 30-minute call every two weeks and a weekly email you can read in two minutes. Approvals happen in the shared calendar rather than in meetings. If we are taking more of your time than that, something has gone wrong.
What if we want to change direction mid-engagement?
Say so on the biweekly call. Retainers are month to month after 90 days precisely so the plan can change without a contract negotiation.
Do you work with our existing agency or freelancers?
Regularly. We often run the measurement layer underneath someone else's channel work, and cross-channel reporting is only useful if it includes the channels we do not run.
Next step
See the rhythm on a real account
Book 20 minutes and we will walk you through an actual weekly update and an actual monthly report, with the client details removed.
No retainer requirement · No long contract · You own everything we build