How we Work
Most marketing problems are not execution problems. They are sequencing problems.
Why Lionwish?
Businesses rarely fail at marketing because nobody knew how to run a Google Ads campaign or write a title tag. They fail because the work got done in the wrong order, on the wrong priorities, by people who were never given enough context to make a real decision. Six months later there’s activity everywhere and no way to tell what worked.
Lionwish runs on a four-part method: Diagnose, Prioritize, Execute, Prove. Same sequence, every engagement, whether it’s a single-channel project or a full program. It exists to make sure the work you pay for is the work that actually moves your numbers.
Diagnose
Most engagements start with someone already convinced they know the problem. Usually they’re partly right and partly wrong, and the wrong part is expensive. A site that “needs more content” often has a tracking problem. An ad account that “needs a bigger budget” often has a landing page problem.
What this solves for
Establish what is actually broken before anything gets rebuilt
Separate the problems worth fixing from the ones that are just noise
Get a real read on where you stand against the businesses you compete with
Tell you plainly when the answer is that your current setup is fine
Related services: SEO Services, Technical SEO, Conversion Rate Optimization
Prioritize
Every business has more marketing opportunities than time or budget. Strategy is mostly the discipline of saying no to good ideas so the great ones get funded properly. A plan that lists twenty initiatives is not a plan.
What this solves for
Rank every opportunity by expected impact against the effort it takes
Decide what happens in the first 90 days and what waits
Match the plan to your actual budget and internal capacity, not an ideal version of them
Put in writing what we are explicitly not doing, and why
Related services: AI Consulting & Strategy, Paid Search Management, Local SEO
Execute
This is where most agency relationships quietly degrade. The senior person sells the work, then the account moves to someone junior and the quality drifts. There is no handoff at Lionwish because there is nobody to hand off to.
What this solves for
The person who built your strategy is the person doing the work
Changes ship in days, not after three rounds of internal approval
No padded scope, no deliverables that exist to justify a retainer
Direct access when something urgent comes up, without a ticket queue
Related services: Paid Search Management, SEO Services, Website Development, Link Building
Prove
If you cannot trust the numbers, every conversation about performance turns into an argument about the data instead. Broken tracking is the most common problem I find and the least often discussed, because it makes everyone’s reporting look better than reality.
What this solves for
Audit and repair conversion tracking before we judge any campaign by it
Report on leads, revenue, and cost per acquisition instead of impressions and rankings alone
Tell you when something is not working, in the same report where the wins are
Give you numbers you can take into your own leadership meeting and defend
Related services: Conversion Tracking and Audits, Automation and Reporting, Conversion Rate Optimization
Why the sequence matters
You can execute brilliantly on the wrong priority. You can prioritize perfectly off a bad diagnosis. And you can do all three well and still have no idea whether it worked, if the measurement was never fixed. The order is the point.
It also means we will spend the first few weeks of any engagement on work that does not look like deliverables. That is intentional. Marketing that starts with activity produces activity. Marketing that starts with a diagnosis produces revenue.
What this looks like in practice
Lionwish works with a small number of clients at a time. That’s not a scarcity pitch, it’s a constraint of the model. One senior consultant with 20 years across agency and client side can only hold so many accounts in his head at the level this method requires.
If that sounds like the kind of relationship you want, the first conversation is a free consultation. We’ll look at where you are, identify the largest opportunities, and I’ll tell you exactly what I would do if you were a client. If Lionwish isn’t the right fit, I’ll say so.
What to Expect
A small client roster, by design. We limit how many clients we take on so every account gets real attention — not recycled strategy and a rushed monthly call.
Direct communication, no middlemen. You'll always be talking to the person actually doing the work. Questions get answered fast, decisions get made without a game of telephone.
Monthly strategy that's actually built for you. Every month starts fresh — new projects, new thinking, built around where your business is right now. Not a copy-paste from the previous report.
Reporting that respects your time. You'll get what you need to see, in the format that makes sense for you. No bloated decks, no unnecessary meetings, no graphs for the sake of graphs.
Common Questions
Working FAQs
How long does the diagnose phase take before real work starts?
Usually one to two weeks, depending on how much access I have to your analytics, ad accounts, and site. For a single-channel project it can be shorter. I don’t stretch it, because a diagnosis that takes a month is a diagnosis nobody acts on. You’ll get a written summary of what I found, what I’d prioritize, and what I’d deliberately leave alone, before any execution work begins.
Can I skip the first two steps? I already know what I need.
Sometimes, yes. If you’ve had a recent audit, your tracking is clean, and you’re clear on the priority, we can move straight to execution and I’ll say so. But I’ll still spend a few hours verifying the setup before spending your budget on it. More often than not, something turns up that changes the plan, and finding it in week one is much cheaper than finding it in month four.
What if you find that my conversion tracking is broken?
We fix it first. This comes up more often than any other issue, and it’s usually been quietly broken for months. Running campaigns on top of bad tracking means optimizing toward the wrong signal and reporting numbers nobody should trust. It’s rarely a long fix. It is almost always the highest-return work available, because everything measured afterward depends on it.
Do I have to buy the entire method, or can you work on one channel?
One channel is fine. Plenty of engagements are just SEO, or just Google Ads, or a single project like a tracking rebuild. The four steps still apply, they just apply to a smaller surface area. The method describes how the work gets done, not how much of it you have to buy.
How many clients do you take at a time, and what does it cost?
I keep the roster small on purpose, because this approach depends on staying close to each account rather than delegating it. Retainers scale to the scope of work, and project and hourly engagements are available for defined pieces like an audit or a tracking rebuild. The free consultation is where we figure out which structure fits. I’ll give you a straight number, and I’ll tell you if the budget you have isn’t enough to get the result you want.