The person actually doing the work.
Most SEO engagements in the UK are sold by a senior person you meet once, and delivered by a junior you never meet. That is how agency unit economics work, and for large brands with mature in-house teams it is often fine. For a founder-led business spending From £950/month on search, it is the wrong shape. You are paying senior rates for junior execution, and the person closest to your commercial reality, you, never speaks to the person closest to the work.
I sized this studio deliberately around that observation. I work with six to nine clients at a time, personally. Every crawl, every schema rebuild, every content brief, every monthly review is done by me. There is no account manager translating between us, and no junior taking the brief in a different direction than we agreed. If that breaks at scale, which it does, after about nine clients, then I stop taking on new work rather than hire an account manager. The product is the relationship.
My background before this was in-house. I ran SEO and growth for a London recovery operator for three years, rebuilt their site, their local SEO, and eventually their dispatch workflow into an automated WhatsApp agent. That commercial grounding is what the consultancy is built on: I have sat in the seat where the phone is quiet at 7pm on a Tuesday and the month-end invoices are looming, and I understand that SEO has to turn into enquiries or it is just an expense line.
The work I do now is wider than pure SEO, AI agents and custom web builds are a meaningful part of the mix because founders increasingly want one operator who can see the whole surface. That breadth has a ceiling: I am not a brand strategist, I am not a paid-media specialist, and I am not an enterprise systems architect. When those are what you actually need, I will tell you, and usually point you to someone I trust.
How the work actually runs.
The studio method is boring and deliberately so. I have watched enough agency engagements collapse under their own process overhead to know that the real variable is consistency of output, not choreography of meetings. What follows is the shape of a typical month with me.
The fortnightly rhythm
Every fortnight I ship a planned batch of work and a short written note covering what shipped, what is queued, and anything I need a decision on. The note is two pages maximum and goes by email. If there is nothing to decide, there is no call, I do not believe in filling the calendar with status meetings that exist to justify the retainer. When we do get on a call, once a month, it runs thirty minutes, covers what moved commercially, and ends with a clearly agreed plan for the next thirty days.
The tools, honestly
Ahrefs for backlinks, Semrush for keyword research, Screaming Frog for crawling, Search Console and GA4 for first-party data, Looker Studio for reporting dashboards when clients want one, and a cluster of custom N8N workflows for the repetitive work that automation can absorb. I do not use AI writing tools to generate pages that go onto client sites. Short first drafts, section rewrites, outline help, fine. Full pages signed under my client's brand, not from my studio. The ranking penalty risk is real and the quality ceiling is visible.
The reporting discipline
I will not send you a fifty-metric dashboard and ask you to interpret it. The monthly note answers three questions in plain English. What happened this month? Why did it happen? What are we doing next? If you want the underlying numbers, Search Console exports, Ahrefs link deltas, Core Web Vitals field reports, they live in a shared folder you can open any time. The written note is what you read over a coffee.
The honesty clause
Every engagement has one unwritten rule: I tell you when something is not working. If a content bet misfires, if a link campaign stalls, if a competitor shipped something that moves the competitive frontier, you hear it from me before the month-end review. The worst outcome in an SEO engagement is the client discovering the truth three months after the consultant did. I would rather lose the retainer by telling you we should pause than keep billing through a slow decline.
Month-to-month, always
I work month-to-month on every retainer. No twelve-month lock-ins, no 90-day notice clauses, no break fees. The incentive structure is correct that way: if I am not earning the retainer this month, you should be able to leave without a fight. The side effect is I have to justify the fee every single month, which sharpens the work.
The work I turn down, and why.
A consultancy is defined as much by what it declines as what it delivers. Below is the short list of work I have said no to in the past eighteen months, with the reasoning. It is not about being precious, it is about doing a small number of things well enough that clients stay for years.
Sectors I decline regardless of budget
Gambling and betting verticals where the ranking work depends on deceptive comparison content. Aggressive weight-loss or diet programmes that sit on the edge of medical claims. Lead-generation aggregators that harvest searcher data and sell it to undisclosed third parties. Reputation-management work designed to bury legitimate journalism. Political campaign SEO outside of standard constituency work. None of these are illegal. I am just not the person who is going to help you rank for them.
Engagements I decline on size grounds
If you are a FTSE 250 with a forty-person in-house digital team, I am genuinely not the right shape of consultant for you, a specialist agency or in-house director is a better fit. If your monthly SEO budget is under £1,000, I will recommend you buy a free fit-check call and implement it with your existing team rather than start a retainer that cannot fund the work it needs to do. Neither of those is a judgement on you. It is a judgement on whether I can add enough value to justify the fee.
Deliverables I decline on principle
I do not sell backlink packages. I do not sell guaranteed rankings. I do not sell AI-generated content at scale. I do not sell SEO “for a flat fee” where the deliverables are not tied to specific outcomes, flat-fee SEO is how agencies make money on clients who never audit what they are actually receiving. Every engagement I run has a written scope, a written monthly work log, and an open invitation for the client to challenge any line item in either.
Relationships I end early
Occasionally I will end an engagement before the client does. It is rare and I do not enjoy it, but it is the right call when the relationship is not producing meaningful outcomes. The pattern is usually the same: a founder who hired me because another consultant failed them, and who brings to our engagement the same decision-avoidance that caused the previous failure. I can do the work but I cannot make decisions on a founder's behalf. When that is structurally the blocker, I say so early and we part on good terms.
The best work I do is for clients who read this page, nod, and send a short honest email describing their business. Those engagements tend to last for years. Everything else is noise I politely decline.
Send a short email describing what you sell and where you want to be.
First calls are free, thirty minutes, and at the end of them I will tell you honestly whether working together is the right call. If it is not, I will usually know someone who fits better.