Home / The Honest Marketing Standard
You already know the feeling. An agency site full of words like growth and results, a calendar link, and no price anywhere. A call that turns out to be a pitch. A contract that outlives your patience.
It does not have to work that way, and the proof is that it is cheaper to run an agency honestly than to run the theatre. So here is the standard I hold myself to, in writing, with each claim linked to the place you can verify it.
Take this list and hold any agency to it. Including mine. Especially mine.
Retainers start from $800 a month and the number is on the site, not behind a discovery call. You should not have to give an hour of your life to learn what something costs. What moves the price is scope, and I will tell you what your scope costs on the first call, in a number, not a range.
You can cancel any month. If the work stops earning its keep, firing me should cost you an email, not a negotiation. An agency that needs a 12-month lock is telling you when it expects you to want to leave.
Every service page lists who I am NOT for, because a fit that is wrong for you wastes your money and my reputation in that order. If your business is on a turn-down list, I will say so on the call and point you somewhere better.
The cost questions your customers ask get answered on this site with real numbers. The tools are free, uncapped, and do not ask for your email to show you the result. If you never hire me and only ever use the free work, that is a fine outcome.
The site, the content, the ad account, the analytics. All of it lives in accounts you own from day one. If we part ways you lose a vendor, not your assets. Ad spend goes to Google in your own account and I never mark it up.
Traffic is not the product. You will get the number of calls, forms and booked consultations, and when that number is zero I will write the word zero. An agency that reports impressions is reporting its own activity, not your outcome.
225 completed jobs at a 100% Job Success Score, on a platform where I cannot delete a bad review. Testimonials on an agency's own site are curated by definition; judge me on the record I do not control.
Because the standard is the strategy. Most agencies compete on promises, and promises are free to make. Commitments with terms attached are expensive to fake, which is exactly why they are worth publishing and exactly why almost nobody does.
This might not work. Publishing prices invites shoppers. Naming turn-downs shrinks the market. Reporting zeros loses the clients who wanted comfortable reports. I publish it anyway, because the owners I want to work with are the ones this page was written for, and they are also the ones every other agency quietly fails.
Before you sign with any agency, mine included, send them this list and ask which items they will put in writing. The ones they refuse tell you more than the proposal does. That is the whole trick, and you now have it for free.
And if you want the version of this where I do the work: it starts with a 30 minute call where you learn what your scope actually costs. One call, one number, no follow-up sequence if you pass.
Real, and it is a floor, not a package. It buys a focused local scope. What moves it upward is the size of the work: more locations, more channels, more content. You will get your own number on the first call and it will not change after you sign.
The catch is mine to carry: I have to re-earn the retainer every month. The honest trade-off for you is that compounding work like SEO needs months to show, so judge the work on the agreed checkpoints, not on week two.
Because a wrong-fit client costs more than they pay: the work underperforms, the reference is bad, and both sides know it by month three. Naming who I turn down in public is cheaper than learning it in private, for both of us.
Yes, that is what it is for. Send the list, ask what they will sign. There are good agencies at every price point who will happily meet most of it. The point is to make the terms visible before the invoice does it for you.
Mandeep Singh. Sprout Sage Solutions is founder led: the person on the call, in the Search Console, and writing the report is the same person. That is not a scaling strategy; it is the product.
Thirty minutes. I will show you what your patients are searching before they call, which of those questions your site answers, and which ones your competitors are quietly winning because nobody published a number.