Assessment

Digital Vitamins/Studio/Process

Ten weeks. Eleven hours of your time.

If you are on the tools or in the chair all day, the real question is not how long the project takes. It is how much of your week it eats. So that is the number we lead with.

Week by week↓ Start the assessment→

01 The honest total

Eleven hours of your time. Spread over ten weeks.

The number that matters if you are on the tools, in the chair or in front of clients all day. Here is every hour we will ask for, and when.

Your time, itemisedDosage per week
W0Week 0A call. No preparation, no deck, no homework afterwards30 min
W1Week 1Two recorded sittings. The only long conversations in the project3 hours
W1Week 1We observe. You carry on exactly as normal0 hours
W2Week 2The Diagnosis, presented in person, and argued about90 min
W3Week 3One route shown. You say yes, or you send us back60 min
W4–9Weeks 4–9Words reviewed in short pieces, never a spreadsheet to fill in3 hours
W10Week 10Handover and a walkthrough, recorded so you can rewatch it90 min
Y1Year oneA quarterly review of the numbers45 min × 4

02 The ten weeks

What happens, and when it happens.

A typical site-plus-two-systems Treatment. Bigger platforms add weeks in the middle, never at the ends. The panel keeps a running count of your hours as you read.

  1. Week 0 · 30 min of yours

    The call

    Thirty minutes. We establish whether we are right for this, and say so on the call if we are not. About one in four calls ends with a recommendation to go elsewhere, usually to someone cheaper.

  2. Weeks 1–2 · 3 hours + 90 min of yours

    The Diagnosis

    Two sittings, a week of observation (in the room, in the van, or behind the front desk) and a written Diagnosis presented in person. This is a standalone piece of work with its own fee, and it stops here if you want it to.

  3. Week 3 · 60 min of yours

    The Formula

    One position, one voice, one visual route, and one way the practice will run. Presented once. We do not show three options: choosing between routes is our job, not yours.

  4. Weeks 4–6 · part of the 3 review hours

    The front of house

    The site is written and built. You see it in the browser from the first week, not as a picture of a browser, and the words are edited with you until they sound like speech rather than a website.

  5. Weeks 6–9 · the rest of the 3 review hours

    The Actives

    Scheduling, records, payments, quotes, whatever the Diagnosis argued for. Built against your real data and your real edge cases, with the awkward Tuesday in mind rather than the ideal one.

  6. Week 9 · 0 extra hours

    The dress rehearsal

    A fortnight of running both systems side by side. Nothing is switched off until the new thing has survived a normal week, including whoever is worst at following a new process.

  7. Week 10 · 90 min of yours

    Handover

    Accounts in your name, documentation written for a stranger, a recorded walkthrough, and the ownership inventory checked line by line.

  8. Year one · 45 min × 4 of yours

    The Ritual

    Hosting, edits, monitoring, and a quarterly review of the same five numbers the Diagnosis measured, so you can see whether it actually worked. One step taken per quarter, not ten.

03 While it runs

Six rules that protect your working week.

Ground rulesIn the engagement letter
R1We come to youSittings happen where you work, at an hour that suits, including eveningsYour place
R2No content spreadsheetWriting your pages is our job. We do it from the recordingsNever
R3One threadA single place for everything. No project tool for you to learnOne
R4Reply inside a dayBoth of us, on working days, no ticket system< 24h
R5Nothing switches off earlyOld and new run side by side for a fortnight2 weeks
R6Fixed feeAgreed before we start. Scope changes are quoted, never assumedNo surprises

04 When it goes wrong

What happens if we are late.

What if the Treatment overruns?

The fee does not move. A fixed fee that grows when we misjudge the work is not a fixed fee, it is an estimate with better marketing. If we are late, we are late at our own cost, and we tell you the week we know rather than the week it becomes obvious.

What if you disappear? There are only two of you.

The fair answer to a real risk. Everything is in your accounts and your repository from day one, and the documentation is written for a developer who has never met us. That is not a courtesy, it is the mitigation. We also carry professional indemnity cover and will send the certificate on request.

What if we change our mind halfway?

You can stop after the Diagnosis with nothing further owed. Once a Treatment starts we invoice in three stages against work completed, so stopping costs you only what has actually been done. Nobody has, but the terms should not depend on that.

What if we do not like the route you show us?

You send us back and we do it again, once, inside the fee. If the second route is also wrong we are the wrong studio for you, we say so, and you keep the Diagnosis. That has happened once in thirty-seven projects, and the Diagnosis was still useful to them.